For most of its history, consulting sold proximity. The value was partly the analysis and partly the fact that a senior person flew in, sat in the room, and stayed late. When the world went remote, a lot of firms assumed the value would erode. The opposite happened: freed from travel, the best teams delivered faster, documented better, and reached talent they could never have hired before.
Why proximity stopped being the product
Clients were never paying for a plane ticket. They were paying for judgment, momentum, and accountability. Remote delivery, done properly, can produce all three — often more consistently, because the work is written down instead of trapped in a conference room. The teams that struggled were the ones that tried to recreate the office over video, meeting for meeting.
What remote-first actually requires
Remote-first is an operating model, not a location policy. The firms that thrive treat writing as the primary interface and meetings as the exception. In practice that means:
- A single source of truth for every engagement, updated continuously
- Decisions captured in writing, with the reasoning, not just the outcome
- Fewer, sharper live sessions — reserved for judgment, not status
- Explicit norms for response time, so async does not become never
The office rewarded presence. Remote work rewards clarity. That is a better deal for clients.
The economics changed too
Without travel and real estate, more of the fee goes to the actual work. That lets a firm keep teams smaller and more senior, price more honestly, and take on clients in markets that were never viable when every engagement meant flights and hotels. For growth-stage companies especially, that is the difference between affordable senior help and none at all.
Where in-person still wins
This is not an argument against ever meeting. Kickoffs, hard conversations, and moments that need trust to be built quickly are still better in a room. The shift is that in-person becomes a deliberate tool for specific moments, not the default container for all the work. Spend the travel budget where it changes an outcome.
The playbook is simple to state and hard to live: write more than you meet, keep teams small and senior, and reserve time together for the moments that truly need it. The firms that internalize that are not surviving the shift to remote — they are winning because of it.
