My Consultant Is Worthless! - The CREST Network

4 min read

Hopefully, you have never been in a situation where you hired a consultant only to find out they weren’t bringing any value to you or your company.

Too many times, consultants promise the world, set your expectations at the top of the world, and then deliver worn, leftover coaching and advice that was trending in 1990.

Today more than ever, there are self-proclaimed “guru’s” that are:

Rehashing advice and ideas from the 80’s, 90’s, and even up through 2015.
Re-packaging programs and advice that worked years ago.
Change the names of old strategies and ideas, but it’s still the same crap.
Make you use their one-size-fits-all paperwork, forms, documents, spreadsheets.
All bluster and bluff – telling tales that really aren’t credible.
Brand new to our industry but claim to have the “magic bullet.”
Able to appeal to the suckers in our industry (yes, there are some).

Here’s a real-life example of a blowhard consultant: They claim to have visited ten insurance agents on a Friday, on Monday got ten referral jobs from them! Any contractor that believes that baloney deserves to hire them.

For those of us that have been eyeballs deep in the industry for 20 or more years, we continue to see scam artists. Unfortunately, there are even some “seasoned veteran coaches” within the restoration industry that are still stuck in the mode of 15 or 20 years ago. They’re still trying to convince companies that it’s a great idea to deliver chachki cheap trinket junk (marketing collateral) to clients and prospects, all with the mistaken belief that giving away a $10 or $20 box of snacks will produce thousands of dollars’ worth of leads like some wizardly wand. It rarely works that way.

VALUE FOR VALUE

Why it rarely works this way is because giving a $10 box of cheap goodies doesn’t create the willingness of the prospect to return the favor of sending you a job worth potentially thousands of dollars! Reciprocity typically requires the return favor of similar value. It’s quite a stretch to give a plumber a cheap box of snacks expecting them to send you jobs worth a LOT of money.

If you are using the goodies to entice them to be willing to meet with you and hear about your referral program – OK – maybe that will work. What so many contractors fail to realize is that a $10 box of goodies times 100 plumbers is also a lot of marketing money.

WORSE YET

I talk with marketers every day that tell me they deliver these snack boxes over and over to the same plumbers (or sometimes insurance agents). Bottom line, you can’t buy their love. Quit using chachki items as a crutch to get people to talk with you or refer you! You are better than that. Get Restoration Marketing Specialist™ certification (RMS™) certification training so you are a Rockstar without giving away the house.

Here’s the link to the info on RMS™: https://thecrestnetwork.com/rms/

By Dick Wagner, Co-Founder The CREST Network, LLC

Nationally recognized coach, consultant, trainer, and speaker

Creator of the renowned PREP™ pre-disaster program

Owner of AskDickWagner.com BLOG