Emerging markets aren't a consulting practice

Every top-tier global consulting firm has an "emerging markets practice." A team, usually small, based in the home office, that produces reports, hosts panels, and sends people into markets like Nigeria, Indonesia, or Mexico on two-week engagements.

The engagements produce reports. The reports get read by corporate clients who want exposure to the narrative. The clients then hire the same firm to actually execute, and the firm realises — six months in — that the reports did not capture the operational reality of the market.

I have seen this play out enough times to stop being angry about it. The structural problem is that "emerging markets" as a consulting practice is organised around being an outside observer of markets that only make sense if you are an inside operator.

The pattern that does not work

A global firm's emerging markets practice typically operates like this. Senior partners based in New York, London, or Singapore. Junior analysts flown in for engagements. Local associates hired to provide "on-the-ground insight," but positioned below the senior team in the decision hierarchy. Reports structured around aggregate data that looks clean in macro but misses the specific operational texture of the market.

The reports describe markets the way a tourist describes a city after a long weekend. Accurate in the macro. Useless in the micro.

The operational reality of doing business in Lagos, Jakarta, or São Paulo is not captured by GDP growth charts, consumer spending forecasts, or competitive landscape slides. It is captured by the small, specific things that determine whether your business will actually run. How mobile money settlement works in practice when the operator's API is down. Which regulatory official actually signs off on a licensing change, and what they care about. Why the logistics partner you signed with last month cannot deliver to the region you thought they covered.

None of that shows up in a report.

The pattern that does work

The firms that actually do the work in these markets are usually not global consulting firms. They are operating companies that happen to have built the muscle. Payd in African cross-border payments. Gojek and Grab in Southeast Asian super-apps. Rappi and NotCo in LatAm. These companies understand their markets because they live in them.

The consulting that works in these markets is almost always done by people who came from operating companies, often still running them, who know specific markets with an operator's precision rather than an analyst's abstraction.

B3n is organised around this. The operators in our network are active operators who live in the markets they understand. When we engage a global client entering East Africa, the team includes people who have shipped in East Africa this quarter — not people who have visited.

The distinction sounds small. In practice it is the difference between advice that survives contact with the operational reality and advice that dissolves on first encounter.

A specific example

A global health company tried to enter an East African market through a top-three management consultancy's emerging markets practice. The report recommended a specific hospital chain as the distribution partner. The recommendation was correct in the macro — the chain had the largest footprint, the most recognisable brand, and the best financials on paper.

The recommendation was wrong in the micro. The chain's purchasing process had three veto points, two of them informal, and the third required a specific kind of relationship that the incoming brand did not have. The company spent eight months and a seven-figure budget trying to close the partnership. It never closed.

The operator who eventually fixed the problem — brought in because the consulting firm's engagement had failed — made one introduction in the second week. The operator knew the specific veto point. The introduction unlocked a different partnership with a smaller chain that had a cleaner decision process. Launched in three months. Out-performed the original plan by 40 percent in the first year.

The consulting firm was not bad at its job. It was just playing the wrong game. You cannot fix operational texture with a great deck. You fix it with operators who know the specific ground.

The implication

If you are a global company entering an emerging market, the advice you need is almost never from your global firm's emerging markets practice. It is from operators currently running companies in the specific market. They exist. They are usually not in the room you are hiring from. Find them.

If you are a B3n client, that is what you are paying for. Operators who have shipped in the specific market, recently, under pressure. Whose advice is calibrated to the operational texture of the ground rather than the macro narrative of the region.

The word "emerging" itself is part of the problem. It implies a market that is still catching up to a norm set somewhere else. The operators in these markets do not experience them that way. They experience them as the markets they are in — complete, sophisticated, full of their own logic. Anyone selling you advice about these markets who does not carry that premise is selling you a report.