Tenhaw vs Big Four

Choose a global consultancy when you need hundreds of people across multiple countries, deep multi-domain regulatory expertise, or when board expectation requires the brand. Choose a small forward-deployed firm like Tenhaw when you need senior operators building working systems inside your teams, a contractual exit, and pricing you can see before you engage. The determining question is usually whether you need scale or seniority.

Tenhaw's Agent-Readiness Audit is £30,000–£90,000 fixed, against a typical £150,000–£500,000 for an equivalent large-firm assessment. The gap is the shape of the team rather than the day rate: fewer, more senior people over 6–8 weeks, and no pyramid to fund. Our rate card is published so you can check the arithmetic, and the pricing page sets it beside the large firms' own G-Cloud framework rates. Those rates run 1.3 to 2.3 times ours at the top grade, not the four times often claimed, and at mid grades several are cheaper than us. A global firm's overhead is real and its scale requires it. You are not buying scale here, you are buying far fewer people-days to reach the same answer.

Yes, and it is a common arrangement. Tenhaw frequently runs the agentic operating model and embedded delivery while a larger firm handles adjacent regulatory or systems-integration workstreams. We are explicit about the boundary and will say when the other supplier is better placed to own something.

Mobilise at scale, carry very large indemnity positions, and bring deep expertise across tax, legal, audit and regulatory remediation simultaneously. If your programme spans those domains, or needs 200 people quickly, Tenhaw is the wrong supplier and we will say so on the call.

On evidence and accountability. Named clients with checkable outcomes, published prices, a monthly production increment reported against, and a contractual exit date with permanent-team recruitment in scope. The Agent-Readiness Audit exists partly as a low-risk way to test the working relationship before committing to a larger programme.

No. Tenhaw has not taken an agentic system into production for any client. A large consultancy can put you on a call with a named client running one in a regulated firm, and if that is your gate, this comparison is settled. What we can put in front of you is narrower. A live engagement in the London specialty insurance market, confidential at the client's request, where a two-week proof of concept turned PDFs into business intelligence on Azure over ground the business had circled for roughly a year, and where month three stands up a team to productionise it. A proof of concept at HSBC applying natural language processing, sentiment analysis and entity recognition to enterprise voice data, projected rather than measured, and never rolled out. Twelve engagements written up in full with the evidence basis stated on each. And the client engineer who paired on that entire two-week build, who finished it saying they were 70% confident they could run the process without us. If a supplier answers 100%, ask them the same question about a system they built two years ago.

There is no published evidence that they do. What the data does show is that longer programmes overrun more, larger teams carry more risk, and engagements priced on inputs do not reward finishing early. Those are properties of the delivery model rather than anyone's intent, and they apply to any supplier who sells a large, long, day-rate programme. The National Audit Office, looking at consultancy engagements that ran past their scoped length, put the extensions down to the departments buying them rather than the firms selling them.

Not always, and the finding has a limit. On software builds the evidence is fairly direct: comparing 390 applications, teams of nine or more cut the schedule by about 30% against teams of under four, while cost rose 350% and defects rose 500%. Across whole programmes the finding is about risk rather than raw speed: underperformance rises sharply past eighteen months and past a team of twenty. A small team is not automatically faster. It is exposed to less of what makes programmes fail.

It applies to any input-based price, ours included, which is why the ways in are fixed-price rather than rate-based: the audit is a fixed fee over six to eight weeks and the proof of concept is a fixed fee over two to four. Where we do sell a monthly team, the engagement carries a contractual exit date and recruitment of your permanent replacements is written into the scope. The rate card is published so you can check the arithmetic, not because the rate is the product.