Have you ever sat in a meeting with a consultant, nodded along politely for an hour, and then driven home wondering whether they actually understood your business at all?
You’re not being paranoid. It’s a genuinely difficult thing to judge in the moment. Most consultants sound confident. Most of them use the right words. Very few of them will ever tell you, out loud, “I don’t really know your industry and I’m mostly guessing.”
We’ve written before about the consultant who has a solution before they’ve heard your problem, which is one specific warning sign. This is the broader question. Even once someone’s asked the right questions and slowed down, how do you actually know whether the person sitting across from you knows what they’re talking about, or whether they’re just good at sounding like they do?
Those are two very different skills. Confidence is cheap. Actual understanding is not.
Before We Go Any Further
This is our view, formed from years of sitting on both sides of that table. We’ve been the consultant in the room, and we’ve hired consultants ourselves.
We’re not saying every impressive-sounding consultant is a fraud. Plenty of genuinely brilliant people also happen to be good communicators, and that’s no bad thing.
Have a look around, speak to a few people, and make your own judgement. This is simply how we see it.
Why Is This So Hard to Judge in the First Place?
Because most of us are being asked to assess expertise in a subject we’re not experts in.
If you knew exactly how to fix the problem yourself, you probably wouldn’t be hiring someone. So you’re stuck judging competence from the outside, based on how someone talks, how confident they sound and how polished their slides are. None of those things actually measure whether the advice is any good.
This is exactly how a mediocre consultant with good presentation skills can sound more convincing than a genuinely excellent one who’s a bit awkward on a call. It happens constantly.
“A slick deck tells you someone can make a slide look nice. It tells you nothing about whether they understand your business.”
Do They Ask Questions Specific to Your Industry, or Could They Be Talking to Anyone?
This is one of the clearest tells there is.
A consultant who genuinely understands a sector asks questions that only make sense in that sector. Someone advising a manufacturer should be asking about lead times, minimum order quantities, supplier reliability and how seasonal demand hits the shop floor. Someone advising a professional services firm should be asking about utilisation rates, how work actually gets billed and where the bottleneck sits between a lead coming in and someone picking up the phone.
If the questions being asked would work equally well for a bakery, a law firm and a scaffolding company, that’s worth noticing. Generic questions tend to produce generic answers.
To be fair, nobody arrives already knowing every detail of your particular sector on day one. That’s not the test. The test is whether their questions get sharper and more specific as the conversation goes on, or whether they stay exactly as vague as they started.
Can They Explain Their Reasoning in Plain English, or Does It Stay Vague?
If someone genuinely understands what they’re recommending and why, they should be able to explain it to you in a couple of sentences, without hiding behind jargon.
Watch out for phrases like “it’s a bit technical” or “you probably don’t need to worry about the details” when you’ve asked a perfectly reasonable question about how something actually works. Sometimes that’s true. Often it’s a way of avoiding a question the person can’t actually answer properly themselves.
A useful test is simply asking “why this, and not something simpler?” Someone who genuinely understands your problem should have a clear answer. Someone reciting a pitch usually starts repeating the same phrases they opened the meeting with, just louder.
“If someone can’t explain in plain English why they’re recommending something, I’d think very carefully before handing them thousands of pounds. Complicated language is sometimes used to disguise a fairly simple idea, or the absence of one.”
Are They Talking About Your Actual Numbers, or Just Generalities?
This is probably the single most practical thing you can check.
A consultant who’s done the work will reference your actual situation. Your current conversion rate. Your current cost per lead. What’s happening in your specific accounts, your specific process, your specific team. Not “businesses like yours typically see” this or that, delivered with a straight face and no evidence behind it.
Generic statements aren’t automatically wrong. Industry patterns exist for a reason. But if every single recommendation is phrased as a generality, and none of it ever gets tied back to something specific about your business, that’s a fair sign the advice hasn’t actually been built around you. It’s been built around “businesses in general,” with your logo added to the cover slide.
Here’s a hypothetical to illustrate the shape of it, not a real client story: imagine a retail business gets a proposal recommending a full website rebuild, justified with the line “most e-commerce sites see a 30% uplift from a redesign.” Nobody’s looked at this business’s actual bounce rate, actual checkout drop-off or actual traffic sources. The number sounds impressive. It’s also completely untethered from anything real about that particular business. That’s the pattern worth watching for.
Have They Actually Done the Thing They’re Advising On?
This one’s simple, and it’s amazing how rarely people ask it directly.
If someone’s advising you on how to run a sales team, have they ever run one? If someone’s advising you on manufacturing efficiency, have they ever stood on a shop floor? If someone’s telling you how to price a product, have they ever actually had to set a price and live with the consequences of getting it wrong?
