Nicholas Mukhtar hears the objection often, usually from the same business owners who eventually become his clients: why pay an outside consultant to explain a business the owner already knows better than anyone.
“There’s a lot of cynicism about companies using McKinsey and outside consultants,” Mukhtar said, “but the rationale is sound. You bring in an outside voice that isn’t ingrained in the day-to-day, and can actually think creatively.”His answer to the skepticism rests on proximity itself getting in the way of certain kinds of thinking, regardless of how capable the people inside a company are, rather than on any claim that an outsider understands the business better.
Mukhtar draws on his own background as evidence for the argument rather than treating it as an abstract claim. His consulting practice grew directly out of running Healthy Detroit, a nonprofit, where he says the same principle applied in reverse: an outside public-private partnership model, built deliberately apart from city government, was able to test ideas that the bureaucracy itself couldn’t attempt from within. The lesson he brings to corporate clients is the same one he applied to a city government years earlier.
The skepticism itself isn’t unreasonable. Business owners who have spent years building specific expertise have good reason to question whether someone without it can add real value in a matter of weeks. Mukhtar’s response redirects that instinct rather than dismissing it: the value comes from the ability to see patterns across a business that the people running it day to day are too close to notice, not from expertise in the client’s specific business, since the client already has that.
For owners weighing whether outside advice is worth the cost, Mukhtar’s framing offers a simpler test than credentials or case studies: whether the recommendation being offered is something someone inside the company could plausibly have said months ago, or something only an outside vantage point could have surfaced.
Nicholas Mukhtar doesn’t argue that outside advice is always worth the price. Plenty of engagements produce recommendations an experienced internal team could have reached on its own, and he’s candid that those engagements aren’t earning their fee. The distinction he’s making is narrower: proximity itself, not lack of intelligence or effort, is what keeps capable people inside a business from seeing certain problems clearly.
