Lived It vs. Learned It: What to Ask Before Hiring a Consultant

Before You Hire a Consultant, Ask If They Have Ever Sat in a Bank (Or Just Read About One in a Brochure)

When I was learning the ropes in banking, I used to ride along with the lenders. We would visit customers on-site-manufacturers, farmers, shop owners-and I would just sit back, listen, and soak it in. No slide decks, no jargon. Just people walking us through how they ran their businesses.

And let me tell you-those were the best classrooms I ever had. I learned how a delay in one machine can throw off payroll. How weather impacts inventory. How a broken loading dock door on a Thursday could turn into a cash flow issue by Monday. That is not something you pick up from a white paper.

Fast forward a few decades spent in community banking I decided to transition to consulting. I spent three years on the consulting side, helping banks sort through the chaos of GLBA compliance, risk assessments, and incident response planning. I enjoyed it, but what made me effective was not just my security knowledge. It was that I knew what it felt like to be in a bank. I knew what it looked like when the examiner walked in early. I had lived the late nights before the board meeting. I understood the difference between a policy that looks good on paper and one that actually works on a Tuesday aftenoon when the core crashes.

Now here is the problem I see: too many firms claim to specialize in banking, but a lot of their consultants have never worked in a bank. They can recite the ten control families from FFIEC like it is a TED Talk, but they have never had to explain GLBA to a skeptical board member or recover from a BEC incident on a Friday at 4:50.

Look, I have nothing against career consultants. There are some brilliant ones out there. But there is a difference between understanding the concepts and understanding the culture. Knowing the controls is not the same as knowing how they apply when your frontline staff just lost their third teller this quarter and your IT guy is wearing seventeen hats.

A lot of consulting firms wrap their services in really nice packaging. Beautiful branding. Slick onboarding portals. They talk about transformation and innovation and synergy. But before you sign that contract, stop and ask: is the production value just hiding a lack of substance?

Because the right consultant should know your world. Not just the acronyms. Not just the framework boxes to check. They should know why that outdated spreadsheet still matters in your process. They should know what keeps your operations officer awake at night-and it is probably not just MFA adoption or patch cycles.

So if you are hiring a consultant-especially in the information security and risk space-do not just ask what they know. Ask how they know it.

The difference between “we specialize in banking” and “we have lived in banking” is everything.

– Joe