Turnaround consulting has no published price and there is a structural reason for that, which is worth understanding before you ask anyone for a number. Almost every figure you can find about what this work costs was published by somebody who sells it, and the ones that were not are usually generic consulting benchmarks with a turnaround label attached.
So this is a guide to computing the number rather than looking it up. Four fee structures, what each one is actually pricing, the arithmetic you should run against your own business, and the things that should end the conversation. If you are still deciding which kind of help you need rather than what it costs, that comparison is in when to hire each kind of outside help.
What are you actually buying?
You are buying one of three things and the fee follows from which. Capacity, meaning hands you do not have. Capability, meaning a specific technical skill nobody inside possesses. Or authority, meaning somebody who can make a decision your organization cannot make itself.
Those price very differently and conflating them is how buyers end up overpaying. Capacity is the cheapest and most substitutable, because you are buying time and there is a lot of it available. Capability is priced on scarcity, so it varies enormously by how unusual the skill is. Authority is the most expensive and it is what most turnaround engagements are actually selling, whether or not anybody says so.
Work out which one you are buying before you take a proposal. A business that needs capacity and buys authority is paying a premium for something it already had, and a business that needs authority and buys capacity gets a very well documented analysis and no change.
The test is simple. Ask what specifically will be different when this is over, then ask who has to agree for that to happen. If the answer is that your own leadership has to agree, you are buying capacity or capability and should not pay an authority premium. If the answer is that the firm will decide, you are buying authority and the price reflects a genuinely scarcer thing.
What are the four fee structures?
Hourly or daily, fixed project fee, monthly retainer, and retainer plus a success fee. Each one allocates risk differently, and the structure a firm proposes tells you more about their confidence than the rate does.
Hourly and daily billing puts all the scope risk on you. It is appropriate when the work is genuinely open-ended and inappropriate when the deliverable is well defined, and it is the structure most likely to produce an engagement that outlives its usefulness.
A fixed project fee puts scope risk on the firm, which is why they will scope it tightly and why change orders are where the money is. Read the exclusions rather than the inclusions.
A monthly retainer buys availability and a defined cadence. It is the right structure for authority-type work, because what you need is somebody present and deciding rather than somebody producing artifacts.
Retainer plus success fee is common in restructuring and distressed work. It aligns incentives on the outcome and it introduces a different problem, which is that the outcome the fee is tied to may not be the outcome you want. Read the definition of success in the engagement letter with more care than you read the rate.
The structure a firm proposes tells you more about their confidence than the rate does. Read the definition of success in the engagement letter more carefully than you read the number.
Why can’t anyone tell you a market rate?
Because turnaround work is not a standardized product and because the published figures come almost entirely from sellers. Two firms quoting the same monthly number can be selling completely different amounts of decision authority, seniority, and time on site.
What you can observe, and should treat as orientation rather than as a benchmark, is that published figures for senior independent operators tend to cluster around a few hundred dollars an hour, that monthly retainers for part-time senior operating leadership are commonly quoted somewhere between five and twenty-five thousand dollars depending on days per week, and that anything approaching four days a week starts to approach the cost of simply hiring somebody. Those are patterns in what sellers advertise. They are not evidence about what the work is worth to you.
Treat any firm that leads with a rate rather than with a scope as pricing capacity. That is fine if capacity is what you need, and it is a warning if you were told you were buying authority.
How do you compute what it should cost you?
Anchor on your own fully loaded cost for the equivalent internal role and work outward from there. That number you can compute exactly, it is specific to your business, and it is the only figure in this conversation that no vendor supplied.
- Take the fully loaded annual cost of the internal role that would otherwise do this work. Base, employer taxes, benefits, and the overhead you actually allocate to a head.
- Divide by the days that role would work in a year. This gives you your true internal day cost, which is usually higher than people expect.
- Multiply by the days the engagement will genuinely consume. Ask for that number explicitly and get it in the proposal.
- Apply a premium for what you cannot hire. Speed of start, a skill you do not have, or a decision an insider cannot make. That premium is real and it is the thing you are actually paying for.
- Apply a discount for what you are not buying. No severance exposure, no ramp, no permanent headcount, and an exit on notice.
- Compare the result to the quote. A quote materially above your figure needs to be explained by the premium in step four, in specifics.
The arithmetic will not give you a precise answer and it is not supposed to. What it gives you is a defensible position and a specific question, which is worth considerably more in a negotiation than a range you read somewhere.
One more input worth putting into the calculation, because buyers routinely leave it out. Your own people will spend time on this engagement: pulling data, sitting in sessions, reviewing output. Two days a week of a controller and a plant manager for three months is a real cost and it does not appear in anybody’s proposal. Estimate it, add it, and compare the total rather than the fee.
What drives the number up?
Urgency, ambiguity, travel, and the number of people involved, roughly in that order. Three of the four are things you control and the first one is the most expensive.
Urgency is priced because it displaces the firm’s other work. A start date four weeks out costs meaningfully less than one next Monday, and if your situation genuinely permits four weeks, taking them is the cheapest saving available to you.
Ambiguity is priced as risk. A scope written as improve operational performance will be quoted with a buffer, and the buffer is yours whether or not it is used. Spending two weeks defining the deliverable before you request proposals reliably pays for itself.
Team size is where the largest and least visible costs sit. A proposal built around one senior operator and three analysts is a different product from one senior operator working alone, and the analyst days are where a fixed fee quietly grows. Ask who specifically will be in your building and how often.
Geography still matters more than it should. On-site presence carries travel, and travel is billed at a rate that has nothing to do with the value of the work. Ask what proportion of the engagement genuinely requires somebody in the building and structure the rest remotely, which frequently removes a meaningful share of the total without touching the scope.
What should make you walk away?
A proposal with no named outcome, a scope that expands on contact, or a fee that is not connected to anything you can measure. Any of the three is sufficient on its own.
The clearest signal is a retainer with deliverables described as ongoing support and no defined end state. Six months is the shortest engagement that accomplishes anything structural and twelve months with an exit on notice is reasonable. Twelve months with no exit protects the wrong party.
Six months is the shortest engagement that accomplishes anything structural. Twelve months with an exit on notice is reasonable. Twelve months with no exit protects the wrong party.
The second signal is a firm that cannot tell you which situations they decline. A senior operator knows where they add value and where they do not, and somebody who says they can help any business is describing a sales process rather than a practice.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books: The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Before you price the help, find out whether you need it. Send me what you were about to scope and I will run Stagnation Genome scoring against it first, free. A meaningful share of the scopes people send me are aimed at a symptom rather than a cause.
See also: How to Tell If You Need a Consultant