Ask for and study a detailed resume. If it recites degrees and states that the consultant is expert in all aspects of, say, mechanical engineering, get very cautious.
Ask for and check references. If you can speak to a reference face to face, you will get more frank disclosure than you will on the phone. The names of individual-person references may not be printed on the resume to prevent their being bothered too much and becoming hostile.
Interview. The interview is almost the same as a job interview, but you should also ask for and expect "free samples." It is common for good consultants who know their worth to offer to do the first day's work at no charge to demonstrate their worth. It is also common (but not universal) for the offer to be declined with thanks, but the sincerity of the offer is significant.
What Are the Business Terms?
Prices. Juniors who assist a senior consultant cost correspondingly less, and some specialists command much more for short periods of time. For extended engagements, the fees are reduced, since the consultants spend a correspondingly smaller portion of their time doing unpaid marketing. A certain amount of homework to come up to speed on the specifics of the problem, to write a brief report, or just to think is usually thrown in. Serious amounts of homework, whether to study or to produce, are paid for. Fee setting is always to some degree an arm's-length bargaining process.
Location. The consultant works in your office, his or her own office, your customer's office, or anywhere else, depending on the requirements of the assignment and everyone's preference, convenience, and economy.
Terms. Until a satisfactory working relationship has been established, the consultant should be willing to work on a day-by-day basis. "Satisfactory" refers to both technical performance and getting along with the employees and outsiders with whom the consultant must work-the chemistry.
Be sure to specify how frequently the consultant bills you. Consultants with good business experience will be sure that they do not put in more time than you expect them to, but you should share the responsibility of preventing inadvertent overruns.
If the consultant demonstrates that he or she is a long-term asset, you may want to contract for a certain number of hours or days over a certain calendar period (e.g., one day per month for one year) for a designated fee. If the fee is paid on a fixed schedule and the work is on a variable schedule, the fee is a "retainer."
If consultants are on a daily basis, it is unethical for them to leave the project or increase their fees until their work on that project has been completed, but it is permissible for you to terminate their work on whatever basis is specified in the purchase order.
Lawyers as Consultants
Lawyers are valuable consultants. Yes, many lawyers really do spend their time suing people, defending criminals, and creating lawsuits, but many others spend their time helping people do constructive work and avoid trouble.
Patent attorneys get you patents, warn off infringers, and try to defend you if you infringe intentionally, inadvertently, or uncertainly (i.e., are you really infringing?).
Lawyers are consultants about what laws exist which apply to what you are doing (there are more laws than grasshoppers) and, most important, what these laws mean to you. Most laws are written by people who believe that writing clear English is an admission of professional incompetence. Furthermore, the effective meaning of a law is what judges have chosen to make it mean in lawsuits based on the law. Your lawyer will give you an "opinion" about what you may or may not do. The next judge's decision may change everything, so an opinion is the best you can hope for.
If you engage in contract writing for your company, your lawyer will help with the terms. (Your company may have a contract administrator, who in effect is a non-degree lawyer solely in the field of negotiating and performing contracts.) If you start a company, you will live forever with corporation lawyers who are your agents for government relations and contracts of many kinds, who can give you good business advice based on their observation of many other businesses, and who can negotiate some agreements much better than you can. However, watch what is going on; you know more details of your situation than your lawyer does.
In your personal life you will encounter legal problems, some of which may be constructive and happy, like buying a house. The best advice is to have a lawyer and consult him or her early and often. It's well worth the money.
Vendors as Free Consultants
Vendor sales engineers and even salespeople are a most valuable class of truly free consultant. They are not charity. They are sent to you by a vendor in the hope that the assistance they provide will encourage you to buy from that vendor. They teach you knowledge of the vendor's products, services, and organization, and they provide application guidance for using the vendor's products to solve your problems. The better ones will help you adapt your design so that their products will help you solve its problems and will even help with engineering problems unrelated to their products. (This is called "consultative selling" and can bring prestige to the sales engineers' company.) You are expected to make allowance for their competitive bias, and you are free, legally and ethically, to get such service from competing vendors. Vendors may give you detailed written proposals, including special designs, for using their products to solve your problems as well, of course, as price quotations.
Vendor consulting extends to seminars, courses, and books in the vendor's technology. All these are marketing investments by the vendors, so you may be sure that they try hard, in their own interest, to be sure that you are well taught. Some courses and books are charged for, largely as a mechanism to limit attendance and acquisition to serious prospective customers. Some catalogs and handbooks are written as textbooks as well as a display of wares, and their language is usually edited by serious advertising writers to make it clear and unambiguous.
Some vendors will provide free samples (resistors, yes; 100-hp motors, no), and others will provide loaners for test (perhaps a 100-hp motor). A vendor introducing a new machine tool or other expensive product may place one free in the plant of a prestigious customer, asking only that it be given a serious workout in actual service and that prospective customers (including the customer's competitors) be permitted to visit the installation and ask about its performance.
The better your track record with vendors, the more they will invest in helping you.
It is common for vendors to provide seminars for engineers, either within large companies or in hotel space. These seminars are sales pitches, but as with all good advertising they sell by educating and are well worth attending.
Trade Show Consulting
A most valuable form of free vendor consulting is found at trade shows. Not only can you examine actual hardware products and see them demonstrated, but you can consult on the spot with sales engineers, sometimes including the vendor's vice president for engineering. Immense amounts of application engineering are carried out on the display floor, in hospitality suites, and at lunch and dinner at trade shows. If you are lucky, you may learn valuable information from the technical papers usually presented as a parallel activity to the product exhibits.
You can also collect and order pounds of catalogs, sightsee, and lounge in the hotel bars and hospitality suites if you feel that your career success is best served by doing so.
Government Technology Transfer
Government agencies have technology transfer departments which are directed by Congress to provide the results of unclassified research to industry. They are free consultants. Agency personnel are motivated to do so in order to help justify their own jobs. Such agencies include the NBS, various NASA headquarters and laboratories, and specialized laboratories.
