01–08
Credential & pedigree verification
Education, prior firm tenure, and professional licenses are checked against primary sources. Members come from 89 of the top 100 MBA programs; 22 are former partners of MBB firms.
A PROFESSIONAL NETWORK · EST. 2017
Post a brief Monday. Meet three interview-ready candidates by Wednesday.
SGC Network is a curated marketplace of 4,217 credential-verified senior consultants and fractional leaders. Clients post a brief on Monday and meet a shortlist of three by Wednesday — measured at 41 hours median across 11,300 engagements since 2018.
No subscription. Pay only on engagement. NDA on first message.
CHAPTER ONE · THE WORKFLOW
The Monday-to-Wednesday cadence, measured at every step.
Four operational beats from brief to kickoff — instrumented, timestamped, and built to map cleanly against the vendor-onboarding requirements of PE-backed procurement teams.
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01MONDAY · T+0
Post the brief.
You submit a two-page brief: scope, seniority band, industry exposure, duration, and the three questions you actually need answered. Briefs are reviewed by a senior matching lead within four hours; ambiguous asks are clarified before curation begins.
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02TUESDAY · T+24
Curation by the matching team.
The matching engine scores every active consultant against the brief, then a human lead filters for fit, conflict, and capacity. Median throughput at this stage: 312 members reviewed, 14 interviewed internally, 6 advanced to the shortlist pool.
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03WEDNESDAY · T+41
Shortlist delivered.
Three ranked profiles land in your inbox with credentials, prior engagements, conflict clearance, and proposed day rates. Every shortlist member has passed the 41-point rubric and signed a platform-level NDA before you exchange a single message.
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04WEEK ONE · T+5 TO T+10
Interviews and kickoff.
You schedule interviews directly through the platform. SGC facilitates reference calls, contract templating, and payment escrow. Median time from shortlist acceptance to signed statement of work: six business days.
CHAPTER TWO · THE RUBRIC
The 41-point vetting rubric, in six categories.
Only 7.3% of applicants clear the rubric each quarter. The depth is visible at a glance — credentials, track record, references, and conflicts are surfaced before you ever exchange a message.
09–17
Operating track record
Documented P&L responsibility, transformation leadership, and shipped outcomes — not just slideware. Every claim is tied to a verifiable engagement reference.
18–25
Functional depth
Specialization is scored against a competency matrix — strategy, growth, pricing, supply chain, digital, M&A integration, and twelve other functional clusters.
26–32
Industry exposure
Sector fluency is benchmarked against the brief you actually posted — financial services, healthcare, industrials, software, consumer, and seven other verticals.
33–38
Reference checks
Three references from prior buyers are required, two must be from the last 24 months. References are re-pulled annually for active members.
39–41
Conflict & capacity clearance
Live conflict mapping against your industry, your named competitors, and the consultant's current commitments. Capacity is confirmed weekly.
CHAPTER THREE · THE MATCHING ENGINE
What the algorithm reads, scores, and ignores.
What it reads from your brief.
The engine parses scope, seniority band, industry, function, duration, and engagement mode (fractional vs. project). Free-text questions are scored against the consultant corpus using semantic similarity — not keyword matching, which historically produced near-empty shortlists for buyers who wrote in their own language.
What it scores against.
Every active consultant carries a structured profile: verified credentials, operating history, functional depth, industry exposure, and weekly capacity. The engine ranks candidates on a weighted blend of fit (40%), capacity (20%), prior engagement outcome (25%), and reference strength (15%). Weights are surfaced in your dashboard so procurement can audit the logic behind the shortlist.
What it deliberately ignores.
Self-reported skill tags, popularity signals, and tenure-at-platform are not inputs. A consultant who joined last quarter and has shipped two engagements outranks a five-year member with thinner work — fit beats familiarity.
How the final three are ranked.
The top six advance to human curation. A matching lead runs a 30-minute review against conflict, comp expectations, and soft signals from prior engagements, then presents three. You see the rationale behind the order — not just a stack of resumes.
PLATFORM EVIDENCE · Q1 2025
The numbers behind the network.
11,300+
Engagements matched and completed since the network's founding in 2017.
4,217
Vetted consultants and fractional leaders active in the network as of Q1 2025.
42%
Average client savings versus comparable Big Four or MBB engagements, audited by Forrester in 2023.
71
Member NPS in 2024, against a consulting-bench industry average of 22.
$284M in cumulative consulting fees facilitated through the platform in 2024. Rated 4.8/5 on G2 (312 reviews) and 4.9/5 on Trustpilot (1,104 reviews). Featured in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and Financial Times.
CHAPTER FOUR · BEFORE YOU POST
Questions procurement teams ask before posting a brief.
Six questions, answered in plain English — the ones Chief of Staff, Head of Ops, and PE operating partners bring to vendor onboarding. If your diligence needs more, the network team will respond within four hours.
How is the engagement structured?
Project, retainer, or fractional — your call. Most fractional engagements run six to eighteen months at one to three days per week; project engagements are scoped against deliverables. SGC provides a templated MSA, statement of work, and payment escrow; you may substitute your own paper and we will close it in.
What happens if the engagement isn't working?
Free replacement within the first 30 days, no re-matching fee. After 30 days, replacement is available on a pro-rated basis; the matching lead runs a closed-loop review and re-curates against the original brief. Reference data from the prior engagement is shared with the replacement consultant so they start with context, not cold.
Can we use our own NDA?
Yes. A platform-level NDA is signed on first message so identity and credentials can be shared; you may layer your own NDA before any project detail is exchanged. Legal teams at 38 of the Fortune 500 have reviewed and approved the platform NDA without modification.
How does payment and escrow work?
Client funds are held in a segregated escrow account; consultants are paid on milestone or monthly cadence per the statement of work. Net-15 default, with Net-30 available for procurement teams that require longer cycles. Wire and ACH supported; international wires settled in 48 hours.
How is data handled?
Briefs, contracts, and deliverables are stored in SOC 2 Type II infrastructure with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit. Members access only the data they need for the engagement. Retention follows your master agreement; we support right-to-deletion requests within 30 days.
Can we scale from one engagement to a portfolio?
Yes — and most buyers do. The platform supports portfolio-level agreements with central billing, multi-engagement dashboards, and a named engagement lead. Switches between consultants in the same functional lane are common during diligence and integration phases.
Have a question not covered here?
Speak with the Network Team