The Consulting Pyramid Is Crumbling. That's Your Opening.

I remember sitting in a boardroom at KPMG watching a partner present a strategy deck to a client. The deck was 80 slides. It took a team of six analysts three weeks to build. The partner presented for 45 minutes, answered two questions, and closed the engagement.

The client wasn’t paying for the 80 slides. They were paying for those two answers.

The Model That Made You Invisible

For decades, consulting ran on a simple equation. Hire smart graduates cheap. Bill them at three times their salary. Stack them in a pyramid where the base does the research and the top does the selling.

If you spent 10 or 15 years inside that pyramid, you know what it felt like. You were the person with the judgment, the pattern recognition, the ability to walk into a room and read what the data couldn’t tell you. But the firm’s business model needed you to stay in the middle. Visible enough to keep clients happy. Invisible enough to keep billing junior hours underneath you.

That model is breaking.

What the Numbers Are Telling You

Deloitte scrapped traditional job titles in 2025. Accenture cut 11,000 roles. The Big Four collectively reduced graduate hiring by up to 30%.

These aren’t temporary cuts. This is structural.

AI automated the base of the pyramid. The 40-page landscape analysis that took a junior team two weeks now takes an afternoon. The benchmarking deck that billed at $300 an hour can be generated before lunch.

The firms kept the partners. They kept the people whose value was never in the research. It was in the judgment.

And they let go of the middle. The exact layer where most experienced professionals spent their careers building expertise that nobody outside the firm could see.

The Window You Didn’t Know Was Open

Here is what most people miss about this moment.

The same firms that made you invisible for 15 years now need to hire people like you back. Not as employees. As advisors. As the external judgment they can no longer afford to keep on payroll.

Daniel Priestley calls this becoming the Key Person of Influence in your space. The person whose expertise is so specific and so proven that the market comes to you.

It’s not about having more credentials than the next consultant. It’s about being the person in the room who has watched enough decisions play out to know which ones will work before the data confirms it.

That used to be locked inside firms. Now it’s portable. And the market is paying for it.

Why Most People Won’t Move

I’ve seen this pattern at Reignite more times than I can count. A senior professional with 20 years of experience sits across from me and says, “I know I should do this, but…”

But the salary is safe. But the title is comfortable. But going independent feels like starting over.

It’s not starting over. It’s graduating.

Simon Sinek talks about the infinite game. The finite game is climbing someone else’s pyramid. The infinite game is building something that outlasts any single employer, any single title, any single restructuring.

The consulting pyramid gave you something valuable. It gave you reps. It gave you judgment. It gave you the ability to see patterns that take a decade to learn.

It did not give you permission to use them on your own terms. You have to take that yourself.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Anyone can go fast in a straight line. The question is whether you’re willing to take the corner.

The pyramid is crumbling. The people who built their careers inside it have two choices. Wait for the next round of cuts. Or take the judgment they spent 15 years building and put it to work for themselves.

The window won’t stay open forever. But right now, it’s wide open.

What’s keeping you from walking through it?

---

Ready to stop being invisible? Take the free assessment →

Steven Tshakatumba is the founder of Reignite Advisors and a certified WHY Coach. Work with Steven →