How to Choose Your Best Growth Strategy Consulting Firm

Executive Summary: Selecting a growth strategy consulting firm requires careful evaluation of eight key factors to ensure strong alignment and effective outcomes. This framework emphasizes assessing a firm’s focus on growth strategy, the expertise and experience of its consulting team, and the alignment of its approach with client priorities. The analysis compares leading global firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG with smaller specialized firms. The framework is intended to be a guide to helps organizations make informed choices to foster successful, sustainable growth.

8 Selection Factors to Ensure a Good Fit and Outstanding Results

Growth strategy is a leading topic for many leaders, and growth strategy consulting is on the rise. When it’s time to choose a growth strategy consulting firm, there are eight factors that make sense to consider.  These are:

1. Is growth strategy an important focus for the consulting firm? 
2. Who are the people on the specific consulting team that you are paying for? Are the people on the team experienced in growth strategy?
3. Does the proposed work approach spend more time and cost on the growth strategy areas that are most important to you?
4. What tools, if any, do they bring to developing the growth strategy? 
5. How good is the firm, and the specific team you will work with, at collaborating with your organization?
6. How good is the firm, and the specific team you will work with, at getting adoption, enrolling the leadership team and getting alignment?
7. How easy or difficult are they to work with?
8. How geographically accessible is their team to your location?

Let’s look at each of these factors in turn, and consider why each is helpful, and how to gather the information needed to evaluate the factor.

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #1:
Business Focus

The first factor to assess is whether growth strategy is a focus for the consulting firm.  After that, it’s also important to examine if growth strategy is an area of experience for the specific consultants who will work on your project.

A greater focus means more time focused on growth strategy.  This translates to a greater ability to bring diverse experiences from a range of other companies and industries to bear on your work, if you have the right team.     

Diverse experience is more likely to lead to innovative solutions.  In comparison, a firm that exclusively focuses on just one industry may tend to reinforce existing industry thinking and duplicate the experience of your management team. 

Figuring out whether a firm focuses on growth strategy may not be as simple as it appears. Data sources for this information include:

• The consulting firm’s website
• Thought leadership materials
• Independent rankings

Independent ranking sources are broad, focusing on the best firms for consulting overall or the best firms for strategy overall, not necessarily growth strategy.  Four sources provide such lists of strategy firms:

1. Consultancy
2. Management Consulted
3. Vault
4. Forbes

None of them are specific to growth strategy.

Which Strategy Firms Does Consultancy Recommend?

Consultancy.org doesn’t have a specific breakout for growth strategy, despite having 40+ areas of “specialization.” Within these 40+ areas, Consultancy has the category of “strategy” overall (not specific to growth) with 58 firms. In Consultancy’s strategy top 10 are:

1. McKinsey
2. BCG
3. Bain
4. Roland Berger
5. Accenture
6. KPMG
7. OC&C Strategy Consultants
8. PwC
9. Deloitte
10. Arthur D. Little     

Which Strategy Firms Does Management Consulted Recommend?

Management Consulted provides a list of top consulting firms without designating strategy or growth strategy.  Not surprisingly, McKinsey, Bain and BCG are the top three players in the list of “top consulting firms of 2025.”   Included in Management Consulted’s list of “General Management and Strategy Firms” are: Advancy, Clarkston Consulting, EY, Kearney and L.E.K.

Which Strategy Firms Does Vault Recommend?

Vault provides the category of best strategy consulting to work for, but these are not specific to growth strategy.  Vault’s top 20 strategy firms are:

1. McKinsey
2. BCG
3. Bain
4. Deloitte
5. Accenture
6. PwC
7. Oliver Wyman
8. L.E.K.
9. EY-Parthenon
10. KPMG
11. EY-Consulting Practice NA
12. Kearney
13. IBM Global Business Services
14. Alvarez & Marsal
15. AlixPartners
16. Capgemini
17. Huron
18. IQVIA
19. Roland Berger
20. Grant Thornton

Which Strategy Firms Does Forbes Recommend?

Forbes also publishes a list of over 200 firms in various categories, . One search filter is “strategy,” which yields star ratings for a number of firms that are recommended (again, for strategy overall, not specific to growth strategy).  Several firms that focus heavily on growth strategy, such as L.E.K. and EY, are listed as  three-stars by Forbes, reinforcing the fact that this source is broad to overall strategy without insight on growth strategy.

The question is, how prominent, or not, is growth strategy? 

