Choosing a Consultant for Economic Recovery and Resilience?

Practical Tips for Making a Match

New to hiring consulting guidance to help with economic recovery?  You are not alone.  In fact, you have plenty of company during this challenging rebound stretch, with so many people looking for direction as we enter the latter part of the COVID outbreak and then its extended aftermath.  Communities and economic units across the country can benefit from assistance in making a sustainable bounce-back from the unprecedented slow-down, losses, limitations, and new models resulting from the pandemic –– as well as, from other natural events and trends that have taken place during this same time in various regions.

Right now, the need for experienced direction for any entity seeking to achieve robust recovery has never been greater.  With the many angles and facets to a build-back and resilience effort, and the many strategies and potential collaborators and sources of support, where does a company or township, city, county, state, or municipality turn for a plan and for the know-how to execute that plan?

Areas, organizations, or industries that are not in disaster-prone regions or sectors probably don’t have the proper aspects of planning in place for restoring their activities, much less in a durable fashion.  Instead, this moment requires direction and experienced, knowledgeable assistance in helping leaders to take steps and model behaviors for their community and stake holders that will help everyone move forward and adapt.

Knowing that many consulting firms may be newer to answering this sudden vast recovery need in our country, how do you safeguard your critical recovery expenditures so that you retain capable assistance and get the best long-term payback for your dollar?  What are the attributes to seek in recovery and resilience consulting?  Let’s explore.

Examine Your Prospective Consultant’s Specific Qualifications and Record Closely

In many facets of contracting, in any arena, a long-term commitment and history of success in a focused field speaks to likely quality, insight, efficiency, and effectiveness of services that your selected source can render.  These considerations are certainly true in the discipline of economic rebound and economic staying power.  The “resilience” concept, so widely touted as to have become a meme and a catch-word now, is actually a long-developed discipline in the recovery field.  Resilience implementation should be approached with the same level of vested knowledge, and with the huge responsibility, that the task carries.

The Resilience Mindset™, a rubric developed by our group to inform our work, means building something much longer-lasting than a short-term recovery or return to past normalcy.  True resilience concerns the ability of an economic entity to cope, recover from, reconstruct, and endure after a shock.  In situations of disruption, restoring economic strength involves a response to immediate impacts and a recovery that builds a long-term sturdiness (a characteristic that benefits from a dose of toughness, flexibility, and diversity).

The effort will involve putting together work-groups and coalitions, and will require taking advantage of new and existing resources that help to aid response when disruption or disaster strikes.  Economic resilience should be defined by business resumption and stability for all concerned –– from individual households and sole proprietorships to commonwealths and geographically large enterprises.  To get there, your economic unit can benefit vastly from consulting that brings both big-picture experience and one-to-one skills.

Organizations of all sizes are involved –– from neighborhood coalitions, local lending sources, and township commissions to larger government entities and private/public partnerships, all the way to the United Nations, World Bank, and World Economic Forum.  At whatever level you are working, it’s fair and reasonable to ask your prospective consultant for:

• Examples of return on investment from their current or previous engagements
• Successful tactics used in the past
• Instances of having brought groups together or forming working coalitions
• Case studies from their previous work, demonstrating strategies that succeeded
• Testimonials from key clients they served regarding the value of their guidance and interventions.

At this point, businesses, governing bodies, citizens, and residents are more likely to expect and even demand assistance in economic rebound –– all while the resources for affording such assistance may be tight due to blows to the tax base.  The U.S. government’s gamble on a huge and largely borrowed expenditure for economic stimulus is the vastest example of a calculated bid in the pay-off of investing in recovery.  Thus, the pressure is on to evidence and attest that you’ve selected the right candidate or organization for your assistance, both at the initial hiring and in eventually demonstrating the outcomes.

The Consultant’s Job is to Help You Step Through the Overlapping Issues that Make Recovery Work

Especially at the local or proprietary levels of recovery campaigns, the stakes of budgeting for recovery are most immediate and personal.  As a senior advisory to a range of entities, I can tell you that at the more regional or community level, it takes a nimble hand to get the wheels turning in the right way.  It entails work at person-to-person level as needed with managers and neighborhoods or whomever necessary, and it gains from knowing when and how to bring in highly specialized professionals or subcontractors who are colleagues in the resiliency-consulting industry.

In identifying someone to help you lead this type of work, look for a firm or professional with the agility for these individualized challenges and an appreciation for the scope of societal issues that overlap with this effort.  A depth of previous engagements in this rigorous arena will mean your consultant is more aware of and responsive to the special factors and variables in your situation.

For example, recovery undertakings may involve a variety of challenges, such as:

• social justice issues that touch on education, hiring, food and housing security, and more
• siloed management fiefdoms across the region, state, county, city, town, community, or neighborhood
• known planning, implementation, and capacity-building techniques that can be plugged in to avoid reinventing this art and science of recovery and resilience from the ground up for your benefit
• funding sources that need aggressive pursuit
• complex entities of potential support, access to which requires a working knowledge of correct avenues of approach (e.g., U.S. Economic Development Agency (USEDA), Chambers of Commerce, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), regional planning commissions, and other governmental and quasi-government organizations that are less well known)

These points alone illustrate the variety of types of challenges with which your consulting source must be familiar and savvy.  A career-long knowledge and exploration of the above factors in both theory and practice brings with it an ability to tailor solutions to your economic unit’s particular challenges.

Experience is what brings insightful advantages to your effort and the nuanced direction needed at so may turns of this very roll-up-your-sleeves work of economic rebound.  An outside perspective that brings a fresh look and new hand to your entity’s situation always holds promise; but, one that knows the history, lessons, and new and ever-expanding strategies of this field should give the richest return for your consulting investment.