Should We Hire a Strategic Planning Consultant? A Decision Guide

The proposal is already on the table

Picture the proposal. Twelve weeks, a team of four, a fee with six figures in it. The scope reads: develop a three-to-five-year strategy. The executives nod. Nobody in the room can say which decision the work will inform, who will make it, or when.

Should you hire strategy consultants? Hire them when you can name what you are buying and the decision it serves. Four things can be bought: knowledge your team lacks, hands for a defined job, an outside view people will trust, and a well-run process. One thing cannot: the decision itself.

The guide below asks three questions and routes you to one of eight answers, from “frame it yourself first” to “hire for independence.” Each answer comes with the steps for the next two weeks.

A firm can sell you analysis, hands and an outside view. It cannot sell you the decision.

What clients say they are buying

When Alan Simon and Vanya Kumar surveyed 171 executives in the top 500 companies in Australia, the main reasons for hiring consultants were insufficient in-house expertise, independent or objective advice, additional help and resources, insufficient manpower in-house and quick resolution of issues ¹. Strip out the overlap and three purchases remain: knowledge, hands and independence. The guide adds a fourth that strategy work often needs, someone to run the process.

Notice what is not on that list: making the decision. Yet that is what an open scope like “develop a strategy” quietly asks for. In 1982 Arthur Turner began a Harvard Business Review article by noting that management consultants in the United States received more than $2 billion a year, then added: “Much of this money pays for impractical data and poorly implemented recommendations.” His remedy was that clients need a better understanding of what consulting assignments can accomplish ².

Why the decision question comes first

The guide asks about the decision before it asks what you lack, because the decision sets the size of everything else. Consultants answer the question they are given. Hand them a topic and the project expands to fill it, and the framing they choose decides most of what the work can find. Hand them a decision with a date and the scope shrinks to the few analyses that could change it.

The second question is the purchase. The third is a test for the most common way each purchase goes wrong: knowledge you will need again, hands with no defined job, independence that would change nothing, a process in which the outsiders hold the pen.

That last trap is old. Henry Mintzberg described strategic planning as it arrived in the mid-1960s: it separated thinking from doing and created “a new function staffed by specialists: strategic planners” ³. “As we now know,” he wrote, “planning has not exactly worked out that way” ³. A firm that writes your strategy for executives who did not choose it rebuilds the same separation, at day rates. Our page on what a corporate strategy team actually does makes the same point from the inside: somebody inside has to decide which questions get asked.

Reading your answer

The eight answers fall into three groups.

• Not yet: frame it yourself, buy a scoping phase or do not hire yet. These are not failures. They are the cheapest result the guide can give you, because they stop you paying a firm to discover your own question.
• Buy, with conditions: specialist, capacity, independence or facilitator. Each comes with the condition that keeps the purchase honest: a tight scope, a written deliverable, the right to disagree, or your own people holding the pen.
• Build: knowledge you will need again belongs inside. Hire help once, on the condition that someone of yours can run the second round.

Where this guide can be wrong

The routing is our rubric, built from practitioner judgment. It is not a validated instrument, and no study we know of tests it. Three cases deserve a second look.

• Speed. Quick resolution of issues was one of the reasons executives gave for hiring ¹. In a crisis, buying a large team before the question is clean can be right. Rerun the decision question in week two and cut the scope.
• Legitimacy. The guide treats an outside view that would change nothing as cover. Sometimes a decision that is already made needs an outside voice to be carried through a skeptical organization. That is a communication purchase. Call it one, and price it as one.
• Small teams. In a company with no strategy staff, nearly everything routes to hands. That can be a sign the function is missing, not the project. The strategy function maturity assessment is the next check.

The market for help is also wider than the large firms: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that many management analysts work as consultants on a contractual basis, and that self-employed analysts are typically paid by the hour or the project ⁴. For a defined job, that is often the better fit.

Before you sign

1. Write the decision sentenceThe decision, the decider and the date, in one sentence at the top of the brief.
2. Name the purchaseKnowledge, hands, independence or process. One of them leads.
3. Name the owner insideThe person who will carry the work into the decision and live with it afterward.
4. Write the acceptance testWhat the deliverable must contain for you to call it done.
5. Set the exitA date and a finding at which you would stop or change the engagement.

If you cannot write the first line, do not sign yet. The best consulting projects start with a client who already knows what it will decide about, and is paying to decide it better.

Questions

When should a company hire a strategic planning consultant?

When it can name the decision the work will inform, who makes it and by when, and can say what it is buying: knowledge its team lacks, capacity for a defined job, an independent view that could change the decision, or a facilitator to run a process the executives will own. If none of those fits, the missing piece is usually a decision inside the executive team.

Should consultants write our strategic plan?

Generally no. They can supply analysis, options and a well-run process, but the strategy should be written by the executives who will be held to it. A plan written by outsiders separates thinking from doing, the problem Henry Mintzberg described in strategic planning, and it tends to lack owners once the engagement ends.

What is the difference between a strategy consultant and a facilitator?

A strategy consultant is usually hired for answers: analysis, recommendations and the knowledge behind them. A facilitator is hired for the process: running sessions so the executives surface disagreements and reach decisions themselves. If your executives disagree about the question itself, a facilitator often helps more than more analysis.

How much do strategy consultants cost?

There is no reliable public benchmark for strategy consulting fees, and figures quoted online are rarely sourced. Cost depends on team size, duration and the firm. Self-employed consultants are typically paid by the hour or the project, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Tight scoping changes cost more than haggling over rates.

Where to go next

• What a Corporate Strategy Team Actually Does
• Getting a Room to Decide: A Decision-Making Framework
• Hiring a corporate strategy consultant