A friend in nonprofit leadership reached out recently, weighing the trade offs between a national firm and a local one for their strategic planning process. I gave my honest opinion, which — full disclosure — comes from someone who runs a small local practice and therefore has approximately zero objectivity on the question. But it got me thinking about the broader themes, which show up in every field I work in.
Whether you're hiring a consultant, a business broker, or anyone else you're bringing in to help with decisions that matter, the selection criteria are more similar than you'd expect. And most of them have very little to do with the size of the firm or the weight of the resumé.
Strategy travels. Sector expertise doesn't (at least as much as you'd think).
There's a tendency to look for someone who has worked in your exact space — your industry, your issue area, your business model. But the core questions any organization faces are remarkably consistent: where to focus, how to grow sustainably, how to make hard trade-offs when money and staff are limited, what to stop doing. The foundational questions don't change much between a manufacturing company and a food bank. You're the expert on your work. What you're hiring is a different kind of expertise.
Ask what you'll walk away with.
Some processes are designed to produce an impressive document. Others are designed to produce action. Ask directly what the deliverable looks like and what happens after it lands. If the answer involves a lot of description of the process and not much about what you'll do differently in six months, that's worth noticing. A plan that makes the people in the room feel accomplished and the annual report look good — but that doesn’t move the needle on community impact — is an expensive way to spend your organization’s time and money.
Watch how they behave before you're a client.
This is the most reliable signal available to you, and it's free. How someone handles the discovery call, whether they follow up when they said they would, whether they answer the question you actually asked — all of it is a preview. The initial conversations are often when a person is trying hardest to impress. If things slip at that stage, they almost never tighten up later.
Look for humility and a willingness to learn.
The advisors worth hiring share a few traits that are hard to fake: They listen more than they talk in early conversations. They treat you as the expert on your own organization, because you are. They're curious, and not just prescriptive — willing to learn something from you rather than just fitting your situation into the framework they already had.
Local matters more than people think.
Back to my friend's original question, and back to my complete lack of objectivity.
A national firm brings scale and a refined process. Sometimes that's exactly right. But a firm that already understands your community — the funders, the other organizations, the local economic reality, who knows whom — brings context that no amount of process design can replace.
There's also a practical difference in attention. At a smaller local practice, you're a client. At a large firm, you may be an account, staffed by whoever is available, running through a template that has worked well enough elsewhere.
And there's the money. Dollars spent locally tend to stay local. For organizations that care about community impact, that's not a small consideration.
Look for someone who cares about what you're doing.
This one is softer than the rest, and it shouldn't substitute for competence. But ask what draws them to the work. The answer will tell you a lot.
When an advisor is genuinely connected to your mission — when they find the work interesting, when they share something of your values — you get a different level of effort. Not because they're working harder on paper, but because they'll push a little further to get you a good outcome, because the outcome means something to them.
The alternative is being a line item. Competent, professionally handled, and entirely transactional. That's fine for some kinds of work. For a decision that shapes the next several years of your organization, it's worth finding someone who wants to see you succeed for reasons beyond the invoice.
