That expensive consultant you’re considering? They may already work for you.
When you hire a consultant, you’re ostensibly paying for their advice. In fact, you’re paying for a whole bundle of things:
Their time on task for you
The risk they incur by working without full-time benefits
Their availability at that moment (which comes at a cost to them)
The bounded duration of their work
Their advice
Their work product - some kind of deck, report, memo, market analysis, mock up.
Before you plunk down the cash for this bundle, I suggest two considerations:
Consideration 1: Some people might give you all that for free! Look to your mentors, advisors, and peers.
Consideration 2: If you don’t need or want the whole bundle, you might get more and better outputs from someone who is already on your team.
Let’s dig into Consideration 2 - where there’s a killer opportunity to compound the impact of the work to be done.
What if, instead of contracting with your consultant, you took a hungry, high-performing teammate and told them to go find and read 3 books, listen to 5 podcasts, and write you a scope of work on the relevant issue, perhaps for a modest stipend? In other words, “get smart at this thing and take a crack at it.”
Here are the arguments for this approach:
Downside is low, assuming you aren’t under acute time pressure. Even if you don’t implement the SOW they produce and you go with a consultant in the end, you’ve built your person’s skills and knowledge.
You mitigate the downside of working with an external person. When you assign the job in house, the advice you get is from someone who knows your context and constraints and can bear responsibility for executing the advice they generate. They get what you’re doing and won’t just give you a warmed over template that goes to every other client.
Quite importantly: the return on the time you invest in your teammate is at least double for you - that time gets you the advice and a richer relationship (alliance) with that teammate.
Most importantly of all: an assignment like this is a major vote of confidence that could change this teammate’s whole career trajectory. The upside is exceptional. Suddenly this work - work that you would have paid dearly for someone outside the team to do - figures in your teammate’s professional identity (not to mention resume). “Turns out, I’m the kind of person who can do x or has done y or is seen as capable of z.”
Note: You are most likely to get this benefit if you “call your shot” when you make the assignment. Lay bare the reasoning here - both the cold economics and the deliberate optimism. State your belief in your teammate’s potential and the way this can grow their skills and stature. Anyone with ambition, for themselves or for your team’s mission, is likely to find this affirming and enticing.
Tapping your existing team for new challenges like this can be especially useful when you don’t have the license or means to award promotions or raise salaries. In this in-house consulting arrangement, your person gets a number of things they would get from a promotion: new challenges and responsibilities, contact with and visibility from another leader, (potentially) some extra compensation, status. Perhaps most importantly of all, you make good on any word you’ve previously given about growth mindset, your desire for your people to develop and thrive, a culture of continuous learning.
This is an elaborate version of one of my favorite “belonging cues”, practiced by the dynamite Elissa Kim: simply asking your people, especially those you want to grow, “what’s your take?”
If this argument makes sense to you, pay attention to the implications. Odds are you can apply the same rationale to some, even many, of the things you personally are doing right now. Seek out teammates who can take those on. Outsource in house and watch ‘em grow.
