Both get the call when a portfolio company's revenue plan is behind the deal model. A sponsor looking at a stalled commercial plan usually weighs the same two options: bring in a strategy consultancy's private equity practice, or put operators into the business. Claymore Partners is a growth execution firm, so read this as one side of the comparison stating its case as plainly as it can, including the cases where the consultancy is the right call. The two are different instruments, and buying the wrong one costs more than the fee.
A management consulting firm is hired to diagnose a problem and recommend a plan; the deliverable is the recommendation. A growth execution firm is hired to move a commercial number inside the portfolio company; the deliverable is the result. The first is paid for the answer, the second for the outcome.
The table below is the comparison a deal team can put in front of a CEO in one page. None of the rows is a criticism of either model; each describes what the buyer is actually paying for.
| Dimension | Management consulting firm | Growth execution firm |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverable | A recommendation and a roadmap | A moved number: pipeline, CAC, conversion, revenue |
| Where the work happens | Alongside the business, in a project team | Inside the business, in the seat |
| Who is accountable when it does not work | The client, who owns implementation | The firm, which stays until it performs |
| Duration | A scoped engagement of roughly two to four months, then a hand-off | An audit first, then execution scoped to the issue; exit when the number holds |
| Team | Generalist consultants with a partner over them | Operators who have run the function they are fixing |
| What it costs the CEO | Reading time and a steering committee | A seat at the table and a shared number |
The row that decides most engagements is the third one. A consulting engagement ends when the recommendation is accepted, and everything after that is the portfolio company's problem. A growth execution engagement ends when the number the work was scoped to move has moved, and the capability to keep it moving has been handed to the company's own team.
There are four situations where a management consulting firm is the better instrument, and a growth execution firm that tells you otherwise is selling.
Portfolio-wide strategy questions. Which of twelve portfolio companies to invest behind, where to concentrate a fund's operating resources, whether a platform thesis still holds. These are analysis questions with no execution seat attached, and the large strategy houses' private equity practices are built for them.
Market-entry and pricing-strategy questions with no execution capacity needed yet. If the company does not yet know whether to enter a segment, the work is research and modeling, and the output is a decision. Execution comes after the decision, not instead of it.
A board that needs an independent view before it acts. When the sponsor and the management team disagree about the diagnosis, an outside recommendation with no execution stake in the answer is worth its fee. The operations practices of the large advisory firms fill this role for the operational version of the same question.
A distressed situation, where neither is right. A company that needs to stop losing cash needs a turnaround firm, not a strategy deck and not a growth program. The distinction between growth work and turnaround work is set out in operating partner vs turnaround firm, and it holds for firms as much as for individuals: if it needs to grow, put operators in; if it needs to stop bleeding, bring in the people whose job is to stop the bleeding.
The growth execution firm is the better instrument when the plan already exists and is not happening. The symptoms are the four problems we see most often in PE-backed companies, and they are the ones a recommendation cannot fix because a recommendation was never what was missing.
No single source of revenue truth. Data is fragmented across marketing, sales, finance, operations and customer experience, so the board sees three versions of the same quarter. Activity without accountability. Teams are busy, but ownership, priorities and follow-through are unclear. More spend, not more growth. Budget is scaling before the commercial system is fixed. Leadership flying blind before the board meeting. The business cannot clearly explain what is working, what is broken and what to do next.
Each of these is an execution gap, not a knowledge gap. The CEO usually knows what the number should be and often knows why it is not there. What the company lacks is a senior operator with the time, the mandate and the track record to build the measurement, fix the sequence and run the function until it performs. That is the seat a growth execution firm fills, and it is why the model is built around Embedded Operators rather than a project team.
The other tell is a capable CEO starving for execution capacity rather than a leadership gap. A management team that is strong but stretched does not need to be assessed or replaced; it needs hands on the commercial engine that report into it. A team with a genuine capability gap needs a different conversation, and a growth execution firm should say so in the audit rather than staff around it.
Engagement data from our own work shows the shape of the result when the instrument matches the problem. A distressed PE-backed flooring retailer grew revenue 36% in 24 months on essentially flat marketing spend after the commercial engine was rebuilt end to end. A five-brand home services rollup identified up to a 60% reduction in customer acquisition cost by tripling the share of owned acquisition channels. Neither result came from a recommendation. Both came from operators owning the number inside the business, and the full write-ups are on our results page.
A growth execution engagement opens with a commercial audit: seven weeks, fixed scope, with findings presented in week eight. It produces a quantified fact base of where revenue is leaking across marketing, sales, pricing, retention and the data layer that connects them, and a sequenced plan with named owners. Board-ready reporting is built early, because the sponsor needs to see the same numbers the operators are working from. Execution is then scoped to the issues the audit found, not to a fixed program, and the scope is written with an end state so the company knows what handover looks like before the work starts.
The mechanics, including how the work is staffed and how it differs from an agency or a full-time hire, are set out in how growth execution engagements are structured. When the mandate is the whole commercial engine rather than one function, the Revenue Blueprint is the product that carries it, and what we do shows how the pieces fit.
In practice the two are a sequence, not a rivalry. The common pattern across a hold is a consultancy at diligence or inside the 100-day plan for the strategy question, and a growth execution firm from around month six, when the plan is agreed and the company needs hands to make it happen. The consultancy tells the sponsor what the business should become. The growth execution firm makes the revenue engine become it. Sponsors who buy them in the wrong order pay for a recommendation nobody has the capacity to act on, or for execution against a plan nobody has agreed. The same distinction at the level of the individual, an operating partner against a consultant, is drawn in operating partner vs consultant.
Buy the recommendation when you do not yet know what to do. Buy the execution when you do, and it still is not happening.
A management consulting firm is hired to diagnose a problem and recommend a plan; the deliverable is the recommendation. A growth execution firm is hired to move a commercial number inside the portfolio company; the deliverable is the result. The first is paid for the answer, the second for the outcome.
Yes, routinely. Sponsors bring in the large strategy houses and the operations practices for commercial due diligence, for the strategy question inside a 100-day plan, and for portfolio-wide questions such as which companies to invest behind. The engagement is scoped, the output is a recommendation, and implementation stays with the portfolio company's own team.
A growth execution firm puts operators inside a portfolio company to own a commercial number, typically pipeline, acquisition cost, conversion or revenue, and stays until it moves. It diagnoses first, then builds and runs the fix in the seat rather than advising from beside it. Claymore Partners is one; our Embedded Operators product is the clearest example of the model.
It depends on scope, and the honest answer is that they are priced on different things. A consulting firm bills for the project and the team on it. A growth execution firm bills for the audit, then for execution scoped to the issues the audit found. Our guide to how engagements are structured explains the shape without quoting numbers, because scope sets the number.
Some now offer implementation arms, and the larger operations practices will staff a program office for a portfolio company. The test is not whether the firm can send people; it is who owns the number when the deck is done. If accountability for the result hands back to the CEO at the end of the project, the firm is still selling a recommendation.
When the company is distressed. A business that needs to stop bleeding cash needs a turnaround firm with the authority to cut, renegotiate and restructure, not a strategy deck and not a growth program. Growth execution assumes there is a commercial engine worth improving and the runway to improve it; a turnaround firm creates that runway first.
Have a revenue problem the board is asking about? Start a conversation.