Hiring a consultant to provide specific guidance and expertise can be a very smart business decision. It could take you hours or months to research and get a basic understanding of a subject or technology.
It might take you years to become an expert, and you have other things you’d rather do.
As part of a consulting team, I was brought in to advise on call flows for the call centers of a Fortune 100 company. I knew nothing about call centers. Luckily, I am a good strategic thinker and was able to provide value as part of the team and to the client. So much so that they were still using what our team set up years later.
And I won a client service award. 😀
But, I don’t generally recommend this, especially as a small business owner.
If you are going to hire a consultant, make sure they understand your type of business and your industry. Research what people say about them online. Talk to some of their clients if you can, knowing that they will probably tell you good things if the names came from the consultant. (They shouldn’t be dumb enough to provide references that would say bad things.)
Ask detailed questions to uncover the consultant’s thought process, frameworks they might use, types of deliverables you can expect, etc.
And the consultant should be asking you a lot of questions to better assess the scope of work.
Good consulting projects need very clear agreements as to what is in scope and what is out of scope. Big problems happen when one side, or both parties, make assumptions. The clearer the engagement letter, the smoother the project.
I was considering working with a business coach I have very high respect for. I asked specifically what experience she had selling professional services similar to mine. She said she had no experience with that. We’re not working together.
I took a six-month break from doing resumes, but I had to jump back in when someone was referred to me. He had been out of work for almost a year and had hired someone to do his resume, but it wasn’t working. He wasn’t getting interviews.
We had a conversation and I looked at his resume. It was different from the way I do them, but professional and probably fine, except that it positioned him for the wrong job. It positioned him as a “sales leader,” meaning a quota-carrying sales executive or sales manager. He had done that earlier in his career, but for many years he had been in sales enablement, which was the position he was looking for.
Sales and sales enablement are two different things, and he didn’t look like a fit for the sales enablement jobs he was targeting.
I reformatted and edited his resume. We positioned him as the ideal candidate for the job he wanted. He began to get interviews and he started his new “dream job” a few weeks ago.
The resume writer he hired didn’t understand the difference between sales and sales enablement. It broke my heart that my client spent extra months in transition because his resume wasn’t right.
This is my cautionary tale for you. Hire a consultant who understands you and your business.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
