August 2026
An SME should not have to choose between advisory and execution.
Between knowing what should be done and being able to do it, there is sometimes a gap that no one truly has the capacity to fill.
An exploration of what happens after the diagnosis, when strategy meets the real bandwidth of an SME.
Everyone agrees. Then Monday comes.
A company may have understood its problem, received good recommendations, and still be almost exactly where it was six months later. Not because the strategy was wrong. Between knowing what should be done and being able to do it, there is sometimes a gap that no one in the organisation truly has the capacity to fill.
The scene is a composite. It could take place in Charleroi, Liège, Brussels, Namur or Antwerp.
A company of around fifty people. It has grown. The clients are there. So is the business.
Growth has brought familiar symptoms. Decisions are escalated to the CEO too often. Sales sometimes promises what operations will struggle to deliver. The figures arrive too late. A few people have become indispensable. Urgencies have gradually replaced priorities.
The CEO calls in an expert.
Interviews are conducted. Data is analysed. Problems are made explicit.
A few weeks later, the management team has a solid diagnosis: target organisation, responsibilities to clarify, processes to review, indicators to implement, projects to launch.
The meeting ends with a rather rare feeling.
Everyone agrees.
Monday comes.
The sales director returns to their targets. Operations has to deliver. Finance closes the books. Managers handle absences and unexpected issues. The CEO goes back to daily trade-offs.
That someone did not exist.
Three months later, the strategy has not become wrong. It has become a file.
Advisory is not the problem.
It would be easy to tell this story as a criticism of consulting. It would be convenient. And wrong.
Research published in 2025 by Gert Bijnens, Simon Jäger and Benjamin Schoefer offers a rare perspective. The researchers used Belgian business-to-business transactions from 2002 to 2023 to study the effects of using management and strategy consulting.
Their results associate the start of a consulting relationship with an increase of about 3.6% in labour productivity over five years. The effects are larger among firms that were initially less productive. [1]
Consulting can therefore create value.
And in some situations, advisory alone is exactly what the company needs.
A management team may have all the capacity needed to execute but lack perspective, method, specialist expertise or an external view capable of challenging its decisions.
In that case, unnecessarily extending the engagement into execution would add cost without creating more value.
The reverse also exists.
An organisation may know exactly what it wants to do and simply need a project manager, subject-matter expert or interim manager to make it happen.
It does not need another diagnosis. It needs experienced hands and a clear mandate.
Estimated increase in labour productivity over five years after entering a consulting relationship, in the Belgian study by Bijnens, Jäger and Schoefer. [1]
When the organisation knows how to execute but lacks perspective, method or specialist expertise.
When management already knows what it wants to do and lacks delivery capacity.
When understanding, decision and implementation lose value if they are artificially separated.
The problem arises when the situation requires continuity between understanding, decision and implementation, while the company is forced to buy those dimensions separately.
[1] Bijnens, Jäger & Schoefer, What Does Consulting Do?, NBER Working Paper 34072, 2025.
An SME is not a large company in miniature.
In Belgium, SMEs account for around 99% of companies and a decisive share of employment and value added. [2]
Their economic importance is immense. Yet their internal architecture is very different from that of large organisations.
In a large group, a strategic recommendation can be taken over by a programme office.
A PMO can structure the portfolio. An HR team can support the transformation. Finance can assign a controller. Operations has several layers of management. An ERP project can have its own director.
Between the decision and the frontline, several layers can absorb the work required.
In an SME of 30, 70 or 150 people, those layers are often much thinner.
A function may be carried by a single person.
A member of the management team may simultaneously manage their team, respond to clients, take part in recruitment, oversee several projects and prepare the budget.
The CEO often remains very close to day-to-day operations.
The weakness is not intelligence.
The word that is often missing is capacity.
And this capacity does not simply mean having enough employees. It results from a much more demanding combination: available time, the right expertise, a mandate to act, sufficient availability and the ability to coordinate others around the issue.
You can have the expertise without the time. The time without the mandate. The mandate without the expertise. Or each of these elements separately, with no one able to bring them together.
A recommendation that requires three months of work does not become easier to execute because it fits on fifteen slides.
of Belgian SMEs surveyed in 2023 said that skills shortages had a negative impact on their business, compared with 63% on average in the European Union. [2]
“With whom?” is sometimes the hardest question.
The CEO’s problem has no obligation to respect the boundaries between consulting professions.
