Consulting Firm or Fully Independent? Why Senior Leaders Need a Third Option

Published on September 9, 2026

Every leaving executive hits the same two doors — hierarchy or hustle. Here's the door nobody tells you about.

Every senior leader who's seriously thought about leaving corporate life eventually ends up looking at two doors.

Door one is joining a traditional consulting firm. You spend the first six months relearning how to ask permission for things you used to just decide. Different building, same hierarchy.

Door two is going fully independent. Nobody tells you what that actually means day to day. You're now your own head of sales, your own head of marketing, your own IT department, on top of doing the work you're actually good at. A lot of very capable people quietly give up here.

We started TPG because we didn't think those were the only two options. Keep the judgment and the independence. Let someone else have already built the infrastructure and the peer group around you. Not a corporate ladder. Not a blank page either.

If you've been standing between those two doors for a while, the real problem is usually that there was never a third one, until now.

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