Had a similar conversation with the guy who runs Raizlabs, and an original member of Pivotal, over the last few weeks. I definitely concede that there's a reason the market looks the way it does, and that it's not economically feasible to run a consultancy on gigs below a certain threshold, whether you're shelling out for Aeron chairs and massages or no.

We do call it a consultancy, and some clients certainly come in that centralized way, but it's also a resource for freelancers. Freelancers already have their own dealflow. We want to enable them to do more my offloading to folks they trust, not make them into de facto employees of some management team. That team is as small as it can be to keep things running, and in addition to hourly rates it's supported by the same commission that any job referrer would get for bringing in jobs.

For example, management right now consists mostly of me. Most of my income comes from coding on projects. But if a new job comes in through 'official' co-op channels managed by me, and I spend time screening & onboarding the client, I bill the co-op for that time.

With no office, no fulltime employees, and nobody who doesn't have billable hours, there's not a lot of overhead to worry about. The trick is keeping client experience and quality high while doing that, which isn't too terribly hard when you only have experienced, successful freelancers on board.