The consultants have return tickets. Your people don't.

Early in my years in online travel, the family that owned the agency I was helping take international did what careful owners do before a big bet. They called in one of the big consulting firms. The firm studied the plan, the markets and the competition, and came back with a number. Hire close to 250 people up front. Boots on the ground in every country we meant to enter.

It was a defensible recommendation. It was also the generic one, the answer you can give any company that wants to be bigger without knowing much about how it works. We went the other way. Stay small, build the tooling that would do the work of those hires, launch one market at a time and let each launch pay for the next. It worked, and it kept working long after I left.

The consultants weren't stupid. They were wrong the way I have watched advice go wrong across more than twenty-five engagements with airlines on five continents, online travel agencies, metasearch engines and distribution companies, sometimes from the inside and sometimes from across the table. Confidently, at scale, and on someone else's balance sheet. Those engagements are not a random sample and I won't pretend they add up to a failure rate. The pattern just repeated until I stopped calling it bad luck. And I say that as someone who has sold advice for a living.

To be precise about the target, I mean the review-and-recommend engagement, the kind that diagnoses, hands over a roadmap and leaves. Specialists hired to implement a defined change and answer for the result are a different trade.

Advice is priced in change

Specialist businesses fear the outsider who breaks things. Owners fear it. Long-tenured staff fear it more, and they have earned the right; they have watched a new broom sweep away a process that took fifteen years to get right. So the comfortable move is to hire a firm instead of a person. A review, a roadmap, recommendations you can take or leave at your own pace. It feels cautious.

It is usually the most radical option on the table.

Look at what an advisory engagement sells: a diagnosis, a target state and a roadmap between them. All three are denominated in change. Nobody invoices six months for "most of what you do is right, keep doing it, fix these four things," even though in my experience that report would be accurate far more often than the industry could survive. The billable unit is the recommendation, and a recommendation is something to change.

Then the advisor leaves. The recommendations land on the people who stay, and the consequences arrive after the final invoice. That is how a single deck can merge three teams, replace the core system and reposition the product. None of it will be its author's problem on a Tuesday morning.

The operator who stays does different arithmetic. Every change I make is one I have to live with: explain to the customer who calls, defend to the board when it goes sideways, unwind myself if I got it wrong. That makes an operator fast on what everyone knows is broken and stubborn, almost mulish, about what nobody can explain. The outsider hired to stay is the conservative choice.

The consultants have return tickets. Your people don't.

When advice and accountability separate

Swissair is the case I keep coming back to. In the fall of 1997 the airline, then one of the most admired in the world, engaged McKinsey to develop what the liquidator's chronology calls a "multipartnership strategy." Out came the Hunter strategy, a bid to become Europe's fourth force by buying into other carriers. The special audit Ernst & Young later prepared for the liquidator says it was conceived as "a moderate investment strategy with clearly minority investments," with a capital requirement of CHF 300 million. Within two years the group had spent around CHF 4.1 billion in cash on stakes in LTU, AOM, Air Liberté, LOT, South African Airways and others, most of them, in the auditors' words, already in a "desolate financial situation." On October 2, 2001, the fleet was grounded.

Buying into other airlines can work. Lufthansa built a group that way, and in 2005 it agreed to buy Swissair's own successor. What failed in Zurich was ownership of the plan. "From its outset, the implementation of the hunter strategy did not conform with its conception." The board was drawn from banks, insurers, industry and politics, and "no board member had solid experience in the operative management of or in monitoring an international airline company." To the end, board and management "relied largely on the support of third parties (the federal government, banks, consultants) rather than introducing the necessary restructuring measures themselves."

The strategy as conceived, as approved and as carried out became three different things. In August 2000 McKinsey was back with the "Shield" report, which put the group's financing gap at CHF 3.25 to 4.45 billion. The firm that helped shape the plan was brought back to measure the hole.

In 2007 a Swiss court tried nineteen people over the collapse, three of them outside consultants, and acquitted every one. No evidence anyone had knowingly damaged the company. Nobody needed bad faith. Distance put authorship, execution and accountability in three different places, and an airline fell through the gaps.

Aviation runs on rules nobody wrote down

Every mature aviation business I have seen runs on four rulebooks. The written one, with its manuals, procedures and approved data. The one the software enforces, which drifted from the first years ago. The one that describes a normal day. And the one experienced people reach for when the first three disagree. That last one keeps the operation out of trouble, and nobody has ever fully written it down.

Maintenance has studied this more honestly than most industries. A European study cited in a 2008 Australian Transport Safety Bureau report found 34 per cent of aircraft engineers admitting their most recent task had contravened formal procedure. An earlier Australian survey found about half of airline maintenance staff had used an informal "black book" of their own notes in the previous six months. The report puts it plainly. "Norms are the unspoken informal rules about how work is done. New workers learn the workplace norms from their colleagues." Transport Canada put "lack of knowledge" and "norms" on its Dirty Dozen list of maintenance error causes in 1993, and every engineer who has sat through human-factors training can still recite it.

Some of those norms are unsafe deviations. Others bridge the gap between the procedure as written and the hangar as it is. From the outside, in a few weeks of interviews, they look identical.

Software is no different. A field nobody can explain, until someone deletes it and an auditor asks where it went. A report that must fit on one page because a regulator somewhere reads it that way. A practice that is right under Transport Canada and wrong under the FAA, kept alive by the one person who remembers why. The review team sees inefficiency, and the deck will say so. The people who got burned see scar tissue. Cut it out and you learn what it was holding together.

