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By Mario Peshev, DevriX
You have inherited a team, a burn rate, and a thesis. Somewhere in the deal model there is a line that assumes this company gets more valuable, and right now you are the person who has to decide whether the advisors already circling the business are helping you hit that line or quietly eroding it. That is a different problem than the one a first-time founder faces. You are not learning the craft. You are underwriting it.
Bringing in outside help can be expensive, and when it works it moves the number that matters at exit. The right advisors and private equity consultants earn their fee by doing things that show up in EBITDA, cash flow, or diligence readiness:
- Providing expert advisory, mentoring and assistance in a specific market
- Assessing risks and identifying problems before they surface in diligence
- Providing leadership or support to existing staff so key-person risk drops
- Planning on new initiatives that carry a return, not just activity
- Providing objectivity in decision-making the deal team cannot supply from inside
- Training employees so capability stays after the engagement ends
- Refining the organizational model to remove cost and friction
- Developing a feasible business plan the LPs and the lender will actually believe
- Networking with potential clients and influencers that feed the growth case
Finding one is not the hard part. There are more than 600,000 management consultants in the United States alone. Choosing the right business consultant for a company you are accountable for is the hard part, and the difference between a good pick and a bad one lands squarely on your return.
Are you trying to fix a portfolio company facing the biggest challenges a growing company hits during a hold period?
Then hire deliberately, because the wrong advisor on a value-creation plan is not a wasted invoice, it is a missed year you do not get back before the clock runs out on the fund.
If this is the first advisor you are bringing into this asset, get clear on your standards first, and get clear on what questions to ask a consultant before a single scope document is signed.
The following is a list of questions to ask a business advisor that tell you whether the person in front of you will move enterprise value or just bill against it.
1. How Many Years of Experience Do You Have?
Most people would say it is not about quantity but quality. In a portfolio context that is only half true, because tenure is a proxy for how many hold-period fires the person has already put out on someone else’s clock.
The length of someone’s track record tells you more than a number. It tells you:
- The consultant’s firm resolve to stay in this specific field for a long time
- Proficiency with the technical know-how and dynamics of consulting
- Exposure to several networking activities with people from all walks of life
- How lucrative the job is for the consultant to continually want to be in this business
Most importantly, years in the field mean the advisor has lived through the mistakes you cannot afford to fund. When you build your business consultant interview questions, put tenure early, and pressure-test it: ask for the specific engagements, the specific outcomes, and what broke. The decision this drives is simple. If the answer is all years and no scars, keep looking.
2. Do You Have Client Testimonials?
An advisor is only as good as the results their clients will put their name behind.
That is why we maintain a list of success stories at Growth Shuttle.
Generic praise is worth nothing to you. A testimonial that says the advisor was pleasant tells you nothing you can underwrite. What you want is a reference that names the situation, the intervention, and the movement in a number: churn down, gross margin up, a covenant that stopped being at risk. The more specific the testimonial, the more it functions like evidence rather than a marketing line.
Among your questions to ask a business consultant, this is the one where you insist on talking to a real portfolio operator who used them, not a curated quote. The information you get from that call might just be the deal-maker if you still have doubts.
The decision it drives: if no client will get on the phone and describe a concrete result, treat every claim on their site as unproven and price the risk accordingly.
Your best bet is finding a skilled consultant with a successful track record of working with similar businesses to yours.
3. What Kind of Assessment Do You Plan on Conducting?
An evidence-based read on where this company actually stands is only possible with a thorough assessment, and in a hold period that read is your baseline for everything you measure the advisor against later.
Never rely on the seller’s narrative or the prior owner’s dashboard alone, because both were built to flatter.
Among the different types of assessment a good advisor should conduct are:
- needs assessment
- organizational assessment
- operational assessment
- individual assessment
- goal assessment
- business plan assessment
Knowing ahead of time what kind of assessment a consultant plans lets you prepare the data room and the management team instead of scrambling.
Some assessments are intrusive enough to rattle a fragile management team mid-integration, so discuss the depth and timing before it starts.
Some need cross-functional participation, so you can warn department heads about what to expect once the advisor is onboarded.
