Nov. 6, 2026

Consultants have a pretty bad reputation in some circles.

In fairness, we have earned it.

I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, but the truth is that many consultants genuinely are charlatans.

And I say that as someone who has been a consultant for over a decade now and has no intention of ever quitting.

Now, when I say “charlatan,” I don’t mean incompetent….

I was pretty incompetent when I first started out as a consultant, partly because I started young (mid-twenties) and partly because I was arrogant. It’s hard to know what you don’t know yet.

Rather, when I speak of “charlatans,” I mean grifters.

I have watched with my own eyes as a consultant dumped client files and requests into ChatGPT, lightly edited the resulting output, and then sent it back to the client as a report. (Rest assured, this is no one I’m currently or previously affiliated with. That was my first exposure to this particular “firm,” and I escaped that dumpster fire immediately.)

Charging clients for that trash was pure grifting.

Who could possibly pretend that a middleman is needed to paste the request into an LLM and then print out the results in a “report”?

What expertise is demonstrated or conferred through that two-step process?

Oh, I get it. They’re paying the big bucks for that light editing the “consultant” provided, right? Give me a break.

It’s no wonder at all that so many people distrust consultants as a rule.

Which is unfortunate, because many consultants are extremely good at what they do.

If someone becomes adept at solving certain kinds of highly complex problems (or realizing certain kinds of possibilities), then it makes sense that others would seek them out to solicit their advice on similar situations.

But that’s what creates the opportunity for grifting in the first place: By its nature, consulting involves advising others on something you understand better than they do.

Therefore, clients rarely possess the expertise necessary to evaluate the quality of the advice. (If they did, then what would they need the consultant for?) In fact, for especially complex situations and challenges, it is never fully clear to the client whether the advice was helpful or not, even after the fact.

Given human nature, this type of dynamic is a huge attractor for grifters. All they need to do is talk the talk, put on a show, and then rake in the cash from unsuspecting marks—uh, I mean, clients.

I wish that weren’t the truth. I wish it were more complicated than that. But I have personally witnessed too many grifters pulling this kind of stunt to be that naive anymore.

If we want a better reputation, we have to earn it.

The only way to build trust is to consistently and repeatedly behave in a trustworthy manner over an extended period of time.