Hiring an advisor is itself an unadvised decision. Competitive bids and reference checks do not separate the firms — every serious one clears them. These nine questions do.
Hiring an advisor is itself an unadvised decision. You are being asked to judge expertise you do not have, usually under time pressure, usually on the strength of a credentials deck and two reference calls that the firm selected. The normal defenses — competitive bids, reference checks, a procurement process — are weak here, because every serious firm clears them.
These nine questions work better. They are not clever, and they are not traps. Each one is designed so that the honest answer is easy for the right firm to give and uncomfortable for the wrong one. Ask them in a room, not in an RFP, and pay attention to how quickly the answers arrive.
The only question about independence that cannot be answered with a slogan. Follow every dollar: reseller margin, referral fee, partner-tier rebate, implementation hours that only exist on one platform, a certification the firm has spent years and real money earning.
"Nothing" is the answer you want. Anything else is not automatically disqualifying — a great deal of conflicted advice is perfectly good — but it means you are carrying the risk that this particular recommendation was shaped by something other than your interests, and you should discount accordingly. What should disqualify a firm is being evasive about it. The conflict is manageable; the unwillingness to name it is not.
The pitch team and the delivery team are frequently different people, and the gap between them is where engagements go quiet. Ask for names. Ask how many other engagements each is on. Ask how many years they have spent doing the specific thing you are hiring them for — not consulting generally, and not in your industry generally, but this.
If the answer is a team, ask what the team is for. Retrieval and document production, which is what large teams historically did, are the parts of this work that have gotten dramatically cheaper. Team size used to be a costly signal of commitment. It is now at least as likely to be a cost structure you are being asked to fund.
Every firm can describe a success. The useful information is in the second half of the question.
A firm that has actually done this work will have ready answers: the assumption that turned out to be wrong at month three, the integration nobody scoped, the client-side resource who was supposed to be at fifty percent and was really at ten. A firm that has mostly sold this work will give you a case study. The presence of specific, unflattering, self-implicating detail is the single most reliable signal available to you in a sales conversation.
Ask for the calendar, not the intention. Time from this conversation to a signed NDA. To a proposal. From verbal yes to signed SOW. To kickoff.
This is diagnostic well beyond scheduling. A firm that needs eight to twelve weeks to execute a contract is telling you something structural about how it makes decisions internally — how many committees, how many approval layers, how much distance between the person in front of you and the person who can say yes. That same distance will be there when you need a scope decision in the middle of the engagement. Contracting speed is the cheapest available preview of decision speed.
You want to see the machinery: the requirements, the evaluation criteria and their weights, the scoring, and the written rationale for why one option beat another. Not a summary slide — the artifact underneath it.
There are two reasons. The first is quality: a recommendation that has to be defended in writing, with weights fixed before the scores, is a recommendation that has been thought about. The second is durability. In eighteen months, when the CFO is new or the board asks why you did not pick the cheaper option, the documented rationale is the only thing standing between you and relitigating the decision from memory. In a regulated company it is also the answer to an inspector who asks how you chose.
The best question for testing regulatory fluency, because it cannot be answered from a template.
Anyone who answers "all of them, to be safe" is either not fluent or is selling protocol volume. Over-validation is not free caution — it is budget, calendar, and change-control friction taken permanently from work that would have made the business better. Real fluency shows up as the ability to draw the line: this workflow touches product quality and patient safety, so it gets full rigor; this one is a finance convenience feature that no regulation reaches, so it gets none, and here is the written rationale for that decision so it holds up when someone asks later.
Getting one therapy to market takes hundreds of millions of dollars, often one to two billion. That makes an IPO or heavy private-equity dependence a near-certainty for a company at your stage, not a hypothetical — and it makes SOX-ready controls, an audit-grade close, and investor-quality reporting design requirements now rather than a remediation project later. In the same way, EU approval following US approval is one of the easiest revenue adds available to a commercial-stage company, which makes multi-entity, multi-currency, and multi-jurisdiction structure a day-one decision.
An advisor who scopes only to what you are today will produce something that works today. You will rebuild it during your first diligence process, at the worst possible moment, with data already in it.
On any build, the implementation partner's project manager works for the implementation partner. That is not a criticism — it is the org chart. Their obligations run to their employer's scope, margin, and change orders, and a competent one will manage all three well.
So the question stands: who holds plan integrity, approves or rejects deliverables, controls change orders, governs risk, and has the standing to say a milestone was not actually met? If the answer is your own CIO, ask what else that person is doing. If the answer is nobody, you have found the reason most troubled implementations were already troubled at month two and nobody with authority said so.
Ask it last, and treat the answer as data about candor rather than capability.
Every firm has a shape. A boutique cannot staff forty people onto a global multi-site rollout; a large firm cannot give you its most senior person's continuous attention on a ninety-day project. Both of those are fine, and both are knowable in advance. A firm that cannot name a single situation where someone else would serve you better is either not being straight with you or has not thought carefully about what it is — and you will discover which one during the engagement.
None of these questions requires you to know anything about ERP, validation, or change management. That is the point. They test for the things you can actually evaluate from where you sit: whose interests the advice serves, who will do the work, how fast the firm decides, whether it writes down its reasoning, and whether it is willing to tell you something you would rather not hear.
If you ask all nine and the answers come back specific, fast, and occasionally unflattering, you are probably talking to the right firm — including when that firm is not us.
Aperigon is the independent operations and systems advisor for Life Sciences companies — on your side of the table, at the speed your clock demands. If you are about to run this conversation with a shortlist, start a conversation.