Nicholas Mukhtar sorts the companies he advises into two categories, and neither one has much to do with revenue or headcount. One bucket is the large, established company that behaves, in his description, like a big city government: a bureaucratic machine that sometimes can’t get out of its own way. The other is the startup, a group of people doing 20 different roles at once, trying to become a real functioning business. He built that framework from his years in public health before he ever took on a corporate client.
“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.”
A Model Borrowed From City Hall
Mukhtar’s comparison traces back to his time as a Bloomberg Fellow at Johns Hopkins, where he studied the approach New York City took to fixing entrenched problems during Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty. New York’s Center for Economic Opportunity, launched in 2006 under a public-private funding model, was built deliberately outside the normal city bureaucracy so it could pilot anti-poverty programs, keep the ones that worked and cut the ones that didn’t. Mukhtar cites that general approach, a nonprofit-style vehicle operating alongside government rather than inside it, as the model he still reaches for when a large client is too weighed down by its own processes to change from within.
“They recognized that government institutions are big bureaucratic machines not equipped for innovation,” Mukhtar said of what he took from that period. “So they built a nonprofit arm completely separate from the government, with a real public-private partnership agreement.” He describes that structural workaround, rather than any single program it produced, as the actual lesson worth applying to business.
Why Outside Voices Get a Hearing
That framework informs how Mukhtar responds to a common objection from clients: skepticism about paying an outside consultant to tell them what’s wrong with a business they already know intimately. “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.”
That demand hasn’t slowed down industry-wide. The U.S. management consulting industry is valued at roughly $420 billion in 2026, having grown at a compound annual rate of 4.5% since 2021 even as clients grew more selective about which engagements deliver results. Nicholas Mukhtar’s pitch to skeptical clients rests on proximity as the obstacle rather than expertise: someone outside the daily grind can see patterns that the people living inside them typically can’t.
For the startups he advises, Nicholas Mukhtar flips the comparison in the other direction. “From a startup perspective, you want to study what larger institutions built and how they got there, but also where they went wrong,” he said. “I see a lot of growing pains in companies trying to transition from startup to fully functioning business.” That transition, in his experience, is where a young company either builds the systems and role clarity that let it scale, or calcifies into a smaller, less capable version of the bureaucracy it was trying to avoid becoming.
Client sophistication has risen across the consulting industry generally, with procurement teams scrutinizing engagements more closely and demanding outcome-based pricing rather than open-ended hourly billing. That shift cuts both ways for a client weighing whether to bring in outside help. It means a business owner has more standing to demand a specific, measurable diagnosis rather than a generic strategy deck, but it also means the outside voice Mukhtar describes has less room to justify vague, feel-good recommendations that don’t hold up under a client’s own scrutiny.
There’s No Universal Playbook
Nicholas Mukhtar resists the idea that either category, the bureaucratic giant or the scrappy startup, has a single fix that applies across every client. “Every entity and every person is unique, and you have to treat it that way,” he said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.” That caveat matters given how often consulting engagements get sold on a standardized framework rather than a diagnosis specific to the client in front of the consultant.
Mukhtar’s own background gives that diagnosis-first approach some grounding. He ran Healthy Detroit, a nonprofit, for seven years, building it from a single idea into an organization the American Public Health Association named the National Public Health Organization of the Year in 2017. That experience sitting on the nonprofit side of a public-private partnership, rather than reading about the model secondhand, is part of what Nicholas Mukhtar brings to conversations with founders trying to decide how much structure their own company needs and when.
Where Mukhtar’s framework departs most from the standard consulting pitch is in how little it promises upfront. Most of his large-institution clients don’t need a new strategy so much as permission and a structure to test something outside their normal process, the corporate version of the nonprofit arm Bloomberg’s team built alongside city government. Most of his startup clients don’t need more ambition. They need someone who has watched enough companies pass through the same transition to know which growing pains are normal and which ones are early warning signs of a business that’s about to calcify before it ever fully forms.
Related: Nicholas Mukhtar On The One Question Every Business Owner Should Ask Before Hiring A Consultant
