The global consulting market was on track to reach $1.06 trillion in 2025, and within that growth, one segment is outrunning the rest: boutique and specialized advisory firms. Across industries, clients are shifting away from broad-scope generalist engagements and toward consultants who carry deep expertise in specific domains. The shift is showing up in revenue data, hiring patterns, and in how business owners describe what they want from outside counsel.
Nicholas Mukhtar, who runs Tera Strategies out of Fort Lauderdale and advises family offices, corporate executives, and business owners across the country, has watched this from the inside. “There’s a lot of cynicism about companies using McKinsey and outside consultants,” he 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.” What he describes, though, is a more precise version of that outside voice, one built from specific, cross-sector experience rather than generalized frameworks.
Boutique Firms, Bigger Numbers
Full-time independent consulting workers grew 6.5% to 27.7 million globally in 2024, according to MBO Partners data compiled by Melisa Liberman. Strategy consulting alone has grown at a 9.9% compound annual growth rate since 2018, outpacing many adjacent professional services sectors.
Clients are driving that growth. Boutique and independent providers are gaining ground through what research from the Financial Times and Source Global Research describes as “agility, specialization, and cost-effectiveness.” Larger, multi-practice advisory firms have historically struggled to deliver all three at once. Alpha Sense, tracking the consulting market through 2025, observed that “the age of jack-of-all-trades generalist consulting firms is coming to an end. Clients increasingly want to work with firms that specialize in their specific sector and understand all its nuances.” For Nicholas Mukhtar, this reflects a long-standing mismatch between what business owners actually needed from outside advisors and what large, generalist shops were built to provide.
What Niche Expertise Actually Looks Like
Nicholas Mukhtar’s path into business consulting didn’t follow the MBAs-to-partner trajectory of large advisory firms. He built and ran Healthy Detroit, a public health nonprofit that raised more than $100 million and became a national model, before advising government agencies, senators, and White House offices on health policy. That background in nonprofit management, public systems thinking, federal policy, and private sector governance is the foundation of what Nicholas Mukhtar brings to client engagements, a distinct value proposition from a generalist who rotates across industries without deep operating experience in any of them.
“I look at companies in two buckets,” Mukhtar said. “One is the large, established company that functions much like big city government — a bureaucratic machine that sometimes can’t get out of its own way. The other is the startup, which is much like my nonprofit.” That comparative framework, drawn from running an organization that had to behave like both simultaneously, produces pattern recognition that a consultant trained in only one sector simply won’t have.
“Every entity and every person is unique, and you have to treat it that way,” Mukhtar said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.” For clients who’ve worked with large advisory firms and received variations of the same playbook, that distinction registers quickly. MBO Partners’ 2024 data shows that full-time independent contractors earning more than $100,000 annually grew from 3 million in 2020 to 4.7 million, a 57% increase in four years. Clients are paying more for specialized advisors because, by most measures, they’re getting more.
Choosing the Right Outside Voice
For business owners sizing up this market, the proliferation of specialized consultants creates its own challenge: distinguishing genuine domain expertise from rebranded generalism. Nicholas Mukhtar’s thinking on this is concrete.
When asked about the most common pattern he sees across client engagements, his answer was unambiguous. “The answer is easy, and I see it time and time again: communication,” he said. “… I’ll have two employees come talk to me about a problem, and I’ll ask: did you just sit down and talk about what was bothering you? Did you actually put a plan in place?” That emphasis on direct conversation runs through how Mukhtar approaches initial client work. Large advisory firms often open with extensive data-gathering phases, survey instruments, and weeks of stakeholder interviews before delivering a diagnosis. Mukhtar’s model starts with a conversation, because in his experience, the gap between a client’s stated problem and its actual root cause is almost always exposed by talking, not by analysis alone.
The market’s move toward specialized advisors reflects something similar: a preference for consultants who can engage substantively with the real problem, rather than ones who arrive with a predetermined toolkit. Specialty consulting areas are expanding at rates that outpace the broader market. The sustainability consulting segment alone is projected to grow at a 26.38% compound annual growth rate, reaching $43.32 billion by 2029. That growth isn’t driven by supply. It’s driven by clients who need someone with targeted expertise in a specific domain and will pay for the difference.
Nicholas Mukhtar describes his own practice as outcomes-driven above all else. “I’m outcomes-driven first and foremost,” he said. For a business owner evaluating outside counsel, that distinction matters. A consultant who measures success by deliverables (slide decks, reports, frameworks) is a different thing from one who measures it by what actually changed inside the organization.
Consulting is fragmenting into increasingly specialized niches, and the practical question for any executive or business owner isn’t whether to hire outside counsel. It’s whether the person they’re considering has done the specific work they need done, not merely something adjacent to it. That market will keep growing. Business owners who get there first will be the ones who ask the harder question.
Related: Nicholas Mukhtar On The One Question Every Business Owner Should Ask Before Hiring A Consultant