For several years, the OECD has highlighted the difficulties Belgian SMEs face in growing and the productivity gaps linked in particular to company size.
It also highlights skills constraints. In 2023, 75% of Belgian SMEs surveyed said that skills shortages had a negative impact on their business, compared with 63% on average in the European Union. [2]
It would obviously be absurd to explain an SME’s difficulties by a single cause.
Financing matters. The market matters. Technology matters. The sector matters. Organisation matters. Skills matter.
But these figures remind us of something very concrete.
Advising a company to strengthen its management, professionalise its sales function or structure a transformation may be entirely right.
The next question remains unanswered.
With whom?
A CEO does not wake up with a need for “consulting”.
Nor do they get up with a need for “change management”, “coaching”, “project management”, “lean” or “interim management”.
They get up because something is not working well enough.
Margins are deteriorating. An ERP needs replacing. Business development has plateaued. Growth is disorganising the company. Two departments no longer work properly together. The data no longer supports decision-making. A team depends too heavily on its manager. The strategy exists but is not moving forward.
Then the market asks them to turn this situation into a purchasing category.
Does it require a consultant? A project manager? A coach? A CFO? An interim manager? An integrator? A change specialist?
Each of these professions has its legitimacy.
But the CEO’s problem has no obligation to respect the boundaries between consulting professions.
The company often experiences the problem as a system. The professional market breaks it down into specialties.
That is where some transformations begin to lose momentum.
Sometimes the recommendation is only the beginning of the work.
Take a new sales governance model.
The diagnosis can be completed in a few weeks.
The pipeline is inflated. Opportunities are poorly qualified. Discounts are poorly controlled. CRM usage is inconsistent. Sales forecasts are unreliable.
The solution may be perfectly clear.
But the company has not yet been transformed.
The pipeline stages must be chosen. Qualification criteria clarified. Data cleaned. Responsibilities defined. Salespeople trained. A forecast meeting established. The first meetings attended.
Observe what actually works. Correct what looked relevant on paper but proves impractical. Handle exceptions. Prevent an immediate return to old habits.
Measure. Adjust. Repeat.
At this point, the boundary between thinking and execution becomes much less clear.
Because learning continues while doing.
Execution provides information that the initial diagnosis could not always know.
The work of Bloom, Van Reenen and the World Management Survey has repeatedly shown the relationship between the quality of management practices and company performance. [3]
But a management practice is not an idea.
A management system does not exist simply because a list of KPIs has been defined.
It exists when data is produced, understood, discussed and used to make decisions.
A responsibility is not clear because it appears in a matrix.
It becomes clear when two people facing a real case know which one should decide.
A process does not exist because it has been drawn.
It exists when the work has actually changed.
That is why some interventions cannot be evaluated solely on the quality of their recommendation.
Execution is also a quality test for advisory work.
It reveals what the diagnosis could not always see before meeting reality.
Too optimistic once confronted with the frontline.
Sometimes impossible to produce at the expected pace.
Elegant on paper, impractical in the real workflow.
Sometimes better than the initial solution.
[3] Bloom & Van Reenen, Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries, NBER Working Paper 12216, 2006, later published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007.
Doing the work instead of the company is not a solution either.
At the other extreme, an external contributor can become extremely effective.
They take over the project. They run the meetings. They produce the analyses. They solve the problems.
Everything moves forward.
Then the engagement ends.
And the organisation discovers that things worked better because an extra person was keeping the system running.
Not because the system had become better.
This dependency may be acceptable in a crisis or during a transition period. It cannot be confused with sustainable transformation.
A successful intervention should therefore produce two outcomes.
Solve the problem that justified its existence sufficiently.
And increase the organisation’s ability to operate afterwards without lasting dependence on the external contributor.
This may involve better governance, more autonomous managers, a clarified process, transferred skills or a responsibility permanently taken over by someone in the company.
The form matters less than the outcome.
An SME may need high-level financial expertise without needing a CFO five days a week.
It may need a programme manager for nine months. Lean expertise during a transformation. Senior sales support while rebuilding its sales system. Or a change management specialist during a particularly sensitive stage.
That does not mean the answer should automatically be fractional management.
Fractional management is not a strategy in itself. It is one possible model.
A permanent hire may be the best choice when the need is ongoing and significant enough. An internal promotion may be preferable when the potential already exists. A short engagement may be enough for a limited problem. A freelancer may suit occasional expertise. And sometimes no additional resource is needed.
What capacity do we need?