Hold this standard: the advisor should hand you a defined baseline and a method for re-measuring it. If they cannot tell you how they will know whether they worked, they are selling activity, not outcome, and you should not sign.
4. What Is Your Availability Like?
In a perfect world you would want an advisor who picks up during a weekend fire drill. Who wouldn’t. But availability is really a question about whether this person has the bandwidth to matter to a company on a clock.
A healthy working relationship rests on a clear understanding of, and respect for, availability on both sides. Most senior operators are mature enough, work several well-paid engagements, or hold corporate roles that are less demanding. There are part-time advisors, too, and part-time is fine as long as it is honest.
Ask this upfront, especially if integration or a turnaround will need real-time decisions. The tricky part is that you also have to set fair expectations about how much of the advisor’s week you are actually buying.
Different specialties handle this differently. IT and engineering advisors are often used to higher availability given the nature of the work, from keeping systems up to holiday deployment schedules. That matters more than usual when you are carrying platform risk into diligence.
How an advisor treats time is a tell for how they will run inside your company. The decision: if you cannot get a straight answer on hours and response times before the contract, assume the worst version and staff around it or walk.
5. How Much Is Your Consulting Fee?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, consultants make an average of $150,000 per year, or $62.93 per hour. That said, this involves full-time roles.
Part-time consultants charge a lot more.
Below are the fee methods and the percentages of consultants who favor them (Source: Consulting Success).
You are not really asking about the rate. You are asking about the return on the rate. A fee is only expensive relative to the value it fails to create, and a cheap advisor who moves nothing is the most expensive line in the budget. Compare the asking fee against the market so you know whether you are being overcharged, then compare it against the enterprise value at stake so you know whether the debate even matters.
Generally, advisors charge on one of the following pricing structures:
- Hourly rate
- Daily rate
- Monthly retainer
- Project-based rate
Where you can, push toward structures that tie a meaningful slice of the fee to a defined outcome rather than to hours logged, because hours logged is the vendor’s incentive, not yours.
The decision this drives: set the budget against the value-creation line in your model, not against a comparison to other consultants. If the fee is small next to the value at stake and the advisor can name that value, price stops being the deciding factor.
The answers to these questions will help provide hindsight into what challenges took place and how your consultant has dealt with.
6. Have You Already Authored Any Books?
A book gives an advisor authority and bolsters credibility, but for you it is more useful as a window into how they think.
A book shows you the advisor’s actual strategies and how they approach a class of problem before you hand them one of yours. It is a cheap way to sample judgment.
If the book landed with the market, that is a mild signal in their favor. If it reveals a way of reasoning that clashes with how your fund operates, that is a useful signal too, and better learned now than three months into a retainer.
The decision: treat published thinking as free due diligence. Read it before the interview, and use it to sharpen your business consulting questionnaire so you are testing their real method, not their pitch.
7. Are You a Member of Any Professional Association?
If the advisor works under a firm, they are most likely affiliated with an association of some kind, and affiliations give you references you can check for character and standing during a background check.
Among the advantages when an advisor belongs to a reputable association:
- You can get access to tools and resources they hold exclusively through the organization
- The advisor keeps growing under the guidance of senior peers
- There are networking opportunities that can link your portfolio company with others
I’ve been involved in several professional networks such as EBAN and multiple startup communities. Networking is integral to delivering higher value, connecting with other industry peers, and providing services through partners.
Among your questions to ask a small business consultant working with your lower-middle-market assets, affiliation is a quick screen for reputational risk. The decision: use memberships as a reference trail, not as proof of competence, and verify at least one. Consulting Success has curated a list of consulting and business associations worth checking:
8. What Has Been Your Biggest Success as a Consultant?
Success stories are useful when you interrogate them instead of admiring them.
Ask an advisor about their most successful engagement and you learn more than a highlight reel. You learn their:
- list of accomplishments
- strategies and specialties
- values
Why values? The advisor could point to a professional feat, a company problem solved, or a management conflict resolved. What they reach for first tells you what they actually optimize for, and you want that to be enterprise value, not their own resume.
- Is it their own professional achievement or a contribution to a company?
- Has it been a long time since they did something significant?
