How to be a consultant
Clients do not consult consultants. The role of consultant is not to give advice. The role of a consultant is to confirm decisions that client has already taken.
I discovered this when I issued a Request for Quotation for a piece of work that involved the consultant suggesting a list of businesses for case studies. The candidate consultants all wanted to talk to me before they gave their quotes. I listened to them and if you sifted out the real questions from the dross they came to
- How much should they quote?
- What businesses would I suggest that they should suggest?
Obviously, I was confused. I naively believed that there was I certain amount of work that needed to be done; the consultants would do it and I would pay for it. The consultants assumed this was a normal contract; that I had a certain amount of money in my budget to confirm decisions that I had already taken, and that they would be paid that money for doing so.
When I say “confirm a decision”, I don’t mean “check the correctness of the decision”. I mean “say that the decision is correct”. No client wants to be told he is wrong, and even less wants to pay someone to tell him he is wrong. Your job, as a consultant, is to tell your client that he is right. If he pays you sufficiently, your job is to tell him that he is right in an impressive report. If necessary, it is your job to include reasons why your client is right, or if that’s not possible, at least arguments in favor of you client’s opinion, or, at the very least, an impressive report from which it cannot be readily determined that your client’s decision is not right.
This is not to say consultants don’t serve a useful purpose. They do – but you have to understand what that purpose is if you are to be successful.
A client may wish to tell his boss, or the board or whoever he needs to convince, “I think we should do X and Consultant Y agrees” or “We asked Consultant Y what we should do about problem Z and he recommended X.” You can rest assured, “X” was decided upon long before Consultant Y got involved. It may have been decided even before Problem Z was found. What your client really means, but doesn’t want to say to his boss, is “I want to do X; problem Z is an excuse to do it; and Consultant Y is a suitable patsy to take the blame if it turns out to be a disaster.” Of course, if it turns out to be a success, that’s whole different matter …