What Is Consulting, Really?
If you’ve worked in your current industry for any length of time, chances are you’ve seen a headline, heard a colleague whisper, or been part of a meeting that started with, “So… we hired a consultant.” Depending on your experience, what phase might be met with curiosity, confusion, excitement, or even a healthy dose of skepticism.
At transform.forward, we’re a consulting firm that partners with organizations across the country to help with organizational transformation and leadership development needs. When we made the pivot into consulting, our friends and former colleagues often asked: “But what do you actually do?” Or, more bluntly: “Why would we pay someone else to tell us what we already know?”
So let’s talk about it.
What is consulting?
Consulting, at its core, is about helping organizations solve problems. A consultant is someone with specialized knowledge who is brought in to offer guidance, structure, insight, and momentum while also providing expertise and an external perspective. Think of us as thought partners and capacity-builders; we’re not here to “fix” you, but to work with you as you make meaningful progress.
In our corner of the consulting world, we focus on organizational transformation, leadership development, and facilitation. This often includes:
Leading strategic planning processes
Designing and facilitating leadership retreats
Supporting change management and communication strategies
Benchmarking against similar organizations
Creating implementation plans and dashboards
Lead executive or team coaching
Designing and analyzing stakeholder engagement opportunities, such as surveys and focus groups
Helping teams translate big ideas into action
In other words, we help organizations figure out where they want to go, how to get there, and how to bring people along in the process.
So why does an organization hire a consultant?
It’s a fair question! We get it. The organizations we work with are full of smart, capable professionals – people who understand their institutions deeply and care about doing meaningful work. (We love getting to interact with these individuals!) So what value does a consulting firm bring to the table?
Here are a few reasons our clients chose to bring us in:
Expertise and Tools
Consulting firms bring specialized skills in areas like qualitative research, data visualization, facilitation, and change management. We also bring proven frameworks, literature, toolkits, and templates that can accelerate progress and reduce the need to build everything from scratch.
Neutral Facilitation
When you’re navigating complex conversations – about mission, strategy, culture, or change – it helps to have a neutral third party guiding the discussion. We’re not embedded in organizational politics or office hierarchies (though we do have a deep understanding of them), which allows us to surface insights that might not emerge otherwise.
Accountability and Momentum
One of the most common things we hear is: “We started this project with energy, but then it stalled.” Consultants bring structure and project management muscle to keep things moving, aligned, and on track – especially across multi-month or cross-unit efforts.
Time and Capacity
Even the most motivated leaders are juggling competing priorities. Strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and data analysis take time, and time is a finite resource. Hiring a consulting firm can bring the dedicated bandwidth needed to move an initiative forward without overwhelming existing teams.
External Perspective
When you’ve worked at an organization for a long time, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Consultants bring an outside lens. We’re not here to push an agenda; rather, we ask questions, listen closely, surface patterns, and help connect the dots. Our goal is to illuminate what might otherwise go unspoken or unnoticed.
What consulting is not
Consulting sometimes gets a bad rap. Some folks picture slide slidedecks full of generic jargon. Others worry consultants come in, take over, and leave before the real work begins. And then there’s the deeper fear – the one people don’t always say out loud. When consultants show up, it means cuts are coming. That somewhere in the fine print is a plan to shrink budgets, eliminate roles, or restructure teams until someone ends up without a seat. While there are consultants out there that operate this way, that’s not how we work – and it’s not what good consulting looks like.
In our view, consulting is collaborative, human-centered, data-informed, and context-specific. It’s about listening first, co-creating solutions, and building your team’s capacity – not making you dependent on us forever. In fact, we often tell our clients that our goal is to get their organization to a point where our help is no longer needed for a specific transition or initiative. When we work with clients for an extended period of time, it's because they identify new projects or aspects of the organization that are in need of support, not because our engagements drag on needlessly.
What is it like to work with a consultant?
If you’ve never worked with a consultant before, the process might feel a bit mysterious or ambiguous. Every firm is different and each of our projects is unique, but here’s a rough sketch of what it usually looks like to work with us:
Discovery: We spend time getting to know you, your goals, and your context. We review existing materials, interview stakeholders, and develop a shared understanding of what success looks like.
Design: We co-create a plan of action, outlining deliverables, timelines, and engagement strategies.
Engagement: We collect data, host sessions, facilitate conversations, and analyze what we’re learning. We don’t just ask what’s wrong; we explore what’s possible.
Synthesis: We bring it all together in actionable insights – reports, roadmaps, frameworks, or toolkits you can use far beyond the end of our engagement.
Follow-Up: We stay connected, offering implementation, strategic advisory support, and coaching as needed to ensure the work sticks.
We’re often told that working with us feels energizing, clarifying, and (dare we say it) fun. Because at the end of the day, our work is about people, purpose, and impact.
Consulting isn’t about parachuting in with all the answers. It’s about partnering with institutions to ask better questions, uncover shared truths, and move forward, together.
So, next time you hear, “We hired a consultant,” know that it might just mean someone will show up with fresh eyes, deep listening skills, a knack for strategy, and a commitment to making your work stronger.
And if you’re curious about what that could look like at your organization, well, you know where to find us.
