When you do someone else’s work for hire, you are labeled as a consultant. The way a consultant makes money is by completing a job and almost always looking for another while doing the job in progress. This means a part of the consultant’s time is spent on looking for the next gig. This is the key difference between a consultant and employee. The charm of having a consultant instead of an employees are:

• No need to worry about job benefits
• No long term planning is required as the consultant leaves after the job is done

Smart consultants get into a company by keeping a lot of room to maneuver so that they can create new work while working on something else. For example, if you hired a consultant to create your Web site, he might point out that you have no infrastructure setup, no viral marketing plans in place, no online advertising strategies, no search engine optimization planning, no privacy and compliance policies in place.

A consultant might withhold a great deal of knowledge about your problems and inject them in your decision path as he sees fit — waiting for the right moment to get your attention. Why is this possible? Because:

• You do not have a clear understanding of your needs — specifications
• You have not set your own goals and investigated the gap between what you have now and the goals you want to achieve — your very own gap analysis

In my dozen years of working with people, I found that most consultants are not focused on getting the job done in a timely manner as most of the time it is very easy to convince the business owner that due to the uncertainty associated with the pseudo-specifications, it is impossible to really plan a good delivery time line.

This flexibility is a great insurance in favor of the consultant. Where does this flexibility of time line comes from? You. Because you have not prepared yourself with a rock-solid scope of work, you are going to pay for it in consultant hours — a few multiple of what you pay your best employee.