My colleagues and I work as a genuine small consultancy. We’ve been that way for a long time, That means we rarely work through agents. Agencies do a lot for contractors and take a lot of the boring stuff away, but without them, much of that suddenly lands on your own desk.
Here are the biggest things you’ll need to handle financially when you’re a small business working with the giant multinationals.

1) Working at risk

“Working at risk” is big-company shorthand for starting work before a contract is fully signed, meaning you might not get paid. It happens because internal contracting and approval processes often move far slower than the need to deliver. Large consultancies accept this as normal. If you’re used to agency work, you won’t have seen it because your contract sits with the agency. As a real company, you will face it regularly.

2) Slow payments

Large organisations pay slowly, sometimes very slowly. Even with everything done correctly, you may wait months (45 or even 90 day terms are common), and practical delays can push invoices being paid out to six months. there is rarely malice in this; it’s just how the corporate machinery works. You will need enough cashflow to cover at least six months of outgoings without incoming invoices when first starting out.

3) “Bad” software (that’s actually just hideously complex)

You might run your own invoicing on tools like FreshBooks, Xero or QuickBooks. Your clients will likely use things like Coupa, Planview and other enterprise platforms. From your vantage point, they can seem dreadful or illogical. In reality, you’re seeing only a tiny slice of a system coping with huge complexity. Expect odd workflows and fields that make little sense in isolation. Be patient, ask for a short walkthrough, and build simple internal checklists so you submit things right first time.

4) Being treated like a multinational

Flattering? Yes. Fun? Not really. Many procurement teams are set up to deal with Accenture, PwC, Deloitte, and the like, so the template master services agreement you’re handed will be written with them in mind. Hire a good lawyer you get on with, and have them mark up practical adjustments for a company your size. Most procurement people are sensible; if you clearly explain what’s unreasonable, they’ll often accommodate it, provided you stay constructive rather than combative.

5) Invisible thresholds

Everything can be cruising along nicely and then, bang, You’re suddenly pulled into confrontational calls and quizzed on billing details that were fine last year, sometimes over very small amounts. What’s happened is you’ve crossed an internal threshold: end of financial year timing, a budget code boundary, or a spend level that pushes approvals to a higher tier. None of this may be visible (or shareable) to you. Don’t take it personally. Break invoices down, align to the right periods, and help them route approvals cleanly.

6) Absorbing costs and tasks

You may be asked to absorb items you’d normally pass on as expenses to a project such as, ISO certifications, bits of hardware, software licences, and so on. Big consultancies often bundle these into their rates or already hold the certifications, so the client expects “sure we’ll cover that” when asked. As a small company, you’re competing with that standard. Decide what you’ll absorb, what you’ll explicitly scope and price, and where you’ll simply say “that’s out of scope, here’s the cost”. Transparency helps, but be prepared to shoulder some admin and paper work to keep things moving.

Final thoughts

Working with huge companies is absolutely doable, and rewarding, if you plan for the realities: accept some risk (carefully), maintain strong cash reserves, get proper legal support, expect bureaucracy, and keep your documentation spotless. Do that, and you can go toe-to-toe with the big players while keeping the advantages that make small firms valuable: speed, focus, and high skill.

We can celebrate chat tools, Slack threads, and the return to in-person collaboration, but in most large, traditional organisations, email is still the system of record. Official statements, warnings, approvals, notifications, and anything that needs a defensible paper trail almost always arrive by email. If you want to stay in control of your work, you have to stay in control of your inbox.

Why email still matters

Email is the channel leaders fall back on when something must be traceable and unambiguous. “I’ve emailed you about this” is shorthand for “this is now formally on the record.” Lose grip on your email, and you lose grip on decisions, timelines, and, ultimately, credibility.

Signs you’re losing control

• Only reachable on chat. People default to pinging you because email responses lag.
• Meeting overload. When someone books meetings for everything and involves large numbers of people in these calls, it often means they can’t manage the information flow via email and so are having to get it repeated to them in person.
• And, obviously, the fact that you have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of unread emails in your inbox.

These are symptoms of the same problem: your inbox is just overflowing.

If you can’t keep up, something must move

If maintaining your inbox feels impossible, don’t just keep drowning; make a change:

• Get support. Ask for assistance with triage or admin.
• Delegate other work. Free up time to handle essential communication.
• Reduce optional involvement. Skip non-essential meetings to protect focus time, even if that triggers a little FOMO.
• Set expectations. Tell stakeholders when you process email (e.g., twice daily) so they know when to expect replies.

Practical inbox habits that work

Thankfully one of my LDC Via colleagues, Matt White, has recently done a blog post on this and provided a good set of tips and ways of dealing with a heavy inbox.

