I have a love/hate relationship with the field of consulting. Having an expert give you clear advice to solve a problem and get you on the right path can be invaluable — that’s what I became a consultant to do! However, in my own experience hiring consultants for help with my business challenges, so often their advice misses the mark and the process of working with them feels impersonal.
I’ve historically had a knack for hiring bad consultants, sometimes when required by a superior and other times through my own ineptitude. Despite these mistakes being annoying and costly, they’ve also helped me shape my own approach to consulting so I serve my clients better.
Here are three things I’ve learned from working with bad consultants and tips for success when working with a consultant:
1) Know Who You’re Talking To
During the sales process, make sure you get to talk to the person who will actually be helping you. I’ve gotten the bait-and-switch so many times when it comes to business services without being told anything about the person I’ll actually be working with. I’ve realized two things:
- The consultant working on your project will likely have a different personality and work style than the salesperson, which is important for determining a good fit for working together
- The salesperson will not comprehensively communicate your needs to the consultant, which means you’ll need to spend time re-explaining your needs and goals, or risk paying out the nose for advice based on a salesperson’s rough summary of your problem.
I once hired a technology consulting company, and all of my requests and needs got passed through the salesperson to the technical expert like a game of telephone. I should have insisted on speaking directly with the technical expert to make sure what I needed was actually being clearly understood.
This experience reinforced how important transparency and personal introductions are. When you work with Ecosystem Events, you’ll always meet the exact people who will be working on your event or consulting engagement before you commit to booking us.
2) Know Your Goals
Have an idea of your goals and/or the problem you are hoping the consultant will help you solve. At a previous design job, my department was required by higher-ups to engage a consultant to review our website and make recommendations. I was junior in the department at the time, and in the initial meeting with the consultant, I observed my manager offer only the vaguest direction, such as “we just need some best practices” and a general desire for the website to be “better,” without defining what that meant.
And on top of that, this meeting was with a salesperson, so our vague direction was then further filtered before it reached the person creating the consulting report. Ultimately, we ended up with a report that was about 10% useful and 90% irrelevant.
It’s important to do some self-reflection before you engage a consultant. Being vaguely aware of a problem isn’t enough. Be able to clearly define the problem you would like to solve, why you want to solve it, and what success would look like to you. Good consultants will ask questions to tease out this information during the booking process, but if you haven’t given it thought ahead of time, you might not fully communicate your wants and needs, making it more likely you’ll be dissatisfied with the end product.
Any field of expertise has countless “best practices” that could fill volumes. Learning about best practices isn’t bad, but because that request is so broad, the odds are low that the consultant will provide a ton of specific info on the things you deep-down think are most important but didn’t state clearly.
Here’s an example (hypothetical, not based on actual clients!):
- Unclear on their goals: “We want to implement sustainability best practices for our event”
- Knows their goals very clearly: “Our event generates a lot of waste, and I suspect we use a ton of energy too, but we’ve never measured. We’d like some help reducing our event waste and finding out how much energy we use. Sustainability is especially important to one of our biggest sponsors, so we want to be able to show we’re aligned with their values.”
Again, you don’t have to have this prepared like an elevator speech, but you should be prepared for a consultant to ask you about what specifically you want to achieve.
3) Advocate For Yourself Along the Way
Even if you clearly communicate your goals initially, it’s important to keep advocating for yourself through the consulting process. Most consultants have some degree of “canned” content or pre-created deliverables or templates, because they often help people with similar problems. However, if something in the statement of work doesn’t sound helpful to you, or you see something and think “This isn’t what we need at all,” speak up!
At that same previous design job, my department also hired a social media consultant to help monitor the performance of the company’s social accounts and provide guidance for improvement. However, the consultant’s monthly reports were overwhelming: 60+ pages of statistics with no summary or comparisons to track performance over time. They were not designed to be comprehended or analyzed at all; they were designed to make it look like the consultant was doing a lot of very important work that we should continue to pay for. We had subscribed to receiving the reports for a year, and we ended up just never looking at them because they were unreadable. When we saw that first unreadable report, we should have spoken up to say “hey, this doesn’t help us at all.”
Standing up for yourself to an “expert” is hard — it’s still something I need to get better at for myself! Because I know first-hand how difficult it can be, at Ecosystem Events we intentionally and constantly check in throughout the consulting process to make sure we’re on track with providing deliverables that will actually meet your needs.
We also keep “canned” content to a minimum and prefer to create customized reports and recommendations for each client. Events in general are similar, but the sustainability challenges facing each specific event are often unique, and we reflect that in our advice and deliverables.
I don’t share these tips because of any particular situations we’ve had with our clients, but because working with a consultant can sometimes feel mysterious and intimidating, and that’s not how we want it to feel when you work with us. And hopefully these tips help you have greater success with any type of consultant you hire for your business!
If you’re thinking about engaging with a sustainability consultant for your event or event-related business, check out our offerings here >>