(FORTUNE Small Business) – --Brent Habig wasn't always an opera fan. His instrument of choice as a music student at Oberlin College was the piano. "I didn't get it," he says of opera's divas and drama. "It was so overblown, and the voices--I thought they were just ridiculous."

That changed a few years later, in 1996, when he enrolled in a class taught by Vincent La Selva, the artistic and music director of the New York Grand Opera Company. After extensively studying Verdi's La Traviata, Habig was hooked. That attitude adjustment--and Habig's strong baritone--led La Selva to ask him to join the opera's chorus as a volunteer. At the same time Habig was launching Tigris Consulting, a supply-chain management consultancy with clients such as Unilever and Nabisco.

Now 32, Habig draws parallels between the small opera company and his own boutique firm. The NYGOC stages free performances in Central Park, bringing opera to the masses on a tiny budget of $500,000. (The Metropolitan, in comparison, spends $200 million annually.) While the NYGOC boasts pros like Enrico DiGiuseppe, a former lead tenor with the Met, it also relies on 50 volunteers like Habig to fill out its chorus. "The idea of the scrappy underdog aspiring to do opera as well as the powers that be has been an inspiration, because that's the position we face as a small consulting firm," Habig says. "We're out there competing with Accenture."

In January 2001, Habig sang Verdi's Requiem at Carnegie Hall. Even he admits he's come a long way. "What I thought was negative is what I like about opera most--that drama," he says. "Now I can't find that intensity in any other music."

--ERIKA RASMUSSON