As we’ve examined previously for growth strategy consulting, top-tier strategy consulting firms are known as “MBB,” because their initials are known for strategy. 

The MBB firms are McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. They all have considerable experience in strategy.  The area where growth strategy is found in their practice varies by firm.

McKinsey and Growth Strategy Consulting

While data on the service mix was not found for McKinsey, McKinsey’s website navigation starts with 23 industries and 10 capabilities. Growth, marketing and sales is a capability where McKinsey identifies growth strategy literally in the name.  Subtopics within the growth, marketing and sales function area include:

• Branding
• Consumer & shopper insights
• Customer experience
• Customer lifecycle management
• Digital marketing
• Green growth
• Insights & analytics
• Marketing return on investment
• NeXT Commerce
• Organization & capabilities
• Pricing
• Sales & channel management   

Other capabilities where growth strategy may fall are M&A and strategy & corporate finance.  Strategic growth and innovation is a specific focus underneath strategy & corporate finance.  

McKinsey features a Committed Innovator podcast for growth-focused executives  A podcast on the “Six Strategies for Growth Outperformance” finds that the core business typically drives 80% of growth across a wide variety of industry sectors from consumer to healthcare. The remaining 20% of growth is made up of adjacencies and breakout spaces.  

An expert McKinsey alumnus estimates that as much as 40% of McKinsey’s work can be considered strategy.  She explains,

“McKinsey generously refers to everything they do as ‘strategy’ and focuses only on issues that are important to the c-suite – who typically are obsessed with profit and revenue growth because that’s how to increase shareholder value, i.e. the reason for being in business in the first place.  So, a claim that a huge percentage of their work is growth strategy could be justified. Also, one needs to separate out profit growth from revenue growth, and I’m guessing that organic revenue growth is what’s captured under the Capabilities tab. But I assume that they’d also include most, if not all, of the Strategy & Corporate Finance work as ‘growth strategy,’ too.  And also, a lot of the work under M&A.  Viewed from that perspective, 40% doesn’t seem too high, actually.”

Since McKinsey is very large, it’s difficult to know how many consultants and partners focus primarily on growth strategy.  McKinsey cut its workforce by 10% in 2025, reducing to approximately 40,000 employees, down from 45,000 in 2023.

McKinsey claims offices in 130+ cities, with a staff of 750 senior partners in 2025.  In 2023, there were approximately  3,000 total partners.  McKinsey has also deployed 12,000+ agentic agents to perform work previously done by consultants.  Based on this, it’s reasonable to assume that there are several hundred experts at McKinsey who focus on growth strategy.

Two examples of McKinsey’s experts are Greg Kelly, (leader of the Marketing and Sales practice), and Brian Gregg (leader of the Consumer Technology and Media practice).

Bain and Growth Strategy Consulting

With 67 offices in 40 countries and an estimated 18,000 employees, Bain is a leader in strategy consulting. In 2019, Bain reported that 24% of its revenue came from strategy work “measured in terms of capability.” 

Bain’s 2023 service mix was reported at 18% business strategy by independent ranking agency Wimgo, similar to the 19% Bain self-reported in 2019.    Private equity related work is estimated to be 25-33% of Bain’s mix, and business and IT transformation around 40%.  We did not find a recent release from Bain on the percentage of its work that is strategy.

In the top navigation bar, Bain’s website has 20 industries (with additional sub industries) and 12 consulting services.  Strategy is one of the consulting services. Under strategy, there are also four “How We Can Help” topics:

• Corporate Strategy (Corporate Finance, M&A, Investor Relations)
• Business Strategy (Full Strategy Review, Business Model Disruption, Growth Beyond the Core, Evergreen Strategy Agenda)
• Innovation & Business Building (Platform Strategy)
• Business Transformation (Full Potential Transformation, Results Delivery Office)

Bain’s featured strategy service leaders include: Dunigan O’Keeffe (global strategy and transformation),  Nikhil Prasad Ohja (head of APAC strategy), and others.

The sales and marketing consulting service area at Bain is further delineated into eight specializations:

1. brand strategy
2. modern marketing
3. product and portfolio management
4. pricing optimization
5. go-to-market strategy
6. customer experience
7. sales management
8. customer insights and segmentation

Sales and marketing service leaders for Bain include: Darci Darnell, Andreas Dullweber, Richard Hatherall, Jamie Cleghorn and Priscilla Dell’Orto.

Boston Consulting Group and Growth Strategy Consulting

BCG has 33,000 employees and offices in 100+ cities. 2024 revenues were $13.5 billion, up from $11.7 billion in 2022.