Knowledge also has an address. On August 28, 2023, one flight plan, filed in a valid format, reached the system that processes flight data for UK air traffic control. It contained two identically named waypoints in a combination the software had never met. The primary system threw a critical exception and put itself into maintenance mode. The backup received the same plan and did the same. Time from receipt to losing both, about 20 seconds. More than 700,000 passengers were affected.

According to the independent panel, the specialist engineer eventually called in "was unfamiliar with the specific fault message." The manufacturer, which "had a unique level of knowledge" of the interface between the two failed systems, "was not sought for more than 4 hours after the initial event." The fix existed the whole time, in specific people the process could not find.

Specialist systems rarely die of the average case. They die of the valid case nobody modelled, and the people who know those cases are exactly the ones a short engagement interviews for an hour and summarizes in a bullet.

Money doesn't cure it either. In 2012 the US Government Accountability Office reviewed 30 major FAA air-traffic-control acquisitions. Eleven had run a combined $4.2 billion over budget. Fifteen were late, by an average of 48 months. Among the causes were requirements nobody anticipated, too little say for the controllers who would use the systems, and software far more complex than planned. If the FAA keeps underestimating its own operation, a few weeks of management interviews should produce humility, not a target operating model.

The value begins where the report ends

The advisory pitch assumes you don't know what's wrong. Most specialist companies I have looked at can name their problems in an afternoon. Sales that lives on referrals and has never had to hunt. A development team carrying old code and new expectations at once. Governance that grew up informally and now needs structure. Nobody sure what AI means for them, inside the building or in front of customers. Management knows the list. Staff know it. The best customers could write it.

When the problems are known, diagnosis is the least valuable part of the work, and the field evidence agrees. In India, Nicholas Bloom and colleagues gave 28 plants in 17 family-owned textile firms free consulting from a large international firm. Every plant got a one-month diagnosis. Some then got four more months with the consultants on the factory floor. Those plants went from using about a quarter of 38 basic management practices to nearly two thirds, and productivity rose 17 per cent in the first year. The diagnosis-only plants moved too, substantially less. The researchers priced the full treatment at "probably about $250,000" per plant.

Nine years later the team went back. About half the adopted practices were gone, and two of the most cited reasons were managerial turnover and directors with no time to sustain them. Change that lives in a person leaves with the person.

In Mexico, small firms got a year of subsidized consulting, with consultants on site every week. They gained productivity, and five years on their employment and wage bills were still about 50 per cent above the comparison group's. In Colombia, consulting delivered to small groups of firms improved management practices about as much as one-on-one help, at a third of the cost. The best evidence for consulting is evidence for help that stays and implements.

Canada says the same. A 2025 matched analysis of BDC clients, prepared with Statistics Canada, found that firms receiving advisory services alone grew employment faster and survived slightly better than similar firms, with no statistically significant edge in revenue or productivity. The clearest revenue gains came when the advice arrived with capital, with something that changed what the business could actually do.

The change industry's favourite statistic, that 70 per cent of change programs fail, was traced back through its five most-cited sources in 2011 by the management researcher Mark Hughes. He found "no valid and reliable empirical evidence" for it. A number repeated with total confidence and nothing underneath. Draw your own conclusion about the genre.

What the review costs the people inside

The fee and the months are the visible bill. The rest is paid by the people who know the business best, because they are the ones it interviews.

They will explain the operation again, to people who translate it into capabilities and maturity levels, and get it back months later in a form they barely recognize. Their skepticism goes into the deck as resistance to change. Usually it is memory. The last review produced interviews, workshops, a roadmap and a reorganization that evaporated when attention moved on. Treat that memory as an obstacle instead of data and the next change gets harder than the last.

The people most afraid of a radical outsider are usually the long-tenured ones. A review interviews them hardest, listens to them least and leaves them holding whatever it recommends.

Then the clock. A review takes months. A governance overhaul takes months more. Only then does anyone hire the leader who will do the work, and that leader spends months earning back the trust the process burned. Meanwhile the known problems compound. In many specialist niches private equity is rolling up competitors and pricing to take share, and the windows to buy, merge or partner open and close on someone else's schedule. The market does not pause while a business studies itself, and neither do the people you would most want to hire.

If you hire one anyway

Outside help has its place. Good governance deserves building, and sometimes a neutral voice is the only one a room will hear. Where I have seen it work in airlines and travel companies, it was held to something like these conditions.

- Hand them everything first.Every previous report, interview note and process map. No interviews until the firm can tell you what it learned from what exists. - Ask for fewer recommendations. Each with a named owner inside the business, a cost, a test that shows it worked and a condition for stopping. - Make them explain five hard cases. Before anyone proposes a structural change, the team walks through five difficult episodes from your history, what was decided and what would have happened otherwise. If they can't, they don't understand the business well enough to restructure it. - Separate commodity from craft. Expense processing can take a best practice. The parts that encode your specialization, compliance and customer commitments can't. - Keep the leadership decision inside. An advisor can help design a board or run a search. It should never stand in for a leader while the business waits. - Pay for implementation or skip the diagnosis. Implementation is what the evidence rewards.

A practice is not "best" because a consultant's other clients use it or a playbook written for someone else recommends it. It is best if it survives your customers, your regulator, your aircraft and your history. In aviation, the record-keeping was the safety controlmore than once, and the people who know which records matter are already on your payroll.

The people inside a specialist business don't need another group to extract what they know, rename it and sell it back to them. They need someone who will still be in the building when the recommendations stop being slides and start being Tuesday mornings.

—TJ