Small business advisors

The useful ones narrow your options. If you leave a session with more things to consider than you arrived with, something went wrong.

What an advisor is for

Three things, honestly: pattern recognition from having seen your situation before, a decision you have been avoiding, and an outside read on whether the thing you believe about your business is true.

What they are not for is doing the work. An advisor who ends up executing is a contractor with a worse title and a higher rate.

How to tell a good one in one meeting

They ask about numbers before they propose anything. They tell you which of your problems is not worth solving. They say "I do not know" at least once. And they can name the engagement's end — a good advisor is working toward not being needed.

The warning signs are equally reliable: a proposal before a diagnosis, a methodology with a trademark, and an inability to name a client who did not need the full programme.

What it should cost, and who pays

Advisory is priced by the hour, the day, or the project, and the project price is the only one aligned with your interests. An hourly advisor is paid for time; a project advisor is paid for an outcome.

In Canada much of the training component is subsidised. Provincial job grants reimburse employers for training staff — commonly up to $10,000 per employee — and they are non-repayable. The constraint is sequencing: the claim has to be approved before the work starts, which is why most of this money goes unclaimed.

Where we fit

We do one thing: pick a workflow your team does by hand, automate it end to end, and train the people who will own it afterwards. We are not general management consultants, we do not sell transformation programmes, and if the honest answer is that an off-the-shelf product already does what you need, the audit will name the product.