In this episode, Patrick talks about the 10 questions to ask before you hire a consultant or lawyer and how to get clear on what you're looking for in a consultant and lawyer. He also talks about why you should hire a lawyer.
00:00:00.00030 seconds. One time for the underdog. Ignition sequence start. Let me see you put them up. Reach the sky, turn the stars up above. Cause it's one time for the underdog. One time for the underdog.
00:00:17.340I'm Patrick Bedevi, your host of iTunes, and today we're going to talk about 10 tips for hiring consultants and lawyers as an entrepreneur.
00:00:24.160Before I share with you the 10 questions, I want to give you a story of what happened recently when this lady came in and we were sitting there with all our executives in a boardroom and she's sitting to my right and, and, and one of our guys like, here's what we're hiring her because of this and very credible guy in our company. And so here's, she started talking about, here's what I can do for you. Here's what, and then the moment she got into the, this is what you need. This is what you need. This is what you need. This is what you need. I said, uh, and she says, so here's what I can. And I started asking all these questions and she started kind of balking a little bit and getting a little nervous.
00:00:54.160I said, time out. I said, ma'am, hang tight. You can sit in this room where you're going to be hearing about what we need. Uh, I said, team, we don't need her first. She's third. We have other issues to address before we hire her. I thank you so much for your time. Can you give us a few minutes? Wait outside. Now pretty much verbatim. That's how the meeting went. I had her step outside and I spoke to my crew and I said, look, before we hire her, there's a few issues we have before we hire a consultant.
00:01:24.160Before we hire this person. So we got to get clear on our outcome before hiring a consultant. Why are we doing this? What questions are we trying to get answered? Because if you don't have that in place, they're going to triple the workload. Oh, you also don't have this because their job is to constantly throw out problems. Oh my gosh, this is a very bad problem because 73.8% of companies that hired this, you know, they throw these numbers out there and look, oh my gosh, panic, fear. This is terrible. You know, it causes big companies to go out of business. That's their job to do that. Right?
00:01:54.160Most fear. Here's how I can help. It's a very simple Hegelian, you know, whatever you want to call it, tactic that works. And a lot of these guys do that job. Attorneys, if you don't get this wording right, you could get sued. And I've seen companies go out of business. You're going to hear that a lot as a CEO founder and they put so much fear in you. Relax. It's okay. Unless if you have a crisis, it's a different story, but you want to be in anticipation preparation game. Most important thing before hiring a consultant, CPA attorney, any of these guys, engineers, you got to get very, very crystal clear.
00:02:24.160Clear on what you want. Even before asking these 10 questions, you got to get clear what you want. So if you have that in place, then let's get into the 10 questions. So the first question I ask is, listen, before you give us advice, what made you an expert to be able to give us advice on what we need to do? Will we pay you money for the advice? What was it? Where did you work at? What did you learn? What have you seen? What have you built? How high did you move up in your career before you chose to become a consultant? Because sometimes there's different kinds of consultants.
00:02:53.260There's those consultants who work at a company for a while. They burn out. They don't want a W-2. They just choose to be 1099 and they want to do some work on the side and be free. I literally had a consultant that he became a consultant because he wants to sale and that's all he wants to do. So he takes a few clients per year, doesn't want to be a millionaire. He's good with that. There's also some consultants because they got fired because they were not the best of employees and they went through a lot of different companies. So then they become consultants.
00:03:23.260They know what they do and these are the guys that are workers. They're going to do their part and they're going to earn their money when they work with you. You're trying to find them. So I ask that question to see where their credibility comes from to give me advice and our team advice about what we need to do next.
00:03:36.800So the second question is, why did you become a consultant? And I want to hear clues. I want to hear why they became that. Well, it became because I saw so many different companies being taken advantage of and I wanted to find that. I said, give me some stories.
00:03:50.680It's like whatever they say, whatever answer they give. So many times, CEOs and entrepreneurs or executives that are about to hire them because sometimes you're a CFO, CEO, COO or CMO, you're hiring a consultant from sometimes even a CEO is not involved. But sometimes you ask that question. It's a good question to ask. They give a response. You don't respond back. Then you don't have a real answer. You don't have all the details. So you give that question. They give their answer. Then you go deeper and say, why? Tell me more. Why is that? How about this?
00:04:20.220What happened here? You got to go deeper to see if there's any areas where you're like, ah, no way in the world. We're going to spend $180,000 on you. In my mind, boom, checked off. I don't even need to go to the rest of the questions because I'm clear this is just not going to work out. Or wow, that's so impressive. You worked here. Can you show me story? There's their idea. Yes. Very impressed. So some things will either lead you to being a little bit worried yourself or some things you'll go down and you're like, wow, this is pretty impressive. I want to go more.
00:04:47.220So question number three is asking them about their experience with a company like ours or an issue that you're facing. What kind of success have you had trying to solve this following issue or address the following request that we have for you? Right now, why do you ask that question? Because sometimes consultants may have had success with a company trying to solve an issue that has nothing to do with the issue you're trying to solve.
00:05:08.920It's almost like going to a dermatologist trying to ask about your lungs, which you need to sit with maybe a pulmonologist or a laryngologist or a complete different field, right? Both are doctors, but their specialty is a different place. The same goes with consultant.
00:05:23.120A consultant isn't good at every aspect of the company's problems that you're facing. So you ask specifically, this is what we're trying to solve.
00:05:31.280You will recommend it to us by this place, and we would like to know, tell us one specific expertise you had in solving this issue. If they have it, ask us for multiple different stories and let them see what they can tell you about it.
00:05:42.720Number four, tell me about your most successful client you've ever had. What do you mean? Who's your most successful client you've ever had? And they're going to tell you their story.
