Ask HN: Which types of consulting do companies spend the most on?

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Among venture funded tech businesses, where do they spend the most on consultants? Engineering? Design? Marketing? Something else?

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There are three B2B value props: revenue growth, cost reduction and mitigating risk. Everything else is a proxy for those things. If you can materially impact one of those things, ideally in a situation where 1. You have a track record for it and 2. You can demonstrate the value is measureable, you'll generally get paid a piece of it. The question is generic, so I thought I'd post a generic answer. People would spend the most on solving a particular problem that occurs once in the evolution of the company, and therefore doesn't make sense / isn't strategic to bring in-house. They do that anytime they have that kind of issue, across those functions. In terms of earnings, though, it really comes back to those three value props and two traits (track record and measurement).

I have no direct observations on this topic myself but I remember receiving a newsletter a while ago that may be of interest [0]. The author says that about half of general market is for clients that "Whether or not they choose to explicitly acknowledge it, they look for an element of therapy or life coaching in their relationships with consultants they hire." but tech companies are a smaller proportion of the market and generally want a consultant to guide them philosophically.

An important distinction perhaps is the difference between consulting and being a contractor. If you're looking to go down the consulting path I recommend reading the other posts in that newsletter.

[0] https://artofgig.substack.com/p/elements-of-consulting-style

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