What to Ask a Business Consultant For
A business consultant is an outside professional who is paid to look at your company and tell you something you cannot see from inside it. That is the whole definition, and it is why the value depends less on who you hire than on what you ask them for.
Most disappointing engagements were badly briefed rather than badly staffed.
Skills Required for Business Consultants
Start With the Decision, Not the Goal
"Grow the business" is a goal. Nobody can be held to it.
A brief starts with a decision you are stuck on. Whether to open the second location. Whether the pricing is wrong or the sales process is. Whether the operations problem needs a system or a person. State the decision, say what you would do today if you had to choose right now, and ask what would change that answer. A consultant who cannot move a decision is producing reading material.
This is also the honest test of whether you need one at all. If you already know the answer and want support for it, say so and save the fee, or read when hiring a firm is the wrong move first.
The Four Things a Brief Has to Name
- The decision. Written in one sentence, before the first meeting.
- The deliverable. A recommendation, a model, a plan, a diagnosis. Name
the artifact so nobody is surprised by what arrives.
- The test. How you will know afterward whether it worked, and by when.
Agree it in advance, because agreeing it afterward is negotiation.
- Who implements. This is the one that gets skipped, and it causes most
of the damage.
Benefits of Hiring a Business Consultant
Advice and Execution Are Not the Same Purchase
A consultant recommends. Somebody then has to do it, and in a small company that somebody is usually you, on top of everything else you already do. That is how a good recommendation becomes a document in a folder.
So decide which you are buying before you sign. If what you need is analysis, buy analysis. If what you need is somebody accountable for the result, that is a different arrangement: a fractional executive holds the seat and owns the outcome rather than handing back a view on it.
It is also worth checking that a consultant is the right profession at all. Plenty of questions that arrive labeled as strategy are accounting questions with a strategy label on them.
Industry Trends
What You Are Actually Buying
Two things, and only two are reliable.
An outside view. Someone with no history in your company, no stake in the decision that created the problem, and no relationship to protect. That is genuinely hard to get internally, and it is most of the value.
Experience of the same situation elsewhere. Pattern recognition, which is worth paying for precisely because you only get to run your own company once.
Everything else on the standard list, efficiency, cost savings, specialized knowledge, follows from those two or does not happen at all.
Business Consulting in Practice
Before You Hire
Ask for the last three engagements that looked like yours, and what happened after. Ask what they would need from you and how much of your time it takes, because the engagements that fail usually fail on the owner's availability rather than on the work. And ask what they would tell you not to do, since an adviser who only ever agrees is an expensive way to hear your own opinion.
The Takeaway
Write the decision down first. Name the deliverable, the test and who implements. Then hire. A consultant briefed that way earns the fee or clearly does not, and either answer is useful.