American View: Why would you hire an inexperienced novice to “fix” your business?

Responsible Business22 Jul 2025

There’s something to be said about hiring £500/hour shiny-suit consultants fresh out of university to change how you do business. Specifically, it’s “NO!” and “[BLEEP] off!” If you’re an executive and you’re truly desperate to empty your cash reserves with no expectation of getting anything back for it, just give the money to your employees. They’ll spend your cash on drinks, thereby raising morale. Giving shedloads of cash to Top Tier™ consultants instead is a criminal waste of money (that could be put to better use nearly anywhere else).

I write about this subject a lot. Mostly because I was one of these slime weasels for a spell. After I mustered off active duty, I took a consulting position at one of the big, name brand, consulting firms. It took less than ten minutes on my first day to realize what a terrible mistake I’d made. These firms were no place for a vertebrate. You were expected to siphon every possible dollar out of your clients’ accounts and leave them with nothing to show for the effort.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when my readers sometimes reach out and share their own Horrible Consultant Stories™ with me. Another such tragic story fell into my lap over the weekend … and I figured it would be cathartic to share the funnier parts of the story with y’all. This story’s teller – we’ll call her Bob, per tradition – is a retail clerk at a small speciality shop. She’d been employed with the company for ten years and is one of her location’s top sellers. If anyone knows how best to position the stock to catch customers’ attention, it’s Bob.

Earlier this week, Bob shared a story with me and some mates about how her store is being set up for failure. It seems that the big wigs at corporate HQ got it in their heads that they need to “re-focus” on their “core demographic” to “reduce overhead” by “eliminating non-competitive SKUs.” Translating that from corpo-speak to plain English, the Chief Whatever Officers want to stop wasting their efforts trying to sell simple commodity goods that can be bought nearly anywhere else at a more competitive price. Sure, boss-men. That makes sense.

Why would anyone pay more to buy from your little store when the big-box retail chain down the street had it cheaper? C’mon, man…

Rather than pursue this goal from a pragmatic angle (i.e., stop buying the non-competitive items and clearance what’s already in store inventory) these fellas somehow decided that a COMPLETE MAKEOVER!!!TM of all the retail storefronts was needed. Why just manage your inventory pragmatically when you can inject chaos and inconvenience in every store nationwide? Of course that’ll boost morale and sales! Because … magic? Must be an MBA thing. I don’t get it.

The resulting “plan” was a mishmash of seemingly random (and mandatory!) changes dictated to every location. For example, store managers were required to take down all the existing garment racks for their speciality clothing and to instead fold all the clothing for shelf storage, effective immediately. This made no sense, since one of the big draws of their retail outlets was helping customers find the right size and version of their work uniforms … something best attempted by searching through easily inspected hanging garments. Why change something obvious and useful to something actively counterproductive?

I’m so glad you asked! According to Bob’s store manager, corporate HQ had recently contracted an outside consulting firm to provide them with “expert guidance” on how to lower costs and increase sales. To be clear, we’re not talking about seasoned veterans from the retail sales sector; instead, the Gods of HQ hired the aforementioned £500/hour shiny-suit consultants fresh out of university to share their … … “expert advice.” While these consultants might be perfectly lovely people, these were still kids who had never worked in their industry in general and had probably never worked in retail at all. No matter how nice or educated or professional the consultants were, their “expert guidance” was utterly valueless.

*sigh*

Another one of the mandatory “improvements” that Bob wasted last week attempting to implement was a new method of showcasing clothing accessories on their slatwall-type display cabinets. The consultants sent boxes of new hooks to each store to make better use of the existing stations … but didn’t bother to check if their new hooks were compatible with the legacy equipment. Bob tried her best to jury rig the new hooks to fit and finally gave up. It might have been a joke, but I suspect from how she ended the story that her shift leader sold all the new hooks to a scrap metal dealer out of spite.

I can’t imagine what happened to the proceeds of that measly sale. No idea.

Bob shared several more such stories with us, but I’ll save those for another day. The core issue Bob was fighting was the impact of “expert decisions” that had been made by completely unqualified (but arrogant) outsiders who had no stake in their own decisions. The £500/hour shiny-suit consultants fresh out of university were getting paid to come up with plans; once the “experts” issued their orders, they got paid … and they left. There was no way to hold them accountable for any of the mistakes they made. As far as the consultants were concerned, the engagement was a success.

To make things worse, the executives who had hired those bloody £500/hour shiny-suit consultants fresh out of university would never admit that they’d made a mistake. Their public image as Infallible God-Kings of Retail™ would be tarnished if they admitted that they’d made an easily preventable mistake and received a useless product. So, they pretended everything was fine and blamed all the inevitable lost revenue on the store managers, claiming that the line-level workers hadn’t been “loyal enough” to carry out their brilliant change orders faithfully. Utter hogwash, but typical.

I remember those days. I hated those jobs. Every time we showed up at a client site and learned that some director or partner or sales weasel had sold the client an unattainable fantasy, us grunts had to pull off a miracle or else deliver the garbage specified in the contract and leave the client irate. It was humiliating, more so when we had empathy for the grunts who were expected to make use of whatever nonsense we’d given them. Which was most of the time.

Later on, when I joined the consulting group at Yahoo! Broadcast, we chose to always put the client’s needs over our own sales weasels’ promises. Our first question to every client was “what do you think you purchased in this engagement.” Every answer they gave us had to be addressed with “No, you didn’t buy that. So, let’s see how we can get you what you want and need regardless of what the contract language says.” We refused to cheat our customers.

… and this red line shows exactly when your idiot boss screwed y’all over by purchasing something that only exists in comic books. So, here’s what we can do …

I feel bad for Bob and her retail crew at the local store. They’ve been dealt a crap hand and are being threatened with vague consequences if they don’t – somehow – get every change implemented according to the new miracle “plan” that can’t be made to work. It’s an awful position to be in. I wished her luck because there was nothing I could do to help.

So, if you’re an executive and you’re considering hiring a flock of £500/hour shiny-suit consultants fresh out of university to “improve” your business operations, I have some important, potentially life-saving advice for you: DON’T!

To be fair, it’s okay to hire outsiders to give you fresh ideas. Just remember that you have your own subject matter experts in-house. Leverage them to ensure that every idea coming from the shiny suit brigade is evaluated for sanity. Never assign an impossible task to your workers. If the degradation of good order and discipline that will inevitably result doesn’t dissuade you, then consider how easy it is for these angry line workers to find DIY guillotine plans on the internet.

Yes, the economy is in [BLEEP!] shape and everyone in the U.S.A. is desperate to stay employed. That doesn’t mean that you can get away with abusive stupidity. Well … you can … for a while. Just not forever. Eventually, if you keep this nonsense up, someone below you is going to run out of patience and “engineer a vacancy.”