Using Consultants Effectively: How to Extract Value Without Surrendering Control

Critiquing the over-reliance on foreign consultants does not imply that consultants are unnecessary. On the contrary, most mining projects—particularly in frontier jurisdictions—require external expertise at various stages. The issue is not whether consultants should be used, but how they are engaged, managed, and challenged.

Projects that succeed do not eliminate consultants; they use them with discipline.

Consultants Should Inform Decisions, Not Make Them

The first principle is clear: responsibility must remain with the license holder. Consultants provide analysis, interpretation, and recommendations—but they should never be the final authority on strategic decisions.

When reports are treated as definitive answers rather than inputs, companies surrender judgment. Effective operators treat consultant outputs as hypotheses to be tested, not conclusions to be accepted.

A feasibility study should sharpen internal thinking, not replace it.

Define the Question Before Hiring the Expert

Many consulting failures begin before a contract is signed. Companies often hire consultants without clearly defining what problem they are trying to solve. As a result, reports are technically sound but strategically irrelevant.

Before commissioning work, companies should ask:

• What decision will this report inform?

• What assumptions must be stress-tested?

• What would cause us to stop, delay, or redesign the project?

Consultants perform best when the scope is tightly defined and tied to real decision points.

Align Incentives Wherever Possible

While consultants are typically paid fixed fees, alignment can still be improved. This does not mean transferring financial risk indiscriminately, but it does mean structuring engagement intelligently.

Effective approaches include:

• Breaking work into stages tied to validation milestones

• Requiring explicit downside scenarios and failure cases

• Linking follow-on work to demonstrated accuracy, not optimism

Consultants who know their conclusions will be interrogated tend to be more precise.

Insist on Assumptions, Not Just Conclusions

Well-written reports often obscure their most important elements: assumptions. Grade continuity, recovery rates, operating costs, access conditions, and social stability are frequently treated as reasonable defaults rather than uncertain variables.

Effective use of consultants requires demanding transparency:

• What assumptions drive project viability?

• Which variables are most sensitive?

• What data is weak or incomplete?

A project does not fail because assumptions were wrong—it fails because they were never challenged.

Ground-Truth Everything

No report should be accepted without local verification. Desk studies and short site visits cannot capture community dynamics, security risks, or operational constraints in isolation.

Companies that succeed ensure that:

• Local teams participate actively in studies

• Findings are cross-checked through repeated field engagement

• Social and logistical realities are tested against technical models

Foreign expertise must be complemented by local knowledge, not substituted for it.

Build Internal Technical Literacy

One of the most overlooked aspects of effective consulting is internal capacity. Companies that rely entirely on external experts lose the ability to ask the right questions.

Internal teams do not need to replicate consultant expertise, but they must understand enough to:

• Challenge assumptions

• Interpret results critically

• Detect inconsistencies

Consultants add the most value when they are engaged by informed counterparts.

Avoid “One-Off” Consultancy

Mining projects evolve. Treating consultancy as a one-time exercise encourages shallow understanding and false confidence. More effective models involve:

• Ongoing advisory relationships

• Iterative reviews as conditions change

• Consultants who remain accountable to earlier conclusions

Continuity matters more than credentials.

Consultants as Tools, Not Crutches

Used properly, consultants accelerate learning, reduce blind spots, and improve decision quality. Used poorly, they create an illusion of certainty that masks unresolved risk.

The most successful mining companies are neither anti-consultant nor consultant-dependent. They are disciplined, skeptical, and grounded in reality. They understand that reports do not build mines—people do.

In frontier jurisdictions especially, effective leadership means owning uncertainty, not outsourcing it.