---
title: "A consultancy that resells cannot advise you"
url: "https://vucale.com/blog/a-consultancy-that-resells-cannot-advise-you"
description: "The advice may still be good. The problem is that you have no way to tell, because the same firm profits from one answer and not from the others."
---

# A consultancy that resells cannot advise you

August 18, 2026·2 min read·VUCALE

Most technology consultancies also resell. Licences, cloud commitments, implementation hours attached to a specific platform, partner tiers that come with revenue targets. This is normal, widely disclosed, and treated as a minor detail in a procurement conversation.

It is not a minor detail. It is the single most useful thing to know about anybody giving you advice, and it does not require assuming bad faith to matter.

## Why good faith does not fix it

Nobody in these firms sits down intending to recommend the wrong platform. What happens is subtler and much harder to see from outside.

**Expertise follows revenue.** The firm has thirty consultants certified on one platform and two who have used the alternative. When a client question arrives, the honest answer from the people in the room is shaped by what they actually know.

**Partner status requires volume.** Tiers come with commitments. Falling out of a tier costs margin, support and co-selling access, so there is organisational pressure toward one answer that nobody has to articulate.

**The reference architecture already exists.** It was built for the platform the firm sells, it is genuinely good, and it saves weeks. Starting from it is efficient and it is also a decision made before the client arrived.

**Nobody sees the counterfactual.** The client never finds out what the other option would have cost, because nobody built it. The engagement can therefore succeed on its own terms while still having been the wrong choice.

## What it costs a client

Not usually a disaster. Usually a slightly wrong platform, adopted competently, at a total cost somewhat higher than necessary, with a dependency somewhat deeper than intended.

The bill arrives years later at renewal, when the switching cost is real and the firm that recommended it is also the firm quoting to migrate you off it.

## The questions that surface it

Worth asking every advisor, in writing:

**Do you resell anything you might recommend?** Licences, cloud commitments, hardware, or hours tied to a specific platform.

**Do you hold partner status, and at what tier?** Tiers carry targets. Targets carry pressure.

**Are you paid referral fees?** Including fees paid to a parent or sister company, which is where this frequently hides.

**Would you be paid less if we chose the other option?** The clearest version of the question and the one that produces the most informative pause.

Any of these being true does not disqualify a firm. Not disclosing them plainly should.

## Our position, and its cost

We resell nothing, hold no partner status, take no referral fees, and use no vendor logos. Fees come from the work: framing, building, change support.

This is a worse business model. Reselling is where the margin in this industry is, and firms with partner status get leads, support and co-selling that we do not. That is a real disadvantage and we would rather absorb it than have a client wonder which answer we were paid to give.

Judge that claim the way you should judge any claim about incentives: not by whether we say it, but by whether the structure makes it true. Ask us the four questions. The answers are the same in writing as they are here.

-   conflict of interest
-   vendor selection
-   procurement
-   incentives

## Keep reading

-   [The constraint is change capacity, not strategy](https://vucale.com/blog/the-constraint-is-change-capacity)
-   [AI agents in a company that cannot describe its own process](https://vucale.com/blog/ai-agents-and-undefined-processes)