If you lead a small or mid-sized business in Latin America and you have ever tried to hire serious strategic help, you have already encountered the problem we are about to describe.
The market for high-end strategic consulting in this region is shaped by two structural realities, neither of which serves the businesses that most need help.
On one side are the global firms. McKinsey. BCG. Bain. They publish well, they think well, and the people who work there are remarkable. But the engagement model only works above a certain account size. A six-month strategy project from a tier-one firm starts at numbers that are simply not justifiable for most regional businesses, even when those businesses generate USD 50M in revenue. So the global firms quietly select for the largest 200 corporations in the region. Everything else is filtered out.
On the other side are the local agencies and independent consultants. They are accessible. They will take the call. They will quote a number that fits the budget. The problem appears later, in the work itself: a generic framework copied from a graduate textbook, a deck that could have been produced for any business in any sector, and a lack of operating depth that becomes obvious the moment a recommendation needs to be implemented. Many of these consultants have never run a real P&L.
What sits between the two
If you map the market on two axes, the picture becomes uncomfortable. On one axis: strategic depth. On the other: access. The global firms are top-right (high depth, low access). The local agencies are bottom-left (low depth, high access). The diagonal is empty.
That diagonal is where most of the regional economy actually lives. Leaders running businesses that have grown past the early stages but are not yet large enough to bring in tier-one help. Companies experiencing the kind of compounding growth that breaks the operating model that got them here. Management teams who can clearly articulate the question they need answered but cannot find anyone capable of answering it at a price that respects the scale of their business.
The third quadrant is not a niche. It is the largest segment of the regional economy. It is just structurally underserved.
This is not a complaint about the global firms. Their model is what it is, and their best work is genuinely best-in-class. It is also not an attack on local consultants, many of whom do honest work within the limits of what they were trained to do. It is a description of a gap.
Why the gap persists
Three forces keep the gap open.
First, the economics of partner-led consulting do not scale down without a complete redesign of how the work is delivered. A model built around partners flying in for steering committees cannot serve a USD 20M business that needs a partner present in the operation, not above it.
Second, the talent that could close the gap usually exits the consulting world before they have the seniority to do it independently. They join one of their clients. They start a business. They go to a fund. The pool of people with both the strategic training and the appetite to operate alongside mid-market leaders is small, and it does not concentrate.
Third, the firms that try to close the gap usually default to one side or the other within their first three years. They either grow upmarket toward the global model and leave the gap behind, or they compete on price and lose the depth that justified them existing in the first place.
The choice we made
LIFE·IN·CO was built around a deliberate refusal of both paths. We do not want to become a small version of a global firm. We do not want to compete on price with agencies. We want to do work in the third quadrant: top-tier strategic thinking, real operating depth, accessible to a CEO whose business throws off USD 10M in EBITDA but cannot justify a USD 2M engagement.
That choice forces design decisions on us. We work with a small number of clients at a time. We charge differently. We bring senior people, not analysts. We commit to the outcome, not the deliverable. None of this is original. What is original is the discipline of staying inside the third quadrant when the economics push us toward one of the other two.
If you are reading this and you recognize your own business in the description, the answer is probably not "find another consultant." It is to look harder for a partner who has explicitly designed their firm for the question you are actually trying to answer.