In 2006, our practice made the biggest structural decision of its life: we tore out the revenue model and replaced it with values-based, fee-for-service advice. Not a repricing exercise. A different business — different client conversations, different service rhythm, different economics, different expectations of every person on the team.
We didn’t do it alone. We hired Jim Stackpool to help us embed it.
It was some of the best money the business ever spent. So yes, “Hire Jim” is the honest title, and as advice it holds up. But it would bury the useful part. I’d trained under Bill Bachrach, so we knew what we were trying to build and believed in it completely. What we didn’t have was someone to hold the mirror up while we actually built it. That’s what Jim did. The practice went on to win awards, and when I eventually sold my share, the value we’d built through that change was a large part of what I was selling.
Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about why it worked, and it’s not the obvious answer. It wasn’t just that Jim was good — though he was. It’s that we were aligned before the engagement started. Jim understood exactly what we were trying to become, agreed it was worth becoming, and signed up to that outcome. From the get-go, we were building the same thing.
That’s the piece most practices skip. They hire well and align never, and then wonder why the result didn’t match the invoice.
Why we couldn’t do it ourselves
Here’s the objection I’d have made myself, before 2006: we knew the destination. I’d done the training. We had the conviction. What exactly were we paying for?
We were paying for the gap between knowing and doing. Every practice owner knows this gap; most just don’t price it. You come back from the conference converted. You brief the team. Everyone nods. And then Monday arrives, the review meetings are booked, the BAU tide comes in, and six months later the transformation is a folder on a shared drive.
A business runs on habits, and the habits fight back. Not because your people are lazy — because the old way is how everyone in the building already knows how to be good at their job. Changing the model asks your best people to feel incompetent for a while. Nobody volunteers for that without someone external making it safe, structured, and non-negotiable.
That’s the real product. Not the ideas. The ideas were never the constraint.
Alignment is the whole game
A good consultant can fundamentally improve your business. I mean that literally: the 2006 engagement didn’t tweak our practice, it changed what the practice was. But that outcome was set up before a single workshop ran, in the alignment between what we wanted and what Jim was working towards.
Alignment sounds soft. It isn’t. It’s a set of concrete agreements, and you can tell whether you have them.
It starts with a shared, explicit outcome. Not “improve the practice” — something you could state to your team in one sentence, with a date. Ours was unambiguous: embed a values-based, fee-for-service model across the whole business. Jim knew what done looked like because we’d agreed on it out loud. Every session, every uncomfortable conversation, every piece of pushback he gave us traced back to that destination. There was never a meeting where we wondered what we were paying for, because we all knew what we were building.
It requires the consultant to understand your business before prescribing to it. Jim took the time to understand the nuances of our practice — our clients, our partners, what we were genuinely trying to achieve rather than what sounded good — before the plan existed. The plan was built with us, not delivered to us. That’s what made it our plan, which mattered enormously on the days it got hard.
And it requires something from you that most owners don’t expect: your own genuine commitment to the outcome, including the parts where you’re the problem. Alignment isn’t just the consultant agreeing with your goal. It’s you agreeing to be held to it. We gave Jim standing permission to keep us honest — me, my partners, and the staff — and he used it, week after week, when the easiest thing in the world would have been to quietly drift back to the old model the moment a good client pushed back on the new fee conversation.
Hire the best consultant in the country without those agreements in place and you’ll get a pleasant engagement and a modest result. Put them in place and a good consultant becomes something else entirely: a multiplier on a decision you’ve already truly made.
The adviser test
Here’s the shortest way I know to think about what an aligned consultant actually does, and if you’re an adviser it should feel familiar: a good consultant is to your business exactly what you claim to be to your clients.
Think about what a great adviser actually does. Not the product. Not the portfolio — your clients can get a portfolio from their phone. A great adviser works to understand what the client is really trying to achieve, beneath what they first said they wanted. Identifies the handful of things that actually determine the outcome. Builds a plan around those things. And then — this is the part that earns the fee — stays in the client’s life keeping them honest, holding the plan steady when motivation fades and the client starts negotiating with themselves.
A personal trainer, same thing. You’re not paying for the workout sheet. The internet is full of workout sheets. You’re paying for someone who knows what you’re training for, watches your form, and is standing there at 6am on the mornings you’d have gone back to sleep.
Notice what both have in common with the 2006 engagement: the value doesn’t come from the expertise alone. It comes from the expertise pointed at a goal both sides understand and have committed to. An adviser and a client who haven’t agreed what they’re working towards produce a portfolio. An adviser and a client who have produce a life. Same with consulting.
And advisers, of all people, should recognise this when they’re the ones buying. You sell alignment and accountability for a living. Buy it the same way.
Getting aligned before you start
If you’re considering bringing someone in — and for genuine structural change, I think you should — the work happens before the engagement, in the conversations where alignment either forms or doesn’t.
Settle the outcome first. If you can’t state what you’re trying to achieve in a sentence, that’s not a reason to delay hiring — it might be the first thing a good consultant helps you sharpen. But it must exist before the real work starts, and both of you need to be able to say it the same way.
Let them diagnose before they prescribe. The right question in early conversations is not “what should we do?” but “what do you need to understand about us first?” A consultant who wants to know your business before offering answers is showing you how they’ll work. Jim did exactly that, and it’s why the plan fitted us.
Ask about their scar tissue. Someone who has actually sat in the fee conversation with a real client, with their own income on the line, brings something the manual can’t. You’re not testing for credentials. You’re testing whether they’ve stood where you’re about to stand.
Agree a commercial structure that points at the outcome — defined stages, an end point, fees attached to progress rather than duration. This isn’t about distrust. It’s alignment expressed in commercial terms: the engagement should be designed to conclude, because the goal is your independence from it.
And give them explicit permission to make you uncomfortable, then watch whether they use it. The most valuable meetings we had with Jim were not the pleasant ones. If both sides know the honest conversation is part of the deal, it happens early enough to matter.
The part where I declare my interest
I do this work now. I consult to advice practices, which means everything above could be read as a man describing his own shopfront. Fair. Weigh it accordingly.
But I’d offer this: I was the client first — in 2006, with my own money and my own practice on the line — and the standard that engagement set is the standard I now have to live up to, publicly, in writing. If anything, this article is a rod for my own back. Good. That’s rather the point of the accountability business.
The harder question
Strip it all back and the consultant question turns out not to be about consultants.
The alignment that made 2006 work was mostly something we brought to it: a clear outcome we could state in a sentence, partners genuinely committed to it, and a willingness to be held to it by someone with no reason to spare our feelings. Jim was excellent, and Jim aligned with a committed partnership was transformative. The same Jim, with a vague brief and half-committed owners, would have produced a fraction of the result — and it wouldn’t have been his fault.
So before you ask whether you need a consultant, ask the question a good one will ask you anyway: what exactly are you trying to achieve, and would you keep working towards it even in the weeks nobody was watching?
Answer that honestly, find someone who genuinely shares the destination, and the right consultant won’t just improve your business. They’ll get you somewhere years before you’d have arrived alone. I know, because we did it both ways — and the years we bought in 2006 turned out to be the most valuable thing we ever purchased.