When to bring in an external strategy consultant and when not to

A few years ago we were three weeks into a brand strategy engagement with a mid-sized logistics firm in Lyon when their incoming CEO asked us, plainly, why they had hired us at all. It was a fair question. The internal team already had a clear read on the competitive landscape, a strong point of view on pricing, and a draft positioning document that was more honest than anything we had produced. We finished the engagement, but the most useful thing we delivered was a candid memo recommending they dissolve the brief and trust their own people. That moment has shaped how we take on work ever since. Knowing when to call in external strategic support is a discipline in itself, and most organisations get it wrong in both directions — hiring too early, or waiting so long the window for useful input has closed.

The conditions that actually make external input useful ¶

The clearest case for bringing in an outside strategist is a genuine deadlock inside the organisation — not a manufactured one, but the kind where two or more senior people hold legitimately different and well-reasoned views, and internal politics have made it impossible to adjudicate. In that situation, an external party is not being hired for their ideas. They are being hired for their standing to say something the organisation already half-knows but cannot say to itself. We saw this in a nine-month engagement with a regional cooperative bank in Bordeaux in 2021, where the board was split on whether to expand into small-business lending. The data existed internally. The will to act on it did not. Our role was closer to facilitation than analysis.

A second legitimate use case is a genuine capability gap, specifically when the organisation needs a discipline it has never needed before and does not have the runway to hire for it permanently. A manufacturer entering a consumer market for the first time may have no one on staff who has built a retail distribution strategy. A public institution facing a regulatory change under French law — say, a shift in how la commande publique is structured — may need specialist input that would take years to develop internally. These are real gaps, and filling them temporarily with experienced outside counsel is economical and appropriate.

The third case is less obvious but equally valid: the organisation needs someone to absorb reputational risk on a decision that is already made. This is not cynical. Sometimes a board needs external validation not because it doubts its own analysis, but because the stakeholders it answers to require it. If that is the actual need, it is worth naming it clearly at the outset, so the engagement is scoped to serve that purpose rather than pretending to discover conclusions that were never actually in question.

When the timing is wrong ¶

The most common mistake is hiring a strategy consultant at the beginning of a process that is not ready to begin. An organisation that has not yet resolved its internal governance, that is mid-way through a leadership transition, or that does not have a named internal owner for the strategy work will absorb the consultant's output and do nothing with it. The deliverable lands in a shared drive. Six months later, a new director arrives and restarts the process from scratch. This pattern is recognisable enough that experienced consultants can often spot it in the first scoping call, though commercial pressure sometimes makes it easier to ignore.

Equally problematic is the engagement that substitutes for a hiring decision. When a company brings in external strategy support for eighteen months because it cannot agree on what kind of Head of Strategy to recruit, the consultant becomes a placeholder rather than a catalyst. The work drifts. The internal team never fully owns the conclusions because they were not the ones who reached them. We have declined two engagements in the past three years specifically for this reason, and in both cases the organisations went on to make strong internal hires and did the work better themselves.

The deliverable that lands in a shared drive and is never opened again is not a failure of strategy. It is a failure of timing.

How to scope an engagement so it can actually end ¶

A well-scoped strategy engagement has a defined finish state that is not 'completion of the report.' It has a moment at which the internal team takes full ownership of the output and the external party steps back. Getting to that moment requires agreeing, before the work begins, on three things.

First, who internally is accountable for the strategy once it exists. Not a committee. One person, with decision-making authority. Second, what specific question the engagement is answering — not a broad mandate to 'review the business model' but something narrow enough to be resolved in the agreed timeframe. Third, what the organisation will do differently once the question is answered. If none of these three things can be named before the engagement starts, the engagement is not ready to start.

• Name one internal owner before signing anything
• Write the strategy question in a single sentence
• Define what a resolved question looks like in practice
• Set a fixed end date, not a milestone-dependent one
• Agree in writing what happens to the output after delivery

The size and sector variables that change the calculation ¶

External strategy support tends to be most useful in organisations between roughly 50 and 500 people — large enough to have genuine strategic complexity, small enough that a focused external input can shift the direction of the whole. Below that threshold, the founders usually hold the strategy in their heads and what they need is a sounding board, not a consultant. Above it, the layers of internal expertise often mean an outside strategist is working with incomplete context and producing recommendations that the organisation's own people could have reached faster.

Sector matters too. In heavily regulated industries — utilities, financial services, healthcare under French social security frameworks — external strategists need deep regulatory fluency or they produce work that is elegant in theory and inoperable in practice. A strategy that does not account for how the Autorité de la concurrence reviews certain market consolidations, or how ANSM approval timelines affect a product launch, is not a strategy. It is a scenario. The distinction has practical consequences.

The organisations we have seen get the most consistent value from external strategy support are those that treat it the way they treat legal counsel: brought in for specific, bounded questions, briefed thoroughly, and then allowed to leave. The ones that struggle tend to treat strategy consultants like a subscription service — something renewed annually because it has always been renewed, regardless of whether the questions being asked have actually changed.

The Lyon engagement ended in March, just as the freight sector was entering its seasonal peak. The CEO sent a short note two months later saying the internal team had finalised the positioning work on their own and were satisfied with it. That outcome was, genuinely, the most useful thing that particular project produced.