What do consultants do?
Consultants are independent outsiders who bring experience and expertise to bear upon client’s problems to help discover solutions and choose among options and alternatives. Consultants are different than mere contract employees. Consultants advise clients in a variety of ways to proceed. Contract workers are essentially employees who provide labor services on a 1099 basis rather than direct employment. The main difference is the degree and depth of experience possessed by the individual or firm.
When should a consultant not be used?
Consultants are not magicians. While consultants can provide creative out-of-the-box solutions that you didn’t conceive, they can’t fix every problem or suspend the Laws of Physics or make customers buy poorly designed products that have a reputation for failure and disappointment.
When do you need a consultant?
There are a variety of good reasons for hiring a consultant. Some of there are:
- A one-time, short-term project which doesn’t justify hiring employees or contractors
- Competing internal political pressures which call for an unbiased, outside opinion
- No obvious solutions have been conceived to-date
- Cannot really discern where the ‘real’ problem lies
- Need an infusion of new ideas and approaches
- Skills deficiency among in-house resources
How do you select a ‘good’ consultant?
Consultants are made, not born. We generally are people with specific experience in a narrow area of expertise, often former corporate or government employees who retired early or enjoy the challenge of multiple problems to solve. Good consultants are ‘seasoned’ veterans of many client experiences over a number of years, not just contract workers still gaining their preliminary experience on the job. Consulting firms range in size from sole practitioners to large corporate enterprises. The size and scope of a consulting engagement (and the firm you chose) depends closely on the size and scope of the problem to be solved. Regardless, experience and recommendations are the most important qualifications for selecting a ‘good’ consultant. The fee schedule is not necessarily indicative of the quality of the work you can expect. Large firms charge big fees, but these firms also have considerable overhead to cover – at your expense. Smaller firms have lower overhead expenses and lower fees, but may not have the parallel human resources to accomplish the task. Both the client and the consultant need to have a good understanding of the nature of the problem, scope of work, and timeframe to completion to match the right consultant to the task at hand.
How is a consultant different from an equipment or service vendor?
In some industries, equipment vendors offer ‘free consulting services.’ While these services can be valuable, keep in mind that the primary mission of the equipment vendor is to sell equipment to you, and has built the ‘free services’ into the prices of the products they recommend. The chart below points to some obvious differences:
Point of Comparison |
Consultant |
Vendor |
What is being purchased? |
Consultants render advice and present alternative solutions based on long-term experience in a narrow specialty |
Vendors offer equipment, software
and installation services in support
of a sale. |
Who does the person represent? |
Consultants represent the client and act in the client’s best interests. |
Vendors represent manufacturers who act primarily in their own best interests to make a sale. |
Which choices are offered? |
Consultants look a the big picture and should recommend a number of alternative choices and solutions independent of the vendor-specific solutions available. |
Vendors offer a narrow range of solutions tailored to utilize products and services which they sell. |
Is a consultant always
a better solution? |
Not necessarily. Chose a consultant when problem solutions are sought which have broad or costly or long-term implications – decisions that you are going to ‘live with’ for a long time. |
Chose a vendor’s ‘free consulting service’ when a problem solution is ‘cut and dried’ and where reversing a purchasing decision later in favor of another solution is not monumentally significant. Ask yourself: Will it cost my job? |
Aren’t consultants really expensive? |
Yes. They charge either by the hour or on a fixed-fee basis, plus out-of-pocket expenses. They do their job – the one you hired them to do – then go away. Used properly, consultants are one-time costs for long-term benefit. |
Yes, but so are vendors — particularly the ones that offer ‘free design advice.’ Vendors put food on their tables by selling products, and they tend to over-specify the quantity and features of the goods and services they recommend. |