In 2023, Wimgo estimated BCG’s service mix is dominated by product launches (35%) and other marketing (35%).  Business strategy and market research were each 10%, while market entry is 1%.  Excluding other finance, 90% of BCG’s service mix was related to growth strategy.

Recently, BCG has shared that its mix has changed, such that AI advisory services were 20% of revenues in 2024. This shift is consistent with the overall shift in top three revenues away from strategy. In 2015, strategy was as much as 50% of revenue at MBB firms. Over the past decade, strategy has shrunk as digital and implementation have grown.

Expertise areas in 16 industries and 20 capabilities are featured on BCG’s website.  Different from the last update in 2024, many of the capabilities no longer use the word strategy as part of their description.  Two capabilities that appear related to growth strategy are:

• Innovation Strategy and Delivery
• Marketing and Sales

BCG’s leaders in marketing and sales include: Jean-Manuel Izaret, Lara Koslov,  Karen Lellouche Tordjman,  Jessica Apotheker, Bharat Poddar and Phillip Andersen.

The BCG website also provides information on its growth strategy background on other pages.

Comparison of Growth Strategy Consulting Firms

Growth strategy consulting firms can be broadly separated into two categories by number of employees. There are 14 smaller firms (with less than 500 employees), and 11 large or mid-sized firms, including the MBB firms. 

In 2025, eight smaller and medium-sized firms meet the first criteria of focus on growth strategy consulting.  They are:

1. Prophet
2. Insight to Action
3. Strategyn
4. Innosight
5. SEI
6. Waveup
7. New Markets Advisors  
8. Umbrex Consulting  

There are several firms on this list that didn’t appear in 2024, as well as several that fell off the list.  The firms that are consistent are Innosight, Strategyn and Insight to Action. 

While all these firms work broadly in the area of growth strategy, several have a primary focus on different customer groups, for instance, Innosight focuses on innovation, while Strategyn focuses on ODI. 

Comparison Chart of Small and Medium Growth Strategy Consulting Firms

The comparison set of nine larger firms includes the familiar MBB firms McKinsey, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group, along with many other established brands.  Other large firms are L.E.K. Consulting,  PA Consulting, Simon Kucher, PwC / Strategy &, Prophet and EY (Ernst & Young). There is one firm that primarily works with outside consultants: Consultport.   

Comparison Chart of Large Growth Strategy Consulting Firms

Looking back to 2022, MBB firms were well-regarded for growth strategy consulting (in the top three), and L.E.K., Ernst & Young, and Accenture were also in the top 10 for at least two sources.   As of 2025, L.E.K., EY, PwC/Strategy & are found in the large firm growth strategy focus list.   Three additional firms emerged as consistent growth strategy consulting organizations: PA Consulting, Simon-Kucher and Consultport.

The other 2022 large firm players: Oliver Wyman, Deloitte, IBM Global Services, and KPMG don’t appear to consistently focus on growth strategy and did not make the list in 2025.  

This first factor is an “ante”—that is, all consulting firms that you are considering must demonstrate their experience in growth strategy.  All of the MBB firms easily clear this requirement as do several small and large firms.  The next factor is more about the team.

For ease of reference, we’ve updated the list for 2025.  Since many of the 2022 sources are no longer available, there are new sources.

Download 2025 Comparison of Strategy Consulting Firms PDF

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #2:
Consulting Team

The dominant model of leverage that the large consulting firms use means that most of the work is done by less experienced consultants and analysts.   

So, in your project, your budget is spent more on analyst and consultant time than experienced partner, principal or manager time. 

Fees in the MBB firms range from $300,000 to $600,000 per month. According to this source, McKinsey partner time is over $1,000 per hour; consultants are typically $400 or more an hour.

To examine the leverage model, we can look at the ratio of partners to non-partners. For the purposes of this analysis, the focus is on employees, though not all employees are consultants.  Two of these firms also report total employees: McKinsey at 40,000 and BCG at 33,000.

At McKinsey, the employee-to-partner ratio is around 15 to one. It’s safe to say that the other MBB firms also have high-leverage models.

As one source explains:

“In terms of staffing, you’ll find that Bain is more analyst heavy than both McKinsey and BCG. On a standard McKinsey or BCG team, there may be only 1 analyst. In contrast, a team from Bain will have 2 analysts and fewer people who are more senior.

