What an IT consultant should tell you in the first hour

The first meeting with an IT consultant is usually a sales call wearing a discovery hat. Someone asks about your "pain points", writes down the names of your systems, and comes back a fortnight later with a proposal that costs more than you expected and solves a problem you had not described.

A useful first hour looks different. Here is what it should cover.

Where the time is actually going

Not where it feels like it is going. Those are rarely the same thing.

Almost every business we sit down with has a story about which part of the week is the problem — and almost every one of them is partly wrong. The job that everyone complains about is often twenty minutes a week. The one nobody mentions, because it has always been done that way, is four hours.

So the first thing worth doing is boring: walk through a normal week and count. Not an audit, not a workshop. A conversation, with someone writing down where the hours land.

1. 01Walk through a normal week out loud
2. 02Write down where the hours actually land
3. 03Pick the one that is holding up the rest

What it would cost to do nothing

This is the question most consultants skip, because the honest answer is sometimes "not much".

If a process is annoying but cheap, and fixing it costs three months of the annoyance, then fixing it is a bad trade and you should be told so. A consultant who never reaches that conclusion about anything is not assessing your business; they are describing their price list.

A consultant who never concludes "leave it alone" is not assessing your business. They are reading you their price list.

We would rather say "leave that alone" in the first hour and be useful about something else.

Which problem is load-bearing

Businesses rarely have one problem. They have six, and four of them are symptoms of the other two.

The skill in this work is not knowing every tool on the market. It is working out which of the six is holding up the rest — the integration that would make three manual jobs disappear, the reporting that would stop four people guessing, the single system that everyone works around.

Fix that one and several others stop mattering. Fix a symptom and you have bought yourself a slightly faster version of the same week.

Three answers worth listening for

"I do not know yet." In the first hour, nobody does. Someone who has diagnosed your business before understanding it will do the same to the solution.

"That is not our area." We do technology and executive support. We do not do employment law, and we are not your accountant — our sister practice is, which is a different thing. A consultant with an opinion on everything has an opinion on nothing.

"You could do that yourself." Sometimes the answer is a setting, an afternoon, and no invoice. Being told that is how you learn whether the advice is about your business or about the fee.

What we do afterwards

We write down what we heard, what we would do, in what order, and what we would leave alone. If that reads like something you would rather do in-house, that is a good outcome — you now have a plan and you did not pay for a project.

If it reads like something you would rather hand over, we will quote it. Prices start from a day rate and we will tell you the range before you ask.

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We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK. If the week is going somewhere you cannot account for, that first hour is free and there is no obligation after it.