Why independent

The question — why not work inside a large Italian or international consulting firm, where it would be more comfortable, more secure, and statistically more remunerative — is asked of me regularly. The answer is not ideological. It concerns how I believe real value is produced for a principal, and why that way, at least for me, is not compatible with the structures of large firms.

Direct accountability

In large consulting firms, the senior who signs the mandate is almost never the person who does the work. The principal buys a signature and receives a team of juniors who, by definition, are learning on his company. This is economically rational for the firm — a partner has hourly rates that could not be sustained for the entire mandate perimeter — but produces a structural distance between who sells the work and who executes it. The principal, in the end, almost never knows who really decided the things landing on his desk.

The independent boutique model removes this layer. The signer of the mandate is the doer of the work. When the principal speaks with me, he speaks with the person who decides. Not with who sells, nor with who executes, but with who does both. This is the sharpest difference, and it is the one large firm structure cannot replicate for economic reasons.

The choices scale precludes

A large consulting firm has a client portfolio weighing hundreds of millions. This means every strategic decision on firm structure — which clients to accept, which to refuse, which competences to build, which niches to open — passes through filters of overall portfolio sustainability. Things are done if they scale. Interesting things that do not scale, are not done.

An independent boutique can do the opposite. Costantini & Partners can accept an annual mandate with an Umbrian artisanal atelier and simultaneously a regulatory advisory for an industrial holding: two works that, inside a major firm, would go to two different divisions with two different teams and probably two different partners. Here they are the same work done by the same person, who draws from each tools useful for the other.

Cross-domain reach is not vanity. It is an operating asset: experience accumulated on a consumer-retail mandate produces intuitions useful for a mandate on an industrial holding, and vice versa. A structure segmented by divisions does not have this advantage.

The conflicts of mandates

A large firm carries with it the portfolio of its previous clients, and this structurally limits the mandates it can accept. An M&A advisory on an industrial transaction is refused if the firm also assists the counterparty. A regulatory consultancy on a dossier may be constrained by pre-existing relationships with the regulator. This is never explicit to the client, but structures the perimeter of what will be proposed to him.

Independence here has a precise meaning: the boutique firm can accept mandates that large firms cannot accept, and can enter territories where large firms have no freedom of manoeuvre. For certain principals this is a decisive characteristic — and it is not substituted by scale.

The human scale of work

There exists finally a less technical and more personal dimension, which nonetheless weighs on the model choice. Costantini & Partners is born to handle a limited number of principals at a time, give each integral attention, and maintain multi-year relationships rather than mandate rotations. This is a choice that produces explicit trade-offs: less scalable fees, slower growth, inability to accept all incoming mandates.

The trade-off is conscious, and must be declared: those seeking a firm able to respond immediately to any request, at any hour, on any perimeter, will find better at a large firm. Those seeking continuous strategic dialogue with a person who knows their company deeply and answers personally for every decision, will find well here.