- Do they have the motivation to solve problems?
Get specific and make them answer in terms of:
- nature of the task
- goals set
- actions taken
The decision this drives: score the answer on whether they can attach a number and a mechanism to the win. A story with no measurable result is a story, and you are not funding stories.
9. What Has Been Your Biggest Failure?
Just as you want to know an advisor’s biggest success, you want their biggest failure, because it exposes strengths and weaknesses the success story hides.
You should care most about how they turned it around, or admitted they could not.
This is a tricky question and a revealing one. It shows whether the advisor bounces back and, more importantly, whether they can look at a bad outcome with enough objectivity to extract a lesson. An advisor who has never failed has either not done much or will not tell you the truth, and both are problems in a hold period where surprises are expensive.
The question is usually followed by “how did you deal with it?”
The answers help you see what went wrong and, if you ever face the same business challenges inside your portfolio, whether this person learned the lessons you need them to have already paid for. The decision: reject the candidate who cannot name a real failure. That answer is a diligence risk wearing a confident smile.
10. Do You Use a Formal Program to Help Your Clients or Do You Come Up With It as You Go Along?
In a portfolio you are buying repeatability, not improvisation. A formal program is what lets you run the same playbook across two, three, five companies. This question is another way to ask:
- – Are you prepared as an advisor to train and hand over?
- – Do you have the necessary tools and resources?
- – Can you outline your own programs?
- – Have you thought about equipping the management team for the challenges coming their way?
The answer usually arrives as a proposal or portfolio outlining what they can do. Ask it anyway, against whatever document they present, because a documented method is the difference between capability that stays after the engagement and a dependency you have to keep paying for. The decision: favor the advisor with a repeatable playbook you can port to the next asset, and discount the one whose value walks out the door with them.
11. What Is Your Core Business Specialty?
There are several types of business advisors or consultants. Specializations overlap, the way management consultants overlap with operations or strategy advisors, but overlap is not the same as fit, and fit against your specific thesis is what you are buying.
For those who want a comprehensive foundation in core business disciplines, the book Critical Business Skills for Success by Clinton O. Longenecker can be a valuable companion. This well-regarded course, presented by a team of professors from prestigious universities, explores five key areas critical to business acumen: strategy, operations, finance and accounting, organizational behavior, and marketing. Equipping you with not only key terms and methodologies but also real-world case studies, Critical Business Skills for Success can serve as a springboard for your understanding of the intricate dance that makes businesses thrive.
An advisor may profile in several specialties, but this question clarifies how confident they are in their core area and whether they can back it up under pressure.
For example, if you are carrying platform risk, you might be looking for an IT consultant. When you interview for that role, you want to know if they can handle strategy, procurement, and management, not just the wiring of the systems, because the EBITDA impact lives in those decisions, not in the config.
This is one of the questions to ask a management consultant that separates the generalist from the person who has actually run your kind of problem to a result. The decision: match specialty to the single largest lever in your value-creation plan, and let the candidate who owns that lever rise to the top of the list.
Once you search for “business advisor,” “management consultant,” or a relevant term, you can gather a couple of dozen professionals offering one-off or ongoing services. But how do you vet them?
Here is my own simple checklist I use before reaching out for help in a niche area.
It reflects the feedback I receive from my own clients, too.
What to Inspect Before You Fund Another Engagement
Here is the section written for the person who signs the check on the fund’s behalf. Before you renew a retainer or greenlight a new scope inside a portfolio company, inspect the advisory relationship the way you would inspect any other line that consumes cash and promises return.
Start with the baseline. What number was this advisor hired to move, and where did it stand the day they arrived? If nobody can answer that with a period, a baseline, and a method, you are not measuring impact, you are measuring invoices. That is the single most common failure I see when a fund inherits an advisory relationship it did not originate.
Then separate what is real from what is merely promised. Force every claimed win into one of a few honest buckets. Some value is realized and already in the P&L. Some is run-rate, true going forward but not yet banked. Some is only forecast or enabled, a possibility the work created but has not delivered. And some is risk avoided, a diligence problem defused before a buyer could price it against you. All four are legitimate. What is not legitimate is letting a forecast wear the clothes of a realized result in a board deck, because that is how a fund talks itself into a fee that never earned out.
