Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line,

Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.