How to tell whether your advisor is actually worth it
I am one, so this is written against my own interest, and that is the reason to trust it. If you pay somebody for advice you should be able to say at the end of a year whether it was worth the money. Most people cannot, and most advisors quietly prefer it that way.
This is written against my own interest, which is the reason to trust it. If you are paying someone for advice, you should be able to say at the end of a year whether it was worth the money. Most people cannot, and most advisors quietly prefer it that way.
The problem nobody in this industry wants to solve
You cannot cleanly prove what an advisor caused. If the business grew, it might have grown anyway. If it shrank, the market might have done that. Both sides know it, which is why the conversation at renewal usually turns into a feelings contest that whoever is more confident wins.
The fix is not better arguing at the end. It is four things agreed at the start, none of which are difficult, and all of which somebody avoiding accountability will resist.
The four things to agree at the start
Lock the baseline before anything starts
Write down what the business is doing now, both parties sign it, and timestamp it. Everything afterwards is measured against that. No signed baseline means no honest claim later, in either direction.
What to watch for
An advisor who does not want a baseline is telling you something. It is the single cheapest step here and the only one that has to happen before the work rather than after.
Make the baseline a trend, not a flat line
If you were already growing, the honest comparison is against where that growth would have taken you, not against a frozen number. Otherwise your own momentum gets counted as somebody else's contribution.
What to watch for
This cuts both ways, and here is the part most people miss: on a declining business a trend line extrapolates downward and hands the advisor a floor that falls every year, which is the same trick pointed the other way. The honest rule is to project what would genuinely have happened without them, then take the more conservative of the two options and say out loud which one you picked and why.
Keep an intervention ledger
One running list: what was done, what mechanism it was supposed to work through, which metric moved, roughly what that is worth, and the date. Built the system, so the owner stopped doing reconciliation by hand, so six hours a week came back, so that is worth this much a year.
What to watch for
The ledger is the evidence file if a number ever gets challenged. It is also the thing that stops a year of work turning into a vague story reconstructed in December, which is how most engagements get remembered and why most get renewed or cancelled for the wrong reasons.
Share one number, monthly
Both parties looking at the same chart: the baseline trend, the actual line, and the gap between them, with the interventions from the ledger marked against the curve.
What to watch for
The point of doing it monthly is that there is no reconstruction fight at the end, because there is nothing to reconstruct. If you are only seeing numbers at renewal, the numbers are being selected for you.
What to watch in year one, when the money has not moved yet
Financial results lag the work that produces them, often by a year or more. That gap is where dishonest engagements hide, and it is also where honest ones get cancelled unfairly. So track the mechanism rather than only the outcome.
- Owner hours trending down, measured rather than estimated.
- A genuine second in command developing, with outcomes they own rather than tasks they do.
- System adoption, meaning things are actually being used in a normal week rather than merely built.
- How much of your recurring decision-making is now written down somewhere other than your head.
If none of these are moving after six months, the financials are unlikely to move later, and that is a conversation worth having early rather than at renewal.
The accountability rule, stated plainly
If a business stagnates or declines over more than a year while the advice was followed, that is on the advisor. If it declines while the advice was ignored, that is information pointing somewhere else rather than an indictment of the role.
Both halves of that need to be true for it to be fair, and an advisor should be willing to say the first half out loud before you sign anything.
Five questions worth asking before you hire anyone
- 01What baseline are we measuring against, and will you sign it?
- 02What would have to be true in twelve months for you to tell me this did not work?
- 03What are you tracking in the first six months, before the financials could possibly move?
- 04When do I see numbers, and are they the same numbers you see?
- 05What does it look like if you are wrong, and what happens then?
The answers matter less than whether the questions are welcome. Anyone who is comfortable being measured will find these easy, and anyone who is not will find them rude.
Hold me to this
Everything on this page is what I am willing to be measured by, and the strategy call is where the baseline conversation starts. It is free and you keep the plan either way. If you are not ready for that, the community costs nothing.