With what level of responsibility, at what intensity and for how long?
Who should carry it, and in what form?
Reversing the reasoning avoids creating a position to solve a temporary problem or, conversely, treating as temporary a need that has become structural.
The growth of fractional management can easily become a new trend.
Fractional CFO. Fractional COO. Fractional CMO. Fractional everything.
Yet one day a week of expertise guarantees nothing.
Shared time has value only if the mandate actually allows action. A few days of observation without the ability to change the system remains essentially advisory work. Conversely, delegating important decisions to an external person without clear governance creates another risk.
The issue is therefore not only the number of days purchased. You need to know what this capacity must produce, what it can decide, who it must work with and what the company must be able to take back afterwards.
It is more demanding than selling or buying time.
It is also much closer to the real problem.
The SME also has an advantage.
We should not conclude that small organisations are doomed by their lack of resources.
They have a strength that many large groups envy.
The distance between the problem and the decision can be short.
The CEO is close to the frontline. The users of a process can be brought together quickly. A new way of working can sometimes be tested within a few weeks. A decision can be made without going through six layers of governance.
The OECD also highlights the ability of small businesses to react quickly thanks to their proximity to users and shorter decision lines. [4]
But solutions designed for much larger organisations should not be applied to them mechanically.
An SME does not need a miniature version of a large consulting firm.
It needs an intervention proportionate to its problem and its real capacity to absorb change.
No more methodology than necessary. No less rigour than essential.
The CEO remains close to the frontline and the users of the process.
A decision can be made without going through six layers of governance.
A new way of working can sometimes be tested in a few weeks.
The frontline improves the strategy
A recommendation confronted with execution quickly discovers reality.
The perfect structure required three people the company does not have. The ideal indicator requires data that is impossible to produce every week. The new meeting adds another hour to the schedules of already overloaded managers. The software requires more maintenance than expected.
An objection can be information
Resistance that seemed irrational reveals a perfectly legitimate operational risk.
Strategy is not diminished by this confrontation. It becomes better.
And the reverse remains equally true.
Thinking without execution risks becoming abstract. Execution without thinking risks becoming blind.
[4] OECD, SME indicators, benchmarking and monitoring, notably the findings on SMEs’ market proximity and shorter decision lines.
Transformation lies in the loop between the two.
The frontline improves the strategy. Perspective prevents the frontline from optimising the wrong problem.
An organisation that executes without ever stepping back can easily end up optimising problems that perhaps should no longer exist.
It adds a rule. A dashboard. A control. A piece of software. A person.
Then discovers that each local improvement has added another layer of complexity to the whole.
Perhaps the useful boundary is not, after all: advisory or execution.
It lies between interventions that create dependency and those that progressively increase the company’s capacity.
Between expertise that remains locked within the expert and expertise that ultimately changes a way of working.
Between moving a project forward for a few months and making the organisation more capable of moving the next ones forward.
This changes how an engagement is judged.
Success is not only: Did we produce the plan?
Nor even: Did we execute the plan?
The expertise stays with the expert.
The organisation moves forward during the engagement, but does not sufficiently regain the capacity.
The way of working remains.
The organisation becomes more capable of moving future topics forward without lasting dependence on the external contributor.
What can the company now do that it could not do well enough before?
This may also be the best way to assess the value of external expertise. Not by the amount of dependency it creates, but by the capacity it leaves behind.
A successful intervention should solve the problem that justified its existence sufficiently and increase the organisation’s ability to operate afterwards without lasting dependence on the external contributor.
The desired outcome is not just an improvement. It is a company that is more capable than before the intervention.
True success: the capacity stays within the company.
What strategic issue remains stuck in your company today, not because you do not know what should be done, but because no one truly has the time, expertise, mandate or availability required to turn it into a new way of working?
[1] Bijnens, Jäger & Schoefer, What Does Consulting Do?, NBER Working Paper 34072, 2025. nber.org
[2] OECD, OECD Economic Surveys: Belgium 2024, analysis of growth, productivity, skills and constraints affecting Belgian SMEs. oecd.org
[3] Bloom & Van Reenen, Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries, NBER WP 12216, 2006, QJE 2007. nber.org
[4] OECD, SME indicators, benchmarking and monitoring, findings on SMEs’ market proximity and decision-making channels. oecd.org
LUCID | SMEs made clear | Edition 00 - 10
The first 30-minute conversation is free. That's where it gets framed, with no commitment.