Bottom line

Managers and subject-matter specialists who lose control of their email rarely have a happy work life; they’re permanently reactive. Whatever method you choose, treat your inbox like the operational cockpit it is. Stay on top of it, and your life will be a little less stressful.

This is one of my rare posts where I’m genuinely after feedback. to discover if I’m just being daft, or is this something more people quietly recognise?

When I’m dealing with tricky client situations or work I find stressful or dull, I gravitate to an office. If the client doesn’t have one, I’ll book a workspace. Making the environment more austere seems to make it easier to knuckle down ¹. At home, when the work is unpleasant, I don’t tackle it as well; there are too many nice distractions. The difference between work I enjoy and work I don’t becomes stark, so I remove the comforts and go somewhere “all business”.

That’s my personal pattern. But is it generally true? Setting aside “people only work hard when monitored” (that’s a different debate), is difficult or unpleasant work simply more efficient to do in an office than at home?

It could explain a few things. You often hear aggressive, control-heavy managers say, “People work best in the office.” Well, if the work feels unpleasant, perhaps the lack of distractions helps you just get on with it. Conversely, inspiring leaders and organisations, where the work feels meaningful and motivating, may find remote working thrives, because people want to do the work and can benefit from less commuting and more flexibility.

Are we missing this nuance in the broader conversation? Perhaps some kinds of work , or some leadership cultures, make the office more effective precisely because the work feels less rewarding. If your only option in the office is to work, you might as well get it done.

Has anyone else seen this? Is this a conclusion you’ve come to? I’d love feedback, especially from engineers and delivery teams.

Note: I’m assuming all else is equal, same type of work, similar pay structure, and comparable teams. If the people or the work are fundamentally different, the comparison falls apart.

1. I have since learnt that part of this is the known effect that you work harder when you feel you are monitored[↩]

This is a relatively new pattern I’ve seen across vendors and clients, and it seems to track with the rise of strict, goal-based projects with fixed-prices and tighter costing controls. Contingency has seemingly “disappeared”, but the prices of the contract have not gone down, in fact, they tend to have gone up.

Here’s how it tends to play out.

In order to keep a firm grip on fixed-price spend and avoid variance on any given deliverable, the client or central finance team insists contingency is held centrally rather than on the vendor’s estimate. On paper, that’s fine: if something goes wrong, you dip into the central pot. In practice, two problems appear.

First, finance teams are often reluctant to release contingency. They treat requests as overspend or evidence of poor project management/implementation. People don’t like losing control or inviting blame, so approvals get sticky. Second, removing contingency from the vendor’s scope strips away whatever flexibility the vendor or delivery team might have to address issues quickly.

For as long as I can remember ¹, there was usually a simple contingency line at the bottom of an estimate. It might have been in hours or a percentage, typically 10–20% (sometimes ~5% on a well-scoped waterfall project).

Now, many quotes simply cost about 20% more by default, and any challenge to time or scope turns into a long justification and a tussle over release of funds. Everyone knows the contingency hasn’t really gone; it’s just been moved and hidden. and that’s not much of a win for any of us.

The net effect is less transparency in our quotes and vendor interactions. If a project goes really well, we still “spend the contingency” because it’s already included in the bill. I’d much rather see contingency brought back as a clear line item. But while the push for ever-tighter fixed-price deliveries continues, I don’t expect that transparency to return any time soon.

1. ,20+ years[↩]

This has been a recent learning for me. In my experience, there are two broad styles of project management:

• The teeth-gritted, head-down “just get it done” approach.
• The status heavy, constant updates, emails to stakeholders, meetings and escalation approach.

These camps tend not to like each other. I’ve spent most of my career firmly in the first: solve the problem, keep moving, minimal noise. That’s often exactly what clients want, a fix, quickly, with as little fuss as possible.

Historically, I saw the “status update” camp as unhelpful: lots of escalation, senior management getting dragged in, tempers frayed, and, in the end, someone still has to grit their teeth and fix the thing. But I’ve come to appreciate that they provide a vital function: awareness.

If you can resolve an issue quietly, without additional cost and with no material risk, then yes, get it done and move on. However, if the fix will incur more than minimal cost or expose the client to more than minimal risk, there must be full awareness. Simply generating noise isn’t useful; it just makes people anxious, but silence in the face of material impact is worse.

A competent manager does both. Do the head-down work to understand the problem and shape a solution. Once you have a plan, validated with subject-matter experts and the business, raise awareness calmly and clearly. Make stakeholders aware of the implications and the risks, alongside the proposed path to resolution.

A note for anyone hiring PMs: you want people who can do both. Perpetual flappers add little value. Perpetual silencers can cost you dearly over time. Aim for professionals who are strong on delivery and strong on communication.
This isn’t an either/or. It’s both.