00:05:49.060Well, I've had this client, you know, for working with me, they've got an 83% retention. They'll throw some numbers, which none of it you can measure, because anytime you say, how do you measure that number? And can I see data on that?
00:05:58.760Well, I have an NDA signed with a company that I can't really show you. That's typically where it's going to go to. But it's very easy if they say that.
00:06:04.260You're hoping to get great clients, three good stories of clients. Then you ask, can I call them?
00:06:09.080Yeah, sure. They're either going to give you the answer. Sure, you can call them. Or, well, there's some, you know, legal stuff that we can't contact them because of direct...
00:06:19.780Okay, that's a red flag to me. But if they'll tell you, sure, and then who can I call? Can I speak to the CEO? Can I speak to the CFO? Who was it?
00:06:27.480Yeah, no problem. And then you go do your research on who you call on credibility. Again, you're going to go out and find out who it is.
00:06:32.680You're hoping they're right. You're not trying to be like a detective to see if they're wrong.
00:06:36.240You are hoping they're right, but at the same time, you have to realize you've got to do the follow-up and do your own due diligence to see what they say about the experience
00:06:42.400and see if the numbers that they gave is close, and they'll verify to say, yes, it was 83%.
00:06:48.780Then you've got to do a little bit of legwork on your end.
00:06:51.620So then the follow-up question is a tough one to ask. Most CEOs, founders have a hard time asking this question, or even executives have a hard time asking this question
00:06:57.620because it's kind of a little bit offensive. Here's what the question is.
00:07:00.380And you open it up, preface it very easily. Listen, we've been in business for a while, and we've been doing this.
00:07:05.920A lot of things we do right, but God knows we've done a lot of things wrong that didn't work out for us.
00:07:10.220So having said that, what were the three clients that you had that ended up becoming a failure that the results weren't met?
00:07:16.540What were they and why? And let them tell the story. And sometimes they'll tell their story.
00:07:21.980Guaranteed you're going to hear one of the stories being this way. Here's how the story goes.
00:07:24.740Well, the CEO wasn't willing to take the counsel that I gave them, and because of that, it led to dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
00:07:31.500One of the stories they tell you is going to be this. I'm not interested in that story because I do know what it is to have a stubborn CEO or stubborn executive or all that other stuff
00:07:38.360that they don't want any kind of counsel. That's very common.
00:07:41.240The story I want to hear about is what they did wrong that they could have done differently.
00:07:46.760Now, what am I looking for? You know what's crazy about what I'm looking for?
00:07:50.820Just the fact that they're not afraid of telling the truth gives me trust that I can do business with them.
00:07:56.260It's amazing. Just the fact that they sell something like this.
00:07:59.480I'm not going to lie to you. There was this one client that we had, and here's what we did, and we didn't do the right work.
00:08:04.620We should have gone this route, but we went this route, and it didn't end up working out for us with that client.
00:08:08.700We liked them a lot. We were really hoping to come through, but it didn't happen.
00:08:11.440That was about seven years ago, and here's what we learned from it.
00:08:13.320What we learned from it is the fact that that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that.
00:08:16.300And so the next client that we faced that had the similar issue, when we made that decision this way, we did it this way,
00:08:21.520and the results ended up being this way, and I have to tell you, even though that was a bad mistake,
00:08:25.480I'm so glad that we went through because of it. It made us a bit of a consultant.
00:08:29.160You see what I'm saying? See that approach? I'm looking for that. That's all I'm looking for.
00:08:34.060But if the consultant, the attorney, the engineer, whoever you're hiring, the accountant,
00:08:39.520cannot tell you a bad experience that they had, or their fault, it was their fault that they did,
00:08:45.040that you're dealing with an organization that whatever you do is going to be your fault, your fault, your fault,
00:08:48.180that they're not going to take responsibility, and I don't typically do business with people like that.
00:08:51.940I want to know how somebody that's made mistakes, that they're willing to say,
00:08:54.680here's a mistake I made, here's what we learned from it, here's how we're improving, it's not going to happen to you.
00:08:58.700So, then the last question within that part, it's still on the same question as,
00:09:02.860can I call the CEO? And if they say yes, check mark. They're so brave.
00:09:08.020Most of the time, I won't even call them. I'm just trying to see how brave they are that if I can't call the CEO.
00:09:12.680If they say yes, no problem, credibility goes to the roof with me.
00:09:16.120So the next three questions is all about accountability, on how to hold them accountable.
00:09:19.540And the one question I ask is, how do we measure success with you?
00:09:22.620Let me explain to you what I mean by this John Mary Johnson Consulting firm.
00:09:26.300So, say we're done with the project. I'm very happy. I tell the world about it.
00:09:31.080I go online, whatever site it is that you want me to write a review, and I tell them how amazing you are,
00:09:35.220so you get more business, because I want more CEOs and founders to know,
00:09:38.940consultants like you that say what they're going to do, and they come through.
00:09:41.880Everybody wants to know. But what do we also do to prevent my frustration,
00:09:45.900our team's frustration of saying, I want to go write a review,
00:09:48.480because I think other people need to know how you didn't come through,
00:09:51.580and so you're held accountable, so other CEOs and founders don't waste their hard-earned money
00:09:55.640on a project that didn't come through.
00:09:57.340So how do we measure success with you?
00:09:59.320And then they'll tell you whatever they're going to tell you.
00:10:01.120Then it leads me to the next part, which is, give me a time frame.
00:10:05.560Say we move on here, give me a time frame on what you think is going to be taking place.
00:10:09.440Give me when we're going to have this part done, phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four.
00:10:13.180And maybe they'll say, we need more time to put this together for you.
00:10:15.600No problem. And again, that's another phase for them to have to come back to you