What good looks like is concrete. The advisor hands your operating partner a repeatable playbook, not a personality the company now depends on. Adoption is visible inside the management team rather than confined to the advisor’s own hours. The reporting ties to a metric your CFO already trusts, so forecast reliability improves instead of degrading. And the work reduces a named risk that a future buyer would otherwise discount at exit, whether that is customer concentration, key-person exposure, or a platform that cannot survive diligence.
What it costs when it is wrong is not the fee. The fee is the small number. The real cost is a hold period spent on motion that never touched the value-creation line, a management team trained to lean on an outsider who leaves, and a diligence process where the buyer finds the risk you paid someone to close and reprices the whole deal around it. On a levered asset with a defined exit window, a wasted year is far more expensive than any invoice.
This is exactly where good private equity consultants earn their keep and bad ones quietly cost you the multiple. The decision this inspection drives is binary. If the advisory relationship has a baseline, a repeatable method, measurable adoption, and a clear line to enterprise value, fund the next phase and consider porting the playbook across the portfolio. If it does not, cut it now, keep the knowledge in-house, and redeploy the budget against the lever that actually moves the exit.
Can Business Consultants Genuinely Help?
There is an untapped market for advisory services out there. I’ve met dozens of business consultants and advisors over the past 6 years, but it’s almost impossible to find them online unless they network in the same circles you do.
If you look up car rentals, real estate deals, or insurance plans, the first 10 results will be businesses offering the services you need. The market is so saturated that you have to be really specific, including area and other filters, to sift through the available companies.
Ever tried to look up “business advisor” online?
Here’s a snapshot of the first ten headlines Google returns at the moment:
- What is a business advisor and how can you hire the right one?
- How to become a business adviser
- Business advisor job description
- Business advisor: job description, requirements and career information
- Business adviser job profile
- Who is a business advisor?
- How to use a business advisor for your startup
- You should be a business advisor
- Get the right advisors for growth
- 4 key qualities to look for in a small business advisor
Did you notice that NONE of these results is a service offered by an actual advisor?
I’ve spent a lot of time researching “competitors” to uncover lead generation pieces and landing pages prospects look for. When you discard the enterprise-grade consultancies like Deloitte or Accenture, it’s almost impossible to find advisors via standard practices. That opacity is exactly why choosing the right business consultant for a portfolio company is harder than it should be, and why your own network and structured reference calls matter more than any search result.
So it turns out most advisors don’t promote their services actively and only rely on their internal network. The caveat: anyone can call themselves an advisor and claim they’ve worked miracles, and it is hard to prove yourself. For a fund, that means the questions to ask a value creation consultant before hiring have to do the work that a saturated, verifiable market would otherwise do for you.
Most advisors niche down into a type and focus on their core skill set.
As a client, I’ve also used advisors for specific skill sets: management, sales, marketing, finances, legal. Your best bet is to find a skilled consultant with a successful track record of working with businesses similar to yours.
Since they have already faced the same challenges, the relationship can move faster, which is exactly what a hold period needs.
Two things still decide the outcome:
- Finding a great consultant or advisor is genuinely hard and requires due diligence.
- Building a relationship based on trust is crucial.
If you disagree with your advisor from the start, it is not necessarily their fault. But if you leave a meeting with homework, you have to follow it closely, because that is the only way the business strategy gets tested against reality. In a portfolio, the discipline of doing the homework is often what separates the funds that hit their model from the ones that blame the advisor.
So do not treat this as a survey. Treat the questions to ask a business advisor above as a gate, and put every candidate through the same business consulting questionnaire so you are comparing like for like. Whether these are questions to ask a business consultant on a one-off turnaround or questions to ask consultants you plan to deploy across several assets, the standard does not change: name the number, name the method, name the risk retired.
The consequence for the operator is direct. Get this right and an advisor compresses the path to a cleaner, higher-multiple exit. Get it wrong and you have funded a year of motion that the next buyer’s diligence will happily charge back to you. And if you want to explore a consulting relationship with no strings attached, set up a quick call with one pain point you want to dive into today.
