How can we be sure the quality will be consistent across consultants?

Recruiting standards. This is where it starts and ends, and it’s shockingly absent at most firms in this space.

Here’s how we think about it — something we call the VIP standard. Imagine the highest-stakes client imaginable walks through the door. Family of a close friend. Someone where the outcome matters to us personally, beyond just professionally. If we could only feel confident assigning that person to one or two consultants on our roster, then our standards aren’t high enough. The bar we hold ourselves to is this: we should be able to assign any consultant, blind, to the most important client who’s ever walked through our door, and feel completely confident that they’re getting the best in class. That’s not aspirational language — it’s the actual filtering criterion. Every person on our team passed that test. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be here.