Are big safe firms actually safer?

Nobody ever got fired for hiring PwC.

That's not a compliment to PwC. It's an admission about what's actually being purchased when a business chooses a big name over a smaller one. It's not always better outcomes. It's cover. If the project goes sideways, the decision-maker gets to say they went with the safe, obvious choice. The big logo is reputational insurance for the person who signed the contract, not a guarantee of a better result for the business itself.

I think that's worth sitting with, because once you see it, a few other things about big versus small stop being clichés and start being genuinely practical.

Big firms can also absorb blame in a way that should worry you more than comfort you. Something goes wrong, and it gets distributed. The junior who did the data intake, the account manager who ran the relationship, the partner who signed off, nobody individually owns the outcome, which means nobody is individually accountable for it either. A sole trader has nowhere to hide that. There's one person, and every result, good or bad, sits with them. That's not a weakness. It's the single strongest accountability structure you can buy.

Then there's the incentive question, which gets ignored constantly. A big firm's business model often rewards more hours, more staff on the job, more phases to the project. That's not corruption, it's just structurally how they scale and stay profitable. A sole trader's business model runs on the opposite logic: get you a genuine result, keep you as a client, get referred to the next one. Longer engagements that don't move the needle are bad for their business, not good for it.

Yes, you also get the relationship people always mention, the same person who understood your business on day one is still the person on the call a year later, not a rotating cast of interns and someone else quietly doing the actual thinking in the background. That the contextual understanding of your, your business and the nuance that can only come from having one person handle the conversations from end to end rather than delegating to the cheapest intern or data handler available. That stuff is true. It's just not the most interesting part.

The most interesting part is that going small isn't just better for the world we live in; it’s usually also the genuinely safer choice!

But you know, I might be a little bit biased...