An internal finance team knows your business better than any advisor will. What it cannot easily supply is pattern recognition across dozens of comparable businesses, or the freedom to disagree with the person who signs its payslips
Those two things are what you are actually buying, and they are worth far more at some moments than others.
Having seen the same decision play out across many companies changes how quickly you recognise which version of it you are looking at, and which details will matter in eighteen months
Benchmarks from comparable businesses
Independence from internal politics
Specialist depth kept on retainer
You can judge the quality of an advisory relationship in the first two meetings, long before any recommendation arrives, by whether these questions come up unprompted
If they do not, the engagement is likely to produce documents rather than decisions.
What decision is this analysis actually for
What would change your mind about it
Who has to agree before it can happen
What happens if we simply do nothing
Routine reporting belongs in-house. Outside advice earns its cost on the small number of choices each year that are expensive to unwind and difficult to see clearly from the inside
Save the engagement for those, and both the advice and the relationship will be better for it.
Our latest blog post
