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Why We’ve Spent 25 Years Leaving Money on the Table

The easiest way to make money in consulting is to recommend more consulting.

We’ve spent 25 years trying to do the opposite.

Before I started PMC, I spent the first part of my career on the retailer side of the fence, leading IT and business change for some of the UK’s largest retail organisations. I invested heavily in software providers, systems integrators and service partners, and I often came away frustrated, not because the people were poor (many were excellent), but because the commercial model was stacked against me. I was a number in someone’s account plan. My programme existed, at least in part, to feed their revenue target. And once you see that dynamic clearly, it is very difficult to unsee it.

The businesses that gave me the best experience were never the biggest or the most recognisable. They were smaller, specialist firms where I mattered more as a customer: firms that understood my world, cared about my outcomes, and worked harder to fix things when they went wrong because the relationship was worth protecting.

Eventually, I started to wonder whether there was room in the market for a different kind of company: one that combined the deep expertise and delivery capability of a large consultancy with the responsiveness, care and accountability of a smaller firm. A business that would succeed not by maximising the size of its engagements, but by being honest about what its clients actually needed.

That was the idea behind PMC.

The uncomfortable commercial logic

When we started, people told us the model wouldn’t scale. If you tell clients they don’t need a major transformation programme, where does your revenue come from? If you recommend less technology, less consulting, less complexity, how do you grow?

The answer, it turns out, is trust.

When you tell a client the truth, even when that truth is “you don’t need us for this” or “the simpler option is the better one,” something happens. They come back, not because you sold them something, but because you helped them make a better decision. And they tell other people. Over 25 years, that dynamic has proved more commercially sustainable than any account plan I ever sat inside as a customer.

Along the way, we have recommended smaller programmes when the evidence supported it, challenged platform selections that the rest of the market was validating, and told boards that they did not yet know enough to make a responsible decision, that the right next step was more thinking, not more spending. None of those conversations are comfortable. They require confidence in your own expertise, a willingness to walk away from short-term revenue, and a genuine belief that client outcomes matter more than your own pipeline.

What 25 years teaches you

If you spend a quarter of a century advising organisations through complex transformation, you learn a few things that rarely appear in consulting brochures.

You learn that the biggest risks are not usually technical; they are human. They live in the assumptions nobody challenges, the governance structures that distribute accountability so widely that nobody owns the outcome, and the institutional pressure to choose the option that is easiest to defend rather than the one most likely to succeed.

You learn that complexity is not the same thing as rigour, and that adding more advisors, more governance layers and more programme structure can create an impression of thoroughness while quietly making successful delivery harder.

Above all, you learn that independence (real independence, not the kind that appears in a pitch deck) is one of the most valuable things you can offer a client. Not independence as a label, but as a daily practice: the willingness to say what you actually think, even when it creates less work for you.

Why it matters now

Twenty-five years ago, the transformation landscape was simpler. The stakes were lower, the technology choices were fewer, and the consequences of getting it wrong were more contained. Today, organisations are investing millions in programmes that will shape their operations for a decade or more, and the pressure to make defensible decisions has never been greater. The gap between advice that serves the client and advice that serves the advisor has never been more consequential.

That is why we recently published When Safe Decisions Create Risk, a paper exploring how well-intentioned governance and institutional pressure can push organisations toward decisions that feel safe but carry hidden risk. It draws on the kinds of situations we have seen repeatedly over 25 years, and it asks a question that too few people in our industry are willing to raise openly.

I did not start PMC because I thought the consulting industry was broken. I started it because I believed there was room for a business that put the client’s interests genuinely first, and that doing so could also be commercially successful. Twenty-five years later, I still believe that, and the fact that we are still here, still growing, and still having these conversations suggests the market believes it too.

Paul Mason is the founder of PMC, a specialist technology consultancy and services partner working with retail, commerce and enterprise organisations. PMC celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026.