This point caught my attention, as my experience has been quite different, though in completely different industries. How does one go about finding genuinely good consultants, in any industry?
> "Use Consultants
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake lol. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head "I will always check for consultants when I'm assigned a task""
Disclaimer: I'm a software consultant, so obviously biased.
MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way more important to him than to a software business.
He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.
Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend people they worked with.
I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.
Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people in very different technical fields by their thinking and communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're good technical people.
I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".
In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.
That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.
If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a team that will stick together to build value over the long term.
If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever) then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're making.
If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of customization is pretty critical to consistently making those deadlines.
> How do you find them?
Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.
Both of the examples in the quote give you the answer: talk to someone that’s actually done it.
It’s always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the next person. Instead, too many people act like they’re the first person to ever attempt whatever they’re working on.
Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in almost anything other than powerpoint and credential attainment.
Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.
This, like a lot of the advice is "Things that worked for me that likely won't work for you". A lot of people are going to talk to Mr Beast that won't talk to you, Mr Beast is doing a variety of one off projects that he'll never need to revisit. Mr Beast has a shit tonne of money and a shit tonne of resources. For all those reasons, it's something that he can do that you probably can't.
