Compare consulting fees against the benefit the engagement is expected to deliver, and confront the attribution problem that most engagement reviews politely avoid.
Consulting fees are the most visible cost in the building and the least examined investment on the books. Enter the total engagement fees and the benefit the work is expected to produce, and the calculator returns the implied percentage return.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
The ratio you have just produced depends entirely on whose benefit estimate you believed. Operators from the Global Board have sat on both sides of these engagements; put the proposal to them confidentially before committing fees.
Get independent perspectivesROI = (benefit − fees) ÷ fees, shown as a percentage. How our tools work
Nobody signs a consulting engagement expecting a negative return, yet very few organisations ever calculate the actual one. Running the arithmetic, even roughly, forces the question the steering committee keeps deferring: of the benefits on the final slide, how much would have happened without the firm in the room?
An operating-model review costs €250,000 in fees. The engagement identifies changes the leadership team credits with €350,000 of annualised savings. The return is (€350,000 − €250,000) ÷ €250,000 = 40%. Now apply the honest filter: if a third of those savings were already on the CFO's list before the firm arrived, the attributable benefit falls to roughly €233,000 and the same fees show a negative return.
Enter fees including expenses and any planned extension, not the initial statement of work. On the benefit side, use only the value the engagement caused: strip out savings already identified internally, and haircut anything that requires an implementation programme that has not been approved. If the return survives that treatment, the engagement earned its fees.
A single percentage cannot capture what good advisory work sometimes does: stopping a bad decision, for instance, which shows up nowhere as a benefit line. Nor can it detect the opposite failure: an impressive deck that changed nothing. It is a conversation-starter for the renewal decision, not a verdict.
Estimate the cost of the path not taken (the write-off, the failed integration, the exit fees) and weight it by how likely the organisation was to proceed. It is imprecise, but it is the honest benefit line for challenge-driven work.
For the renewal conversation, yes, at least roughly. A €250,000 engagement that consumed €100,000 of senior management time is a €350,000 investment, and the return should be judged on that base.
Not at the final readout, when enthusiasm peaks and nothing has been implemented. Book a review six to twelve months after the engagement ends and compare realised benefit against the case that justified the fees.