What Nobody Tells You Before You Hire a Marketing Consultant

I sat across from a founder last month who had just fired his third marketing consultant in two years.

He wasn’t angry. He was tired. He’d spent over $40,000 on marketing consulting and couldn’t point to a single system that was still running. Every engagement followed the same arc: big promises, a flurry of activity, some slides, and then… nothing. No infrastructure left behind. No process he could repeat. Just a Notion board full of "strategic recommendations" that nobody acted on.

"I don’t even know what marketing consulting is supposed to deliver anymore," he told me.

I didn’t have a quick answer. Because honestly? He’s not wrong to be confused.

The Marketing Consulting Industry Has an Accountability Problem

Here’s something most marketing consultants won’t tell you: a significant portion of what gets sold as marketing consulting is just organized opinion.

Someone with a nice LinkedIn profile shows up, interviews your team for two weeks, delivers a strategy deck, and invoices you. The deck has good ideas. It might even have great ideas. But ideas without implementation are just overhead.

The dirty secret of marketing consulting is that most consultants are incentivized to diagnose, not to fix. Their business model depends on you needing more consulting. If they actually built a system that ran without them, they’d lose the retainer.

I’m not saying every consultant operates this way. Some are exceptional. But the structure of the industry — diagnosis separated from execution — creates a misalignment that most clients don’t see until they’ve already spent the budget.

How I Learned This the Hard Way

When I started Olunix, I modeled our work after what I thought marketing consulting was supposed to look like. We’d do the research. Build the strategy. Present the deck. Hand it over.

And then I’d watch it collect dust.

It didn’t matter how good the strategy was. If the founder didn’t have the team, the time, or the technical ability to execute it, the strategy was worthless. We’d delivered exactly what was promised, and the client still didn’t get results.

That ate at me. Because I didn’t get into this to deliver decks. I got into it to help companies grow.

So I changed the model. Instead of just consulting, we started building. Instead of handing over strategy, we’d implement it alongside the client. Instead of billing for recommendations, we’d own the outcome.

It felt risky at the time. Now it feels obvious.

The Missing Piece: Systems, Not Campaigns

Here’s where my engineering background changes the conversation.

Most marketing consulting operates at the campaign level. "Run this ad. Post this content. Try this channel." Campaigns are one-off efforts. They produce spikes, not growth curves.

What most companies actually need isn’t a better campaign. It’s a better system. A repeatable, measurable machine that turns attention into customers. That’s not marketing consulting in the traditional sense. It’s closer to marketing systems engineering — applying the rigor of engineering to the chaos of marketing.

When we work with a client now, we don’t start with "what should we post?" We start with:

• Where are your customers right now?
• What’s the path from awareness to purchase?
• Where does that path break?
• What data do we have at each stage?
• What can we automate, and what needs a human?

Then we build. Test. Measure. Iterate. Just like engineering a product.

The result isn’t a strategy deck. It’s a system that keeps running whether we’re involved or not. That’s the standard marketing consulting should be held to — but rarely is.

What to Actually Look for When Hiring

If you’re considering hiring a marketing consultant — or a firm that does marketing and consulting — here’s the framework I’d use:

1. Ask what you’ll own when the engagement ends. If the answer is "a strategy document," be cautious. You want systems, templates, and processes that your team can operate independently. The best marketing consultants make themselves unnecessary.

2. Ask how they measure success. Vague metrics like "brand awareness" or "engagement" without clear definitions are a red flag. Good marketing consulting ties back to business outcomes: leads, revenue, retention. The numbers should be specific enough to hold someone accountable.

3. Ask about implementation. Strategy without execution is expensive thinking. Find out whether they’ll help you build the thing, or just tell you what to build. The gap between those two is where most consulting engagements die.

4. Ask for their failure stories. Anyone who claims a 100% success rate is either lying or hasn’t taken on hard enough problems. The best consultants have learned from engagements that didn’t work. I’ve talked about my own lessons openly. The ones who can’t tell you what went wrong probably haven’t interrogated their own process.

5. Look at how they think, not just what they’ve done. Case studies matter. But more important is whether their mental model matches the complexity of your problem. A consultant who thinks in systems will serve you differently than one who thinks in tactics.

The Founder From the Coffee Shop

That founder I mentioned at the beginning? We ended up working together.

We didn’t start with a strategy deck. We spent the first two weeks inside his analytics, his CRM, and his product data. We found that 60% of his marketing spend was going to a channel that produced leads who never converted past the first call. Nobody had connected those two data points because the previous consultants looked at marketing metrics and sales metrics separately.

We cut the wasted spend, redirected it to two channels that his own data said were working, and built a lead nurture sequence that actually matched his sales cycle. Within three months, his pipeline had doubled on a lower total budget.

Nothing we did was revolutionary. It was just rigorous. It was engineering applied to marketing. And it’s the kind of result that marketing consulting should deliver every time — but usually doesn’t.

The Real Question

The marketing consulting industry isn’t broken because the people in it are bad. Most are smart, experienced, and well-intentioned. It’s broken because the model rewards the wrong things. It rewards diagnosis over delivery. Strategy over systems. Insight over implementation.

If you’re a founder looking for marketing help, don’t hire someone to think for you. Hire someone to build with you. The difference is everything.

- MM