Five questions to ask before you commission consultancy

A consultancy engagement can be the cheapest thing a business buys, or one of the more expensive ways to delay a decision. The difference is almost always determined before any contract is signed.

These are the questions we ask prospective clients, and the ones we would want asked of us.

1. Do we actually not know the answer?

Some engagements are commissioned to find out something the client genuinely does not know: whether a property can sustain a given staffing model, how a service standard compares to comparable operations, what a realistic pre-opening sequence looks like.

Others are commissioned to confirm a decision that has already been made. That is not necessarily dishonest, but it is expensive. If leadership already knows what it intends to do, the useful spend is on implementation, not on an assessment.

A good adviser will ask you this directly — and will tell you if the answer is "you already know".

2. Is this a knowledge problem or a capacity problem?

These look identical from the outside and require completely different interventions.

• Knowledge problem: nobody in the business has done this before — a first pre-opening, a first multi-property structure, a first quality system.
• Capacity problem: the knowledge exists, but the people who hold it are fully occupied running the operation.

Consultancy solves the first. The second is usually better solved by hiring, or by temporarily freeing up an existing manager. Buying advisory work to fix a capacity problem produces a good document that nobody has time to act on.

3. What decision will this work change?

Before commissioning, name the decision that hinges on the output. For example: "If the assessment shows the current staffing model cannot hold service standards at current covers, we will restructure the shift pattern before high season."

If no decision is attached, the report will be filed. This single question prevents more wasted consultancy spend than any other.

4. Who inside the business owns the outcome?

A consultant can diagnose, recommend, and support implementation. They cannot make a change stick inside an organisation that does not want it. If no named person inside the business is accountable for the outcome, the engagement will end at handover.

In our experience the engagements that produce lasting change all have one thing in common: a internal owner with real authority, present from the first meeting to the final review.

5. How will we know it worked?

Agree the measure before work starts. It should be something observable in the operation, not a satisfaction rating of the consultant. Examples:

• Standards documented and in use across every shift within 90 days
• Complaint volume in a specific category reduced against a stated baseline
• New hires reaching independent performance in a shorter period

If a consultant resists defining this up front, that is informative.

A note on scope

Be wary of engagements whose scope is defined by page count or deliverable volume. The value of consultancy is not the thickness of the document. A four-page operating standard that the team actually uses beats a sixty-page strategy that gets filed.

Ask what the adviser will stop doing at the end. Good consultancy leaves capability behind — templates, trained people, routines that continue without the consultant present.

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