Three consultants, no change

A new positioning. A new funnel. A new channel. Each one was defensible. Each one came from somebody who knows their trade. And nothing in your numbers changed. That is almost never the consultants’ fault. It is a sequence nobody keeps to.

What the three had in common

None of them measured first.

All three looked at your situation, compared it with what they know, and told you what helps in their experience. That is a recommendation. A recommendation is a reasoned opinion. It is not worthless. It is simply not a finding.

A finding says: at this step, eighteen out of a hundred people arrive, and at the step before it there were still sixty. A recommendation says: the offer would need to be sharper. The difference is that you can check the first sentence and not the second.

Why that isn’t malice but structure

A consultant gets paid for a proposal. They come in. They listen. They think. They walk out with something that looks like work.

Now picture the proposal that would be the right one in many businesses: “Switch the ad back on that you turned off two years ago, and write to the forty people who have already bought from you.”

That is a hard sentence to sell. It looks like too little for the fee, it makes the consultant look small, and it leaves the owner feeling they paid for something obvious. So hardly anybody says it, even though it is often true.

I am expressly not saying this against consultants. I spent long enough in boardrooms to know how good most of them are. I am saying it against a practice that settled in because it pays better than the alternative.

How to tell whether somebody measures or recommends

Three questions you can ask anyone before you hire them.

Which number do you look at first?

Anyone who answers with a category instead of a number will work with categories later too.

What would I have to show you for you to drop your first hypothesis?

Anyone without an answer to that doesn’t have a hypothesis, they have a conviction. Convictions survive data.

What do you propose if it turns out nothing is missing?

Anyone with no scenario in which they build nothing will build something.

Why the fourth consultant changes nothing either

Because the problem is not the number of opinions.

Three opinions and one missing measurement do not suddenly add up to clarity when a fourth opinion arrives. They add up to four opinions. And the more of them are in the room, the harder it gets to start at all, because every start now has to be defended against three other routes.

It rarely takes a new analysis. It takes one person willing to ask the question everyone else skipped, and to answer it with a number instead of their experience.