An inde­pen­dent or small-​​scale con­sul­tant faces many chal­lenges an aggre­gated Big Box con­sul­tancy doesn’t need to deal with, but has advan­tages as well.

There are two large Orders (in the bio­log­i­cal sense) of con­sult­ing clients: Those who want to be instructed to do what they’ve already decided to do, and those who want to be told that some­thing they’re already doing is wrong. In both cases, whether small or large-​​scale con­sul­tants are called in, the point is in the telling by a vet­ted, cre­den­tialled outsider—not the doing. Clients typ­i­cally man­age to do things just fine, all by them­selves, which is how they come to have the money to hire con­sul­tants in the first place. But like nor­mal poor peo­ple like you and me, cor­po­ra­tions like to redec­o­rate once in a while, and need a sec­ond opin­ion to set their mind straight on the task. Some­body who’s known to be fol­low­ing the lat­est fash­ion, or done the neigh­bors’ place up recently.

Oth­er­wise, they’re clas­sic go-​​getter do-​​it-​​themselves kind of entities.

Rarely a client will pay a con­sul­tancy to tell them what they’re doing wrong, and also to imple­ment the thing they’ve already decided to change. Until I see a good coun­terex­am­ple, I have to say that’s a dan­ger­ously overex­tended rela­tion­ship. It’s cer­tainly the source of most of the hor­ror sto­ries I’ve ever heard. One con­sul­tancy, one problem.

Smaller con­sul­tan­cies seem to have an edge on the sec­ond front. The larger mob-​​consultants carry sample-​​books full of pop­u­lar fash­ions from site to site; the smaller oper­a­tors are some­how more often the fix­ers, the inspec­tors, the “Now see, there’s your prob­lem right there” folks with their pants rid­ing threat­en­ingly low as they shine a flash­light on a pool beneath the clients’ sinks. They—we—do our work dili­gently, often throw in a bit of extra advice, write out an esti­mate, offer a lit­tle dis­count if we think we can play it off for some extended rela­tion­ship points later on, rip it off the clip­board and hand it over. Often as not, the client ends up phon­ing the mob with the big splashy ad in the Yel­low Pages to do the actual work.

But that’s OK. Tricky hav­ing the two jobs done by the same folks.

The eco­nom­ics of the con­sult­ing rela­tion­ship is an inter­play between risk ame­lio­ra­tion, hush money and real cost. Real cost is dri­ven by the size of the con­sult­ing firm, not the clients’ needs: more mouths to feed, more black suits to press, and of course prices will sky­rocket. By “risk ame­lio­ra­tion” I mean the con­sul­tants’ risk: if you look at the actu­ar­ial num­bers, a small con­sul­tancy risks either a shorter rela­tion­ship, or being acquired out­right by the client.

But the strangest cost of all is what I think of as the hush money. Nondis­clo­sure. A consultant’s busi­ness is built by rep­u­ta­tion, by evi­dent suc­cess, by tes­ti­mo­nial, and by proof of insight and tacit and explicit domain knowl­edge. Often as not, an NDA obscures most of those from other poten­tial cus­tomers. A small consultancy’s prices must reflect the loss of rep­u­ta­tion and other social cap­i­tal caused by an NDA. In some cases, the client them­selves can­not be men­tioned by name; in other cases, the fact of the rela­tion­ship is even hid­den by con­trac­tual silence.

Free speech is a right. Silence costs.