The short answer
Start with AAG's published planning range: The Business Systems Assessment is $5,500–$18,500 for small and mid-sized businesses. For businesses under 100 employees, the planning range is $5,500–$11,500. The fee depends on the workflows, systems, locations, and depth of review, with scope and fee agreed in writing before work begins.
The marketplace guides cited here do not provide a like-for-like benchmark for a senior-led business systems assessment. Clutch reports broad U.S. business-consulting firms at $100–$149 per hour and says reviewed projects commonly fall under $10,000, but those categories are not the same as an assessment. Thumbtack's page presents conflicting marketplace figures, so it should not be used as a precise assessment comparison.
Read those numbers for what they are: small-business pricing. They're calibrated to the businesses we're built for. Size and complexity scale the scope of an assessment substantially — how far, and what an enterprise-scale review involves, is covered below.
The ranges on this page are illustrative of typical engagements as of July 2026 — they are not a quote or an offer. Every engagement is individually scoped and priced in a written agreement before work begins, and we accept engagements at our discretion.
Why we publish a planning range
You should be able to decide whether an assessment is in the right budget range before arranging a call. A range is only a starting point: comparing proposals also means comparing the workflows reviewed, interview time, analysis, deliverables, and implementation exclusions.
What drives the price up or down
- Headcount and departments touched. An assessment maps how work actually flows. Thirty people in two departments is a smaller map than 200 people in six.
- Systems and spreadsheet sprawl. Every CRM, ERP, scheduling tool, and load-bearing spreadsheet has to be inventoried and traced. More sprawl, more work — sprawl is usually also where the findings are.
- Locations. Multi-site operations add workflow variants (each site quietly does things its own way) and coordination overhead.
- Data and reporting depth. If departments disagree on basic numbers, tracing why — across exports, reconciliations, and manual fixes — is real analytical work that pays for itself in the roadmap.
- Who does the work. A partner-led assessment costs more than one quoted by a partner and delegated to junior analysts. Ask any firm directly: who is actually doing my analysis?
These are small-business numbers — here's how pricing scales
The ranges above assume roughly 10–250 employees, a handful of locations, and a systems footprint a senior consultant can review in a few weeks. That's deliberate calibration, not a ceiling. Two things change the math as organizations get bigger:
- Scope scales with the organization. A 40-person shop with one location and six systems is a few weeks of focused senior work. A multi-site, multi-department operation means more workflows to map, more stakeholders to interview, more systems and data flows to trace — the same discipline, applied across a much larger surface.
- Access requirements scale too. A thorough review of a larger organization can't run on conversations alone. It requires structured stakeholder interviews across departments, real access to systems and analytics, and the appropriate agreements in place — NDAs, data-access authorizations, and waivers — so the work can go deep enough to be worth paying for. Setting that up is part of the engagement, and it's part of why larger assessments take longer.
Can we assess a much larger company? Yes. The methodology comes from large-scale enterprise environments — it scales up more naturally than it scaled down. But be clear-eyed about what that is: an assessment for a Fortune-100-scale organization is a months-long engagement of structured interviews, analytics, and architecture review across divisions, and it's custom-scoped and quoted accordingly. If someone offers to assess an enterprise in three weeks for $18,500, they're selling a slide deck.
What doesn't change at any size: the fee is fixed in writing at scoping for the defined scope, the vendor neutrality holds, and you own the roadmap.
What "fixed price" means — and what it doesn't
Since we're being transparent about numbers, let's be equally transparent about the mechanics. "Fixed price" is a promise with a defined shape, and the definition protects both sides:
- The fee attaches to a written scope. Before work begins, the engagement agreement spells out what the assessment covers — which parts of the business, which systems, which deliverables — and what it doesn't. The fee is fixed for that scope.
- Within scope: no surprise invoices, ever. If the scoped work takes us longer than we estimated, that's our problem, not yours. That's the whole point of fixed-fee work.
- Beyond scope: agreed first, in writing. If mid-engagement you want more covered — another division, another location, a deeper dive the original scope excluded — that's a change we price and agree on before doing it. You'll never discover added work on an invoice.
- The quote assumes the scoping picture was accurate. Our number is based on what you tell us at scoping — headcount, locations, systems, access. If the business turns out to be materially different from what was described, we pause and re-scope together before continuing, rather than either side eating a mistake.
This is exactly why open-ended hourly consulting so often ends badly in both directions: the client fears the meter, and the consultant fears the bottomless request. A fixed fee on a written scope, with changes agreed in advance, removes the fear from both sides of the table.
What you should get for the money
Whatever you pay, a defensible systems assessment ends in deliverables you own. Ours has eight: a current-state review, workflow analysis, technology assessment, operational bottleneck review, risk identification, process evaluation, improvement recommendations, and a prioritized roadmap that sequences the highest-impact changes first. The test worth applying to any quote: if the engagement doesn't end in a roadmap you keep — whether or not you ever hire the firm again — you're buying a sales process, not an assessment.
Watch for two cheaper substitutes wearing the same name. A free assessment from a software vendor or its implementation partner is a sales-qualification call; its conclusion is reliably the platform they sell (we've written about how to tell an MSP, a consultant, and an implementation partner apart). And a templated questionnaire at a suspiciously low fixed price produces generic findings that could describe any company — you're paying for a report, not a diagnosis.
Is it worth it?
Benchmark the assessment against what it protects. A mid-market CRM or ERP decision commits $30,000–$250,000+ over a few years once licenses, implementation, and adoption time are counted — and the most expensive failures are chosen at selection time, not implementation time. An assessment priced at a fraction of that decision is cheap insurance: preventing one wrong purchase or identifying one workflow that is quietly burning payroll can exceed the assessment fee. If your operation is small and simple enough that this math doesn't apply, you likely don't need an assessment yet — read the signs you've outgrown spreadsheets and come back when three of them sting.
Questions to ask any firm quoting you
- Is the scope and price fixed in writing before work begins?
- Who — by name and seniority — performs the analysis?
- Do you resell software or take commissions from vendors you recommend? (Our answer: no, on both.)
- What exactly do I own when it's done?
- What happens if you find the problem isn't what we thought it was?
Any credible firm answers those five without flinching. The ones that flinch just answered a different question for you.