CC Biz Buzz is a column series that features insightful commentary from a faculty member of the Columbia College Robert W. Plaster School of Business.
By Robert Hohenstein
The consultant enters the conference room, opens a laptop and begins explaining what the company needs to do.
The website should be redesigned. The organization needs a stronger social media presence. Employees require more training. The brand needs clarification. New technology will improve efficiency. Perhaps an organizational restructuring is necessary.
The presentation is polished. The consultant is nattily attired and speaks with confidence.
There was only one problem: No one had yet asked why sales were declining.
The most dangerous consultant in the room may be the one with the fastest answer. Confidence is not the same as competence, and a polished slide deck is not proof that the consultant understands the business.
Some consultants recommend the same familiar remedies — new branding, digital marketing, software, training or restructuring — regardless of the client’s circumstances. They change the company name for the presentation, update a few examples and call the proposal customized.
It is not customized. It is a favorite solution searching for another problem.
If every client needs the same answer, the consultant is probably not consulting. The consultant is selling.
Effective consulting begins with diagnosis, not performance. Before recommending a solution, strong consultants ask five deceptively simple questions:
What problem are we trying to solve? How do we know? Who sees the problem differently? What has already been tried, and why did it fail? What is the organization unwilling to change?
In regard to the first question, organizations frequently confuse symptoms with causes. Declining revenue and profit margins, employee turnover, weak customer retention, and poor website performance are symptoms. They do not necessarily explain the cause.
A company may insist it has a marketing problem. The consultant should ask: Is it truly a marketing problem?
Do employees respond to customer inquiries promptly? Is the product or service still competitive? Is pricing confusing? Are the company’s promises stronger than the customer experience it delivers? Has the competitive environment changed?
More marketing may solve none of those problems. It may simply introduce more customers to them.
The second question is: How do we know?
Some opinions are supported by financial results, customer feedback, employee interviews or market data. Others are assumptions repeated so often that they are treated as facts.
A consultant should not accept an explanation simply because it comes from someone high on the organizational chart. Authority is not evidence. Doing so can produce recommendations that sound logical in the conference room but prove unworkable outside it.
The third question is: Who sees this problem differently?
An owner may believe the organization has an employee problem. Employees may believe it has a leadership problem. Management may believe customers are too price sensitive. Customers may believe the business no longer provides sufficient value. Executives may want a new marketing campaign, while the sales team believe the company already generates enough prospects but fails to follow up promptly.
Good consultants investigate the gaps between those perspectives. The real problem is often hiding there.
The fourth question is: What has already been tried, and why did it fail?
Organizations carry the remains of abandoned strategic plans, failed technology implementations, unsuccessful advertising campaigns and improvement efforts that disappeared when leadership attention waned or resources were withdrawn.
A recommendation that appears innovative to the consultant may be painfully familiar to everyone else. A previous idea may have failed because it was poorly conceived, employees were not involved, resources were insufficient or no one was held accountable.
Recommending the same idea under a new name will not correct the conditions that caused it to fail.
The final and often most revealing question is: What are we unwilling to change?
Many organizations say they want improvement while protecting the practices or assumptions creating the problem. They want innovation but refuse to tolerate mistakes. They want employees to take initiative but punish unsuccessful decisions. They want stronger customer relationships but measure employees primarily on speed of service. They want better marketing but cannot explain why customers should choose them. They want strategic focus while continuing to add priorities.
They want an outside perspective, if it confirms what they already believe.
No consulting engagement can succeed when the client is unwilling to confront the problem honestly.
In the marketing and business consulting courses I teach at Columbia College, students sometimes assume consulting means arriving with impressive ideas and immediate answers.
Often, the opposite is true. Premature answers may show that a consultant is more interested in appearing knowledgeable than becoming informed. Students learn that their first responsibility is not to impress the client. It is to understand the client and support actionable recommendations with evidence and data rather than instinct.
That principle is also central to the Aspire Business Clinic, a faculty-led, student-driven consultancy within Columbia College’s Robert W. Plaster School of Business. Student consultants begin engagements with listening sessions involving businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Listening does not mean waiting politely for an opportunity to speak. It means testing assumptions, clarifying objectives, examining evidence and determining whether the problem initially presented is the one that most needs to be solved.
That discipline matters even more in a world filled with instant answers. A leader can enter a question into a search engine or artificial intelligence platform and receive recommendations within seconds. But answers are shaped by the information and assumptions contained in the question. If the question is incomplete or based on a false premise, the answer may reinforce the false premise.
Technology can generate answers. It cannot guarantee that an organization is asking the right question.
Consultants must eventually recommend action. Endless questioning can become another form of avoidance. But action without understanding is not decisiveness. It is gambling with someone else’s business and livelihood.
The best consultants challenge accepted explanations and tell leaders what they may not want to hear. A strong consultant earns the right to recommend by first understanding what is happening.
The quickest answer may win the meeting and secure the engagement.
The better questions may save the business.
Robert Hohenstein is a visiting professor and director of the Aspire Business Clinic at Columbia College’s Robert W. Plaster School of Business. He has a lifetime of marketing experience, from serving as a vice president of marketing with Six Flags Entertainment Corporation and Paramount Parks, Inc., to president and chief executive officer of Miami-Dade County Fair & Exposition, Inc.
