How to hire an automation consultant without getting fleeced

The hard part of hiring an automation consultant is not finding one. The hard part is telling a builder from a salesman, because from the outside the two use the same words and the same friendly website.

Here is the thing nobody selling automation will lead with. Many of them are really reselling. They sign you up for someone else’s software and collect a slice of your subscription for as long as you keep paying, often twenty percent or more, for years.¹ That is a legal and common way to run a business. It also means the person advising you on what you need gets paid more the more you buy, which is a hard thing to trust.

So before you hire anyone, run three plain tests.

Ask what they earn if you buy nothing. If the honest answer is nothing, their advice is a sales pitch wearing a consultant’s shirt. If they charge for their time no matter which tool you land on, the opinion is more likely to be theirs.

Ask them to show you one thing they actually built. Not a slide about it, not a wall of vendor logos they partner with. A real workflow, running, that took a real task off someone’s plate. A builder has these. A reseller has brochures.

Watch whether they will ever tell you a job is not worth automating. The tasks that eat your week are not all fixable by software, and some are cheaper to leave alone. Someone who says that out loud is thinking about your money instead of theirs.

A good one will talk you out of work, and it costs them the sale, and they do it anyway.

That last test is the whole thing, really. The advice that helps you most is the advice that pays them least, so the person willing to give it is usually the person telling you the truth.

What is the task you were about to pay someone to automate, and have you asked them yet what they make if you walk away?

At Aitako we resell nothing and take no referral fees, which is the plainest way we know to keep our opinion actually ours, and the about page says so out loud for exactly that reason. Tell me the one task you keep touching too many times a week, and I will tell you straight whether it is worth automating or whether an afternoon’s fix does the job.

Footnotes

1. HubSpot Partner Commissions FAQ — solutions partners earn 20% of an account’s monthly recurring net revenue on deals they refer, paid for up to three years. ↩