Before You Hire a Communications Consultant, Read This

You hired a communications consultant to create new messaging, better talking points, and a cleaner narrative. You were excited about getting it out to the rest of the world. Then nothing. You spent all that money on a polished framework, but no one uses it and the confusion persists.

What the industry sells

Most communications work is surface-level by design. Consultants are brought in to refine the language, tighten the deck, and prepare for client questions. They interview a few people, find language that sounds good, and build a framework around it. The deliverable looks clean. The presentation goes fine. And then nothing moves. That is because the work they did treated the symptom, not the cause.

What is actually going on

I watched this play out in real time at one of my organizations. A funder had suggested we bring in an outside agency they had worked with in the past and the board agreed. The agency came in confident, interviewed people across the organization, and went to work. I was the head of marketing and communications but I had no visibility into who they were talking to or what they were hearing. My only input was my own interview.

Consultant working with a leadership team.

When they presented the finished messaging, it was built almost entirely around one leader's description of the work. She had described the organization's aspiration as moving "from transactional to transformational." It sounded compelling but it said nothing. There was no explanation of how. No grounding in what the organization actually did. It reflected one department's vision, not a shared understanding of the whole organization.

This is what should have been flagged by that agency: every leader in the organization had a different description of what we did. Instead of surfacing that, they picked one version and built around it.

The CEO saw the presentation but he never approved it. He did not reject it. He simply moved on. The rest of the leadership team did the same. The leader who had championed it eventually stopped bringing it up. The messaging was never used.

Meanwhile, I had been running a parallel process with a smaller firm. We interviewed leaders. We listened for where the descriptions diverged and tried to find language that could hold across the whole organization. That version eventually became the working messaging, although I will admit it felt like a watered-down version because I was trying to make too many people happy.

Here is the part I did not fully appreciate until later. Despite all of that work, two members of the leadership team never fully got on board with the messaging. They had not agreed that what the message said was true. Because of that, the messaging was never fully adopted. It was on the marketing materials, but it was not coming out of the mouths of our employees.

Why audiences sense the disconnect

Misalignment creates a low-level static that audiences can feel. That could be an investor who passes but cannot quite say why. Or an employee who stays silent during messaging training, then continues saying the pitch their way. Most assume this is a communication failure, but it is actually a leadership failure.

People connect with belief, not words. When the leadership team does not share a genuine belief about what the organization is and why it matters, no amount of polish can cover that.

What the right fix looks like

The work has to start with the truth. Before any messaging is written, the leadership team has to get into a room and work through what they genuinely agree on. Throw aspiration out the window. It is not useful at this point. You have to identify the version that every person at that table can say out loud and mean it.

That conversation can be very uncomfortable because it surfaces real disagreements. Sometimes it reveals that the tension between two narratives is pointing at a strategic question that has not been answered yet. Most organizations skip this part of the process because leaders think talking about strategy is a detour from messaging. It is not. Your strategy is the foundation.

Hiring someone to polish an unsettled story is like refinishing furniture that has a structural problem. It looks better for a while but it fails under weight. The fancy agency that came in to write our messaging did not fail because they were bad at communications. I imagine they were very good at what they did. They failed because they did not call out the misalignment when they saw it. So they ended up creating a very expensive document that was never used.

If you want to avoid that, reach out. I have spent years walking into rooms full of competing versions of the truth and finding what everyone can agree on. kim@kimfischer.net.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why isn't my communications strategy working?

Most communications strategies fail because the leadership team has not agreed on what is true before the work starts. A polished message built on an unsettled foundation will not land, no matter how well it is written.

What is the difference between a messaging problem and an alignment problem?

A messaging problem is about how something is said. An alignment problem is about whether the people saying it actually agree on what it means. Most organizations assume they have the first when they actually have the second.

How do I know if my leadership team is misaligned?

Ask every member of your leadership team to describe what your organization does. If the answers are different, you have an alignment problem.

When should I hire a communications consultant?

After your leadership team has agreed on what is true, a skilled communicator can help you find the right language for a shared belief. They cannot create that belief for you, no matter how good they are. If you hire outside help before that work is done, you are wasting money.

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About the Author

Kim Fischer is a strategic communications advisor who helps leadership teams align on narrative, messaging, and trust during high-stakes moments. She is a former investigative journalist and communications executive with more than 20 years of experience working with CEOs and founders.