Questions to Ask a Business Consultant Before You Sign
The right questions expose a weak consultant in twenty minutes and cost you nothing. Here are the ones I would ask, and what a good answer sounds like.
Hiring a consultant is one of the few purchases where the seller knows almost everything and the buyer knows almost nothing. You cannot inspect the product beforehand. You cannot return it. And by the time you know whether it worked, the money is spent.
The way to close that gap is not to become a consulting expert yourself. It is to ask a short list of questions that a good consultant answers easily and a weak one cannot answer at all.
These are the questions I would ask, along with what a good answer sounds like. I answer several of them myself along the way, because it would be cheap to set a test and then dodge it.
1. What will I pay, in total, and what does success look like?
This is the pair of questions that tells you the most, and I have written about what consultants actually cost in Australia if you want the numbers behind it.
A good answer names a figure and a measurable outcome before work starts. A weak answer gives you a rate but not a total, or describes success in words like "improvement" and "transformation" that nobody can verify later.
If the consultant genuinely cannot price the work yet because the problem has not been diagnosed, that is an acceptable answer, as long as the diagnosis itself has a clear price and end point.
2. What exactly will exist at the end that does not exist now?
Deliverables language hides a lot. "A strategic roadmap" is a document. "Your quoting process rebuilt so quotes go out same-day, with your staff trained on it" is a change in your business.
Push until the answer is concrete. We keep a public answer to this question on this blog: six live websites you can visit, because we think shipped work is the only honest portfolio.
3. What happens if it is not working?
You are listening for two things: how they will know it is not working, and what stopping costs you.
If there is no agreed metric, they cannot know. And if the contract has a minimum term with an exit penalty, then stopping costs you money, which means the consultant is protected against their own underperformance. I have covered why that clause exists in red flags when hiring a business consultant.
A good answer is uncomfortable in a healthy way: "here is the metric, here is when we review it, and if it is not moving you can stop without penalty."
4. Who does the actual work?
In larger firms, the person who wins the engagement is often not the person who delivers it. You meet a partner and get a graduate.
There is nothing wrong with a team doing the work, but you should know who, before you sign, and you should meet them. If the answer is vague, the resourcing decision has not been made, which means it will be made later, based on who is free rather than who is right.
5. What have you shipped for businesses like mine?
Not "who have you worked with". What did they ship, and can you see it?
Names without outcomes are marketing. Outcomes without names are unverifiable. The strongest answer is work you can inspect yourself: a system in use, a process running, a site that is live. Be patient with newer consultants who have less to show, and be suspicious of established ones who have plenty of clients but nothing you can look at.
6. What will you need from me?
Every real engagement costs the client time: answering questions, making decisions, giving access to people and systems. A consultant who says "nothing, we handle everything" is either not planning to understand your business or not planning to hand anything over at the end.
A good answer is specific: whose time, how much of it, at which stages. If you want to arrive at that conversation prepared, I have written a guide on how to brief a business consultant, including what a good one will ask you back.
7. What would make you tell me not to hire you?
This one is a character test. Every honest consultant has walked away from work that was not a fit: a problem outside their expertise, a budget that could not support the outcome, a business that needed something cheaper than consulting.
If the answer amounts to "I can help anyone with anything", you are talking to a salesperson. Some problems genuinely do not need a consultant at all, and I have written an honest guide to when doing it yourself is the right call.
8. Walk me through your last engagement that went badly.
Everyone has one. What you are testing is whether they own it.
A good answer describes what went wrong, what it cost, and what they changed afterwards. A bad answer blames the client, or claims it has never happened. Both of those tell you exactly how a problem will be handled when it is yours.
What this list is really for
You are not trying to catch anyone out. You are trying to find the consultant who is relieved to be asked these questions, because they are the ones who have nothing to manage around.
For what it is worth, here is how NXT Innings answers the first three, since they are the ones with money attached: every piece of work is a Play with a fixed price and a named success metric, approved by you before work starts, and you can stop at any time without penalty. The full detail is on our general business consulting page, and the thinking behind the model is in our post on consultant rates and billing incentives.
Take the list into every conversation, including one with us. If a consultant fails the questions, you have lost twenty minutes. If you skip the questions, you find out the same information after the invoice.
Heath McDonald is the founder of NXT Innings Consulting, a business operations and technology consultancy working with founders and business owners across Australia.
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