What if you are not the consultant? Find a consultant, place him/her on a gig and charge the client a 20% markup. Place 5 consultants and you make 100% of a consultant salary with no time sink.
Why not find 10,000 consultants, make them manage each other, become rich like Zuckerberg instantly? With no "time sink"!
"How to draw an owl? Draw two circles; draw the rest of the damn owl" http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/01/how-to-draw-...
- you are only as good as the people you find. Or, you are as weak as your weakest person.
- hiring in any specialized field, including consulting can be difficult to scale into a large product, because 10x consultants seem to know what they're worth (and make it) a lot more than 10x developers.
- the overhead in managing 5 other people to do things also can add up.
The positive? If you do find a few of these people, all at the same time in life, and all available and interested, you can have some pretty remarkable progress and profit, where part time consultants get more done than full time folks.
I'd argue lessened time sink, not none. Still requires management, communication, etc. depending on the setup.