GUIDES

How to choose an automation consultant.

I sell this work, so read this the way you would read a butcher's guide to buying steak. But the questions below are the ones I would ask before hiring anyone, including me, and the last section is about when you should not hire anyone at all.

Ask what happens when they leave.

The single most important question. If the answer involves their proprietary platform, their hosting, or a subscription that keeps the lights on, you are not buying a system, you are renting a dependency. The good answer: the system runs on your tools, in your accounts, documented well enough that the next person can pick it up. You should be able to fire your consultant and keep your automation.

Ask them to show the math.

Anyone selling automation will quote savings. Make them show the arithmetic: which hours, whose wage, what assumption about how much of the work the system actually takes over. If the math is not shown, the number is marketing. If it is shown, you can argue with it, and a consultant who welcomes that argument is one you can work with.

Ask what they will not automate.

The honest ones have a list: judgment calls, client relationships, anything where an error costs more than the labor it saves. A consultant with no such list has either never shipped anything or never watched it fail.

Ask about your industry, then verify.

General automation skill transfers; knowing where your industry's paperwork actually pinches does not. If you run an engineering firm, ask them what a Certificate of Authorization is. If you run job sites, ask what a pay app is. You are not testing trivia. You are testing whether the first month of the engagement is you educating them on your dime.

When you do not need one.

If your problem lives inside one tool, that tool's own automation probably covers it, and an afternoon with the documentation is cheaper than any consultant. If you have not written down the process you want automated, do that first; you may find the writing was the fix. Hire someone when the problem crosses systems, carries deadlines, or has survived two of your own attempts.

Common questions

Match the shape to the problem. A platform partner is right when the answer really is that platform. An agency brings hands at volume. A solo operator is right when the problem is odd-shaped and crosses systems, because you get the person who scoped it doing the work.

A free or cheap diagnosis, a fixed scope with a named outcome, your tools and your accounts, and an exit that leaves everything running. Wariness at any of the four is not cynicism; it is pattern recognition.

Not very. You need to know your own process cold, and you need to be willing to say when a draft is wrong. The consultant's job is to make the technical part invisible.

Give me your worst workflow.

Interview me against the list. Thirty minutes, straight answer.

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