There’s a difference between theoretical knowledge and knowledge earned by actually doing the job, getting it wrong a few times, and learning from that. Both have value. But a consultant who’s only ever advised, and never actually done, tends to be more confident about things that are genuinely harder in practice than they sound in a workshop.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask directly: “Have you actually done this yourself, or have you mostly advised other people on doing it?” A good consultant won’t be offended. They’ll just answer honestly.
What About Consultants Who Are Genuinely Good but Just Aren’t Great Presenters?
This is the other side of the argument, and it’s worth being fair about it.
Some of the most useful people we’ve come across are terrible at selling themselves. They mumble a bit. Their slides look like they were made in 2009. They don’t do the confident, rehearsed patter that makes a pitch feel exciting.
That doesn’t automatically make them wrong for the job. If anything, someone slightly awkward but consistently specific, someone who keeps saying “it depends” and then explains exactly what it depends on, is often worth more than someone slick who’s never wrong because they never commit to anything specific enough to be checked.
Don’t judge purely on charisma. It’s genuinely one of the easiest ways to hire the wrong person.
So, What Should You Actually Do?
- During the first meeting, count how many of their questions are specific to your industry versus generic.
- Ask “why this, and not something simpler?” and see whether the answer is specific or repeats the pitch.
- Ask them to reference your actual numbers, not industry averages, in their recommendation.
- Ask directly whether they’ve actually done the thing they’re advising you on.
- Ask what they’d expect to see if their approach wasn’t working, and how they’d know.
- Don’t score them on how polished the meeting felt. Score them on how specific it was.
None of this guarantees you’ll never make a bad hire. It just improves your odds considerably.
Before Hiring a Consultant, Ask Them These Questions
- What have you asked me so far that’s specific to businesses like mine?
- Can you explain your reasoning without the jargon?
- Which of your recommendations is based on my actual numbers, and which is based on general industry patterns?
- Have you personally done the thing you’re advising me to do?
- What’s gone wrong for you before, and what did you learn from it?
- What would make you say “actually, this isn’t going to work for your business”?
- How will we both know, in practical terms, whether this is working?
If most of those get a confident, specific answer, that’s a genuinely good sign. If most of them get deflected back to the pitch, that tells you something too.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I tell if a consultant actually understands my industry?
Listen to the questions they ask, not just the answers they give. Someone who understands a sector asks questions specific to it. Generic questions tend to produce generic recommendations that could apply to almost any business.
Does a confident presentation mean a consultant is any good?
Not necessarily. Confidence and competence are different skills, and a polished pitch can just as easily come from someone who’s good at presenting as from someone who genuinely understands your problem. Judge the specifics, not the delivery.
Is it a red flag if a consultant hasn’t personally done the thing they’re advising on?
It’s worth asking about directly rather than treating it as an automatic disqualifier. Some excellent advisors have strong theoretical and analytical backgrounds without having done the exact job themselves. The concern is when that gap is never acknowledged and everything is delivered with the same false certainty regardless.
What’s the quickest way to test whether a consultant understands my numbers?
Ask them to reference something specific from your business, not an industry average, when they explain a recommendation. If they can’t, or if they quietly change the subject, that’s telling.
Should I be suspicious of every consultant who sounds impressive?
No. Plenty of genuinely excellent consultants are also good communicators. The point isn’t to distrust confidence. It’s to make sure confidence is backed up by something specific when you push on it.
Is it rude to ask a consultant these kinds of questions directly?
No. A genuinely good consultant expects to be tested a bit and will usually welcome it. Someone who gets defensive or evasive when asked reasonable questions about their reasoning has told you something useful before you’ve even signed anything.
Our Final View
The uncomfortable truth is that most people can’t judge expertise in a subject they don’t already understand. That’s exactly why this matters.
What you can judge is specificity. Whether the questions are sharp or generic. Whether the reasoning holds up in plain English. Whether the numbers being used are yours or borrowed from nowhere in particular. Whether the person’s actually done the thing, or only ever advised on it from the sidelines.
None of that requires you to be an expert yourself. It just requires you to notice when an answer is genuinely about your business, and when it would work equally well in any meeting, with any client, about almost anything.
Fancy a Second Opinion Before You Commit?
If you’ve had a proposal land on your desk and you’re not entirely sure whether it actually fits your business, or whether it’s just a well-dressed generic pitch, give us a call.
We’ll ask you about your actual numbers, not industry averages. We’re happy to be asked exactly the same questions in return.
Pick up the phone and talk it through with us. No script, no jargon, just a proper conversation.