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The consultant who tells you what not to buy

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Almost everyone selling you digital has a reason to want you to spend more. The agency wants the build. The platform wants the licence. The reseller wants the margin. Even the well-meaning ones are paid when you say yes, so "yes" is the answer they are quietly steering you towards.

I make my living the other way round. A good chunk of the value I give clients is telling them what not to buy.

Why "don't" is worth paying for

It sounds like a strange thing to sell. Nobody writes a glossy proposal titled "the project I talked you out of". But think about where your money actually goes wrong. It is rarely the sensible, boring spend. It is the shiny thing bought because it was pitched well, the platform nobody needed, the rebuild that solved a problem you did not have. Stopping one of those is worth more than optimising ten things you were right to buy.

After twenty-five years of this I have seen the same pattern over and over. A business feels behind, someone smart-sounding offers a fix, and the fix gets bought before anyone has checked whether it addresses the real problem. The tool is fine. It is just the answer to a question nobody asked.

The value of having nothing to sell

The reason I can say "don't" is simple. I am not building the thing. I have no licence to shift and no development hours to fill. When I sit on your side of the table, my only interest is you spending well, which sometimes means spending less, and occasionally means spending nothing at all this quarter.

That independence changes the advice you get. An agency reviewing whether you need a new website will, funnily enough, usually conclude that you need a new website. Someone with no build to win can tell you your current site is fine and your real problem is that nobody can find it.

What this looks like in practice

It is not contrarianism for its own sake. Plenty of the time the answer is yes, spend the money, here is how to do it properly. The point is that the yes is earned, not assumed.

So before I recommend a penny of spend, I want to know what you are actually trying to achieve, whether the numbers you are working from are even true, and what would have to change for the outcome you want. Answer those honestly and half the "obvious" purchases fall away. The other half you buy with confidence, because you know why.

The people who read this and think "I could just do that myself" probably can, and good luck to them. The ones worth working with think "I want someone in my corner who will tell me the truth about this". That is the whole job.

The one question to take away

Next time someone recommends you buy something digital, ask them what they get if you say yes. If the honest answer is "a sale", weigh their advice accordingly. The best money you will spend is often the money you were about to waste.

If you want a straight opinion on something you are about to buy, with no build waiting at the end of it, that is exactly the conversation I enjoy most.

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