Five Questions to Ask Before You Appoint a Communications Firm

A pitch tells you what a firm can do, but it rarely tells you how the firm will behave when the advice becomes uncomfortable.

Whether the appointment is yours as chief executive or as head of communications, that second thing matters as much as the first, and it can be tested before anyone signs. These are the five questions we would put to any firm, ours included.

One caution first. The questions favour judgement over scale. A small senior team suits a hard decision, but a larger network may suit execution across several markets. Decide which problem you are hiring for and weigh the answers accordingly.

1. Who will be in the room?

The people who win an engagement are not always the people who deliver it. Ask which of the senior people you have met will attend which meetings, who will write the advice, and who will take the call at eleven at night when something goes wrong. A clear answer is useful. So is a vague one.

2. Will they tell us what we may not want to hear?

Any firm will say yes. Ask how. A good adviser can describe how they handle disagreement with a chief executive, tell you how confident they are in each piece of advice, and say plainly when a decision approaches a legal, ethical or disclosure line, and send you to counsel when it does. Better still, they will agree at the start that this is how the relationship will work, because it is much harder to ask for candour once the relationship is under strain.

3. Who are they working for, and who else are they working with?

Ask which other clients or relationships could bear on your matter, and how the firm handles price-sensitive information, particularly if you are listed. Then ask how concerns will be raised if the firm believes the person instructing it and the organisation are not on the same side. In GLCs and family-run groups, those two are not always the same party, and the route for raising it is best agreed before the first piece of difficult advice arrives.

4. What will we hold after the first month that we do not hold now?

For a decision-led engagement, the answer should be something you can use: a way to decide that includes what happens if things go wrong, and a clear read on where each stakeholder stands. In a live crisis the first week matters more than the first month, so ask what you will have by then. Either way, a long document is not evidence of good advice. If the output cannot be summarised on one page, the engagement is not yet doing its job.

5. What would make them tell us to stop?

Ask what would lead the firm to decline the work, narrow it or advise you to end it. A firm that can name those circumstances has thought about when it is not needed. A firm with no answer has not yet asked itself.

And a test after thirty days

Once the work is under way, three questions are worth putting to yourselves. Has this firm changed how we think about the decision, and not only how we talk about it? Do we decide better, even when that takes longer? Would we put them in front of the board tomorrow? If any answer is no, say so at once. A firm worth its fee will want to hear it.

How a firm answers will tell you more than what it has done.

If you are considering an appointment and would like to put these questions to us, we should talk. Email changenow@orchan.asia, call +603-7972 6377 or visit www.orchan.asia.