When you move up the ranks as a corporate leader, you will likely manage a consulting team at some point. Consultants can add real value to your organization. For example, they can craft new strategies, drive transformation, or implement digital solutions.

Yet, selecting and working with consulting firms is rarely taught. As a result, your first consulting project can be tricky. Even worse, mistakes in project design or management can become expensive. They can also take up your time and create long-lasting negative consequences for the organization.

I have worked both as a management consultant and as someone hiring and leading consulting teams. Therefore, I have noticed several common challenges that corporate leaders face. In this article, I share four key lessons to help you make your next consulting project a success.

In addition, I added a bonus tip at the end. It will help you avoid the number one money trap when starting a project with consultants.

1. Before you bring in consultants to make your life easier, you first need to invest time yourself

Usually, companies choose consultants for their specific skills. These skills can include expertise in a digital solution, strong analytical capabilities, or industry knowledge. However, as a leader within your organization, you understand its specifics and nuances best. The sweet spot is to combine the consultants’ skills with your organization’s specific challenge.

To get there, you need to take the first step. Provide as much information as possible to the consulting firms you invite to pitch. Share the problem, past attempts to solve it, unique company situations, and relationships with other departments or stakeholders. The more information you provide, the better consulting firms can tailor their solutions to your specific challenge.

2. Use the RFP phase to your advantage

During the RFP, or Request for Proposal, phase, you select the right consultancy firm and approach. My counterintuitive advice is simple. Instead of inviting many consultancies to pitch, invite only a few. Also, make this clear to them.

This approach has two main benefits. First, you need multiple sessions with the consultant to refine the solution based on your organization’s unique insights. The more time you can invest here, the better. With fewer consultancy firms bidding, you can spend more time with each firm.

Second, fewer competing bidders increase each consultancy firm’s chance of winning. As a result, they can invest more in the bid. They can also bring their best talent to brainstorm with you on the winning strategy and approach.

3. Once you have selected your consulting team, use them wisely

As a corporate leader, you have many responsibilities. The project is just one of them. However, freelance or interim consultants are hired for a specific project. Therefore, they can focus fully on this single job.

They move extremely fast because they define a clear scope and focus only on tasks within that scope. As a result, the difference in work pace between the consultant and the corporate leader often creates bottlenecks. This can lead to delays, higher costs, or even consultants moving in the wrong direction.

Luckily, you can avoid this. Successful corporate leaders carefully manage the time they allocate to project decisions. They also set clear expectations about what they need to make these decisions. Moreover, they constantly balance what consultants can pick up and where they themselves create real impact.

Imagine you need to decide on the strategic direction. At the same time, you need to consider wider organizational developments. In this case, consultants should interview the stakeholders you specify, list dependencies, prepare scenarios, and summarize everything in an easy-to-digest document. With a clear deadline, you can review the material and have a few informal discussions before the decision session.

During the decision session, the consultants should talk you through the material. They should also offer suggestions and document the decisions. The point is simple: consultants should do the groundwork. That way, you can focus your limited time on strategic decisions. Although this approach may seem self-serving, it helps you avoid becoming the bottleneck and keeps the project on track.

4. Focus relentlessly on dependencies to avoid expensive delays

Large corporations are complex. They have many interrelated processes, often owned by different people. Therefore, dependencies are unavoidable and will be part of your project. Unfortunately, they are also among the most common reasons for significant project delays.

Common dependencies include senior stakeholder approvals, unavailable or unusable data, and new releases of related IT solutions. Other examples are alignment with other departments or a strategic change in the organization that affects your project direction.

Experienced corporate leaders know that dependencies are their responsibility. They also know that dependencies burn money. Therefore, they focus on them almost annoyingly. They ask project managers to stay on top of upcoming team activities. They also ask thorough questions to understand the team’s tasks from start to finish.

The trick is to coach all team members to first look at what needs to be done. Only after that should they decide who should do it. Every freelance or interim consultant in your team should have the same mindset: a task is completed when it is done, not when their part is done. You may need to clear dependencies yourself. However, a strong consultant should flag them in time and make them easy for you to understand.

5. Bonus: don’t blow your negotiation efforts in the first weeks

It is Monday. After an intense contract negotiation, the freelance or interim consultants show up at the office reception. Have you taken the right steps to make them productive from day one? Did you secure access to company systems and data? Did you schedule stakeholder interviews? Did you prepare a backlog for the first weeks?

If not, your hard-negotiated savings disappear quickly. The consultants will wait for you before they can become productive.

The best way to prevent this is to ask during the RFP phase what the consultancy team needs from you in the first two or three weeks. Then, arrange it. No time to do it yourself? Consider onboarding one consultant a bit earlier. Depending on the contract size, this can be an investment or a paid role. This person can then arrange everything for the rest of the team before they start.

Bottom Line

Working with (freelance / interim) consultants can be a superpower for any business. To make your next consulting project a great success, invest some time upfront and focus on quality over quantity during the RFP phase. Set clear expectations to manage your time and create the right mindset in your team to deal with dependencies. Finally, don’t forget to prepare the basics so the team can hit the ground running.

If you want or have more tips or would like to discuss any of the above in more detail, please let me know!