“McKinsey, not surprisingly, leads the pack on depth of experience. They’ve been around for the longest, they have the largest number of consulting staff, and their reach is the most extensive. … When they come to the table to pitch to a client, McKinsey can usually point to 10 examples where they’ve done the same job successfully before.

On the other end of the spectrum, Bain relies on its ‘we’ll work hard for you’ mentality to win clients. The firm doesn’t have the decades of experience to draw from like its competitors, but it does have a card up its sleeve. Bain gives a lot more ideas in the sales process than would McKinsey or BCG, relying heavily on its quantitative prowess and willingness to go the extra mile. A partner at Bain might give away what would normally be the first month of work to a potential client – a tactic that often sways clients in their favor.”

By comparison, the smaller growth strategy consulting firms are more likely to have a business model that includes more experienced partner or project director time.  That’s the model at Insight to Action.

In our experience, most client evaluators will focus heavily on the partner’s experience, and perhaps the project director’s experience, to assess the team.  Some will also take the next step to ask how much of that senior time will be spent on their engagement.  These are good questions to explore.

Freelancer-based firms Umbrex and Consultport offer a choice of experienced consultants to the client. However, these “dream” teams will typically lack shared growth strategy tools and practices, based on their different backgrounds, putting even more stress on the choice of the right team.

Preferably, the consulting team will have worked together in the past so that they can focus on the growth strategy work at hand rather than learning to work together.

If a more collaborative growth strategy development process is desired, where your management team actively contributes to the recommendations, we suggest selecting a growth strategy consulting firm with a more experienced team that can engage with your leaders.   

The more experienced team can avoid “boiling the ocean” and “reinventing the wheel.”  While a less experienced team can theoretically draw upon the resources of their firm, in practice they often fail to do so.

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #3:
Work Approach That’s Aligned with Your Priorities

This third factor will require more work on the part of you and your team to assess.  It will also ensure you get the most value.

It’s critical to prioritize the objectives and deliverables that you want to have coming out of the work.  If you get the answer that everything is equally important, push back and ask for “A,” “B” and “C” priorities.  

The more clarity you have around prioritized objectives and deliverables, the better fit you’re likely to get with the consulting engagement.  If a growth strategy consulting firm isn’t pushing for clarity, this is a warning sign.

Broadly speaking, a strategy consulting engagement might have four phases:

• Phase A: Situation assessment
• Phase B: Growth strategy alternative creation (with or without customers)
• Phase C: Growth strategy selection
• Phase D: Evaluation and vetting of initiatives that deliver the strategy over the next 1, 3 and 5 years.

It’s almost never the case that 25% of your budget will be spent in each phase. More often, emphasis is placed on different parts of work where more help is needed, or where previous efforts have shown an alignment breakdown.

So, looking at the total budget and timeline for a growth strategy consulting effort, should 5%, 10%, 30%, 50% or 80% of the time be spent on the first phase of situation assessment activities?  

Of course, it’s possible to do a quick Phase One situation assessment in as little as a week, and that may meet your firm’s needs. Alternatively, the market fact base may be so inadequate and the need for information so great that an investment of six months in a new customer segmentation can be essential.  Or your organization may want to build the bench by having your analyst team lead some of the situation assessment, rather than the consultants.   

Moving to the second phase, how much time will it take, and when will the growth strategy alternatives be created?  Will these activities take up 5%, 10%, 30%, 50% or 80% of the budget?  Going back to collaboration, how, if at all, will your leadership team participate in the growth strategy creation?

You can then repeat the thought process as you look at the proposed workplan and the budget that is associated with each phase.  It may be the case that there are unnecessary steps that can be eliminated, or that more time should be spent on a particular phase to ensure organizational alignment.    

As the client, it’s a good practice to ask that the consulting proposal costs be broken out by each major step (if not already provided) with deliverables at each step.

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #4:
Proven Tools

The large MBB firms have a wealth of tools to draw upon for each consulting engagement.  A challenge is for the relatively inexperienced analyst and consulting team to find the right tools and apply them. 

As the evaluator, it’s possible to assess how integral (or not) proven tools and frameworks are in the proposed work approach.  How much of the consulting time and budget is spent to leverage proven approaches?

My experience at Booz Allen in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that we developed a custom solution for each engagement, rarely leveraging tools from prior engagements. This was inefficient and stressful, though we always came to a good solution in the end.

By comparison, my experience at The Cambridge Group was that we had the benefit of a portfolio of proven tools that worked, like Safari and Demand Segmentation.  We regularly used these tools to become proficient in them. To the chagrin of some experienced consultants, mastery of the tools took several years.  There is a big difference between following a cookbook and mastery. These tools were primary drivers of insight, and often consumed 50% of the total project budget. 

