It's about impact, and impact (in a short time) is about influencing big decisions made by upper management. Consultants are specifically hired to guide upper

It's about impact, and impact (in a short time) is about influencing big decisions made by upper management. Consultants are specifically hired to guide upper management to theoretically better decisions. Here's an example from a data analytics company I worked at. (I was crunching data and analyzing it, and my company was delivering "simple", actionable guidance). Our deliverable would be a tidy presentation showing that telco X was running all these different marketing campaigns, but that a few of them were generating lots of billing errors but few increases in sales. Cutting some of the messy, under-performing campaigns would save money (which was a lot of money at the scale these companies were operating). The company would pay us 20-50k for that advice, and I would personally earn a typical hourly wage...