Before Nicholas Mukhtar recommends a single change to a client’s business, he places it into one of two categories, and the category determines almost everything about how he approaches the engagement.
“I look at companies in two buckets,” Mukhtar said. “One is the large, established company that functions much like big city government, a bureaucratic machine that sometimes can’t get out of its own way. The other is the startup, which is much like my nonprofit.” Before consulting, Mukhtar founded and ran Healthy Detroit, a public health nonprofit, which gives him a direct comparison point for the second category.
The two buckets call for opposite advice. Large, established companies typically need permission and structure to test something outside their normal process, since bureaucratic weight tends to crowd out internal experimentation. Startups need the opposite: less improvisation and more of the systems that larger institutions eventually build, minus the bloat that comes with them. “From a startup perspective, you want to study what larger institutions built and how they got there, but also where they went wrong,” Mukhtar said. “I see a lot of growing pains in companies trying to transition from startup to fully functioning business.”
Most consultants default to one playbook regardless of which bucket a client falls into, which is part of why Mukhtar treats the initial sorting as the actual first step of any engagement rather than a formality before the real work starts. A recommendation built for a 200-person company rarely transfers cleanly to a 12-person startup, even when both are struggling with a version of the same underlying problem.
What Mukhtar resists is applying either playbook universally. “Every entity and every person is unique, and you have to treat it that way,” he said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.”The two-bucket framework works as a starting diagnostic that narrows the real question down before any specific advice gets offered, rather than a shortcut to a standard recommendation.
For business owners evaluating outside advisors, the practical signal is whether a consultant asks which bucket a company falls into before proposing a fix, or arrives with the same fix regardless of which one it is.
Nicholas Mukhtar’s own path through both buckets, first running a nonprofit that had to move like a startup, later advising established companies that move like city governments, is part of why he leads with the sorting question rather than a prepackaged answer. The framework traces back to the actual shape of his own career rather than a theory he read about somewhere.