If you’ve never worked with a consulting firm, you may not know that Consulting success depends as much on the quality of the client, as the caliber of the consultant. Is there such a thing as a good, or great, client? Can that formula be replicated by others who seek to improve the effectiveness of their engagement with consultants, or with vendors of any kind?

This post by Seth Godin lists most of the essentials. Here are the points that resonated most with us:

Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.

After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.

Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?

Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.

Celebrate the innovator. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more innovators and do even better work next time if innovators understand how much they benefit from working with you.

There are a number of valuable insights in that list, some of which require a great deal of maturity to acknowledge and accept. On our part, we would also like to add the following…

Do your homework on the “canvas” and what your specific need is, before you meet prospective vendors.  e.g. If you’re out to get a website for your business and know “nothing about website design”, at least spend some hours surfing the web and noting down the sites you like and the ones you don’t, including the Why.

Know the kind of customer you’re trying to attract, and how they are likely to behave. There is just no substitute for that clarity, and only you can bring that clarity to the table.

When you ask someone for a recommendation of a vendor, specify that you’re looking for someone you can trust not to cheat you, nothing more. The evaluation of their competence in relation to your need should be entirely up to you.

There will always be a way to get all of it (or some of it) done at no cost or low cost, but every approach has its limitations. For example, the code/design you used may not scale with your evolving needs. Understand the tradeoffs involved, and go with a low/no cost, only if the tradeoffs are acceptable.

Print the list out and check against each item.  You will surely be better off, no matter what your endeavor.