Hiring an Expert You Cannot Evaluate? A Buyer of Nineteen Years on What Changed Since 2015

Dana Oyelaran spent nineteen years on the buying side, approving engagements for mid-sized manufacturers, first in facilities and later in finance, before she began advising small firms and households on the same problem from the outside. She has signed contracts with accountants, engineers, translators, immigration attorneys, brand consultants and one firm that turned out to be a single person with a rented conference room. I asked her to compare the decision as it stood around 2015 with the decision a buyer faces now, and to be specific about what she measures before she signs anything.

What the search actually looked like a decade ago

Walk me through finding a specialist in 2015.

"You called three people you already trusted and asked who they used. That was the whole method, and it worked better than it deserved to, because the pool of names in circulation was small and the people in it had been vouched for by someone who would hear about it if the work went badly. The weakness was coverage. If your network did not happen to contain anyone who had bought an environmental site assessment, you were starting from a directory listing and a phone call, and you had no way to tell a twelve-person firm from a letterhead."

So the constraint was supply of names.

"Supply of names, and supply of evidence. A firm might have three pages on a website and no case studies, and you would meet them in person because that was the only way to learn anything. Those meetings did real work. You saw the office, you saw whether the person answering your question was the person who would do the job, and you noticed when the principal deferred to someone quieter in the corner. Now I get a forty-page capability deck before the first call, and it tells me almost nothing that the deck for their competitor does not also tell me."

The signals that stopped sorting

Which signals have lost their value?

"Polish, first. Ten years ago a clean proposal with a defensible methodology section suggested somebody senior had spent a day on it. Today that document costs an afternoon at most, and the language that used to indicate experience is now available to anyone. Second, published thought leadership. It used to be a proxy for depth because writing well about a subject took study. Third, the volume of reviews, which correlates with how aggressively a firm solicits them rather than with how the work turns out. None of those are lies. They just stopped separating anybody from anybody."

And credentials?

"Credentials still sort, but you have to know which one is load bearing. There is usually exactly one that a state agency issues and can revoke, and then a wall of memberships and certificates that a firm bought or joined. The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for deceptive advertising claims, including how professional qualifications are presented to consumers, and that oversight is the reason the revocable license is worth asking about by name. My question is always the same. Which of these can somebody take away from you, and who do I contact to check that it is current?"

The dimensions that set the price

You have said before that most buyers argue about the wrong number.

"They argue about the rate. The rate is the least informative figure in the engagement. Four things set what you pay, and the hourly number is downstream of all of them. The first is scope width, meaning how many questions the engagement is allowed to answer. The second is seniority mix, meaning what fraction of the hours a partner touches. The third is who carries revision risk when a regulator, a lender or a counterparty sends the work back. The fourth is turnaround, because compression is expensive and nobody discounts for it."

How do you measure those before you commit?

"I ask for the same engagement priced three ways. Narrow, with a defined deliverable and everything else billed separately. Medium, which is what they think I need. Wide, which is what they would do if cost were not a constraint. The three numbers tell you where the money sits, and the gaps between them are more diagnostic than any single figure. A firm that cannot produce those three prices in a week has not thought about my problem in units. That is a glance rather than a tape measure, and I have paid for glances."

What the buyer can do now that was harder then

Is any of this easier than it was?

"Considerably. Two things improved. Public records are searchable in a way they were not in 2015, so I can see filings, license status, disciplinary history and litigation before the first meeting, and that takes a morning rather than a month. And the paid first hour is now normal across most professions, which is the single best tool a buyer has. I will pay for ninety minutes of an attorney's time or an engineer's time and treat it as a test, not a consultation. What I am buying is a sample of how they think."

What does a good sample hour look like?

"They reframe the question. I arrive convinced my problem is one thing and a good practitioner tells me, within twenty minutes, that the real exposure sits somewhere I had not looked, and then tells me which parts of it I can handle myself. That last part matters. Somebody who wants every piece of the work, including the parts a competent bookkeeper or a competent homeowner could do unaided, is selling volume. Somebody who hands three tasks back to me and keeps the two that need judgment has just shown me their actual value, and I will pay their rate."

Oyelaran's closing instruction was procedural rather than philosophical. Write down, before any call, the decision you need to make and the date it has to be made by, and give both to every candidate in the same words. The ones who quote against your deadline and your decision, rather than against a general description of the field, are the ones who have measured the job. Everyone else has estimated it from across the room, and estimates from across the room are how the gap between the first invoice and the last one gets made.