You pay for one or two people with real experience and 4 reasonably new hires whose job it is to answer questions posed by the senior team and to build documentation.

You want the senior people focusing on the problems, strategy, and comms and not data aggregation and power point formatting.

Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.

They have a brutal up or out culture. The idea is that the recent grads are grunts who are ground into the dirt. They actively hope that most of them quit and the few who don't get promoted into positions where they do have the experience, or really, one very specific type of experience that consultancy firms select for. Similar setup to Big Law.

The Partner is the consultant. The 'recent grad' is just extra low-cost apprenticeship for the partner. The customer is (ridiculously over-) paying for the Partner's time and tolerating the apprentices that come along for the ride.

> The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain

This is your mistake. The point of a consultant is to tell the business to do what the business was already planning to do anyway. This way the consultant takes the risk/blame of the decision. It's similar to the classic 'no one was ever fired for buying IBM' "I did what the McKinsey consultant told me" is CYA. The last piece is that since everyone is in on the game, when a decision leads to bad outcomes they don't blame the consultant, but something they could not have foreseen.

There's a cycle to one's relationship with Mckinsey and the big accounting firms. You start with a lot of attention from the partner, who over time shifts you to more experienced assistants, who over time shift you to new hires. Then you scream at them about the shit quality of their work, and you get the partner's attention again for a year or two.