If a firm has only one approach with one tool, that can also be a warning flag.      

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #5:
Collaboration with your Organization

A cable industry client candidly shared that they selected us because they thought we would be the best at working with them to arrive at the growth strategy and recommendations.    This “soft” criteria may require digging a bit deeper beyond the written proposal.

Two areas to consider:

1. Are there regular points of engagement with the leadership team throughout the work?
2. What are the cultural values of the growth strategy consulting firm, and do they align with your firm’s values?

Most likely, you and your team will have a feel for this from the face-to-face conversations that you have with the consulting firm sales team.  Another option is checking the firm’s references, asking about the success of the engagement and team enrollment. 

Another measure to consider is how easy or difficult it is to communicate changes in scope or direction during the proposal process.  If this is difficult during the proposal phase, it portends communication challenges in working together.

At times, there is no desire for collaboration and there is a need for an outside appraisal.  In that case, this factor can be omitted.  This type of “hands off” model is more common when working for outside investors or boards, rather the management team.

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #6:
Enrolling the Leadership Team, Getting Alignment and Gaining Adoption 

Getting the most tailored, top-quality growth strategy for your firm is worthless if there’s poor buy-in from leadership.  Moving into the next steps typically relies on enrollment of the leadership team and their making the answer “their own.”  For example, McKinsey is well known for vetting recommendations with the key players in advance so that there is enrollment and adoption. 

To assess this ability, the first step is to look at the work approach. For example:

• Are stakeholders asked to provide their data and hypotheses in the early stages of the work?
• What about senior sponsors, are their opinions and pet theories solicited to be vetted?  
• Are there check-in points, where leaders can vet the emerging growth strategies?

Again, the consulting firms’ culture will provide clues on this factor. Note how open they are to suggestion and collaboration during the sales process.

We worked on a segmentation and positioning assignment with a client team that previously worked with another firm for one year, only to find that the previous firm’s recommendations were not accepted by the group president.  In that case, we redoubled our check-in points to prevent a repeat scenario and are pleased to share that the recommendations were adopted by all. 

It’s also possible to ask for examples of a firm’s growth strategy consulting work “in the wild.” Evidence that leadership and their teams have adopted the growth strategy will filter down into public-facing marketing campaigns, communications, new product releases, etc. It’s a good sign when you see growth strategies for other clients being put into practice.

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #7:
Ease of Working Together 

This factor will be apparent from all the interactions that you have with the growth strategy consulting firm in the sales process.   For instance:

• Do they meet the deadlines that your process sets with quality work?
• Do they take feedback to adapt their approach based on learning more about your organization’s needs, or do they stick with a “cookie-cutter” process?
• Do they actively suggest ways to make it easier to work together?
• How quickly do they respond to requests?
• Are their communications clear and professional or confusing?

At Insight to Action, we actively strive to make working together easier for our clients.  Whether it’s tailoring the presentations to use client templates or scheduling meetings at the best time for the whole team, this principle is important.

Similar to the team engagement and enrollment, asking about this area may be helpful when checking references.  A useful measure of this comes from the percent of repeat business that the firm has. If the firm has a high repeat ratio, it suggests they are easy to work with.

Growth Strategy Consulting Selection Factor #8:
Geographic Access of Team

In a global digital world with access to the best resources available via Zoom and Microsoft Teams, this factor may be considered irrelevant.  And perhaps it is irrelevant for companies who function with global teams who almost never meet in person.

We find, however, that it is practical to have a consulting team who can meet in person with your leadership team on a regular basis during the growth strategy consulting engagement.  Post COVID, we’re also seeing a trend towards leadership teams getting together to collaborate on growth strategy in person.

For many clients, local offices and geographic access make a difference. Most likely, that’s one reason why McKinsey has offices in over 130 cities.

Post COVID,  we are also seeing increased interest surrounding in-person insights work to support growth strategy, such as ethnographies and in-person focus groups to give greater insight into the end consumer. Remote studies remain popular, especially as a method for testing the findings of in-person research.

Choosing the right growth strategy consulting firm for your organization can be just as challenging as the growth strategy project itself. But evaluating consulting firms with these eight decision factors will set your organization up for success and contribute to sustained growth.

Visit Insight to Action’s Growth Strategy Resources for more expertise and examples. Contact us to start a conversation about your organization.