How to Select a Mining Consultant: Why the Industry Gets It Wrong

The mining and minerals processing industry spends considerable time and money on consultant selection processes that regularly produce the wrong result. The problem isn't the process itself — it's what the process is measuring. Here is a perspective from someone who has been on both sides of that table.

I've sat through a lot of consultant selection processes over the years.

Glossy presentations. Impressive slide counts. Frameworks with names that sound like they were invented in a business school seminar — which they probably were. Websites that look like they were designed by an award-winning agency and written by a marketing department that has never been near a processing plant.

And at the end of it, someone gets selected. With hindsight, after the fact, they were the wrong someone.

Here's my opinion, plainly stated: consultant selection in the mining and minerals processing industry is broken, and the way it's broken is that we've confused presentation with capability.

The questions that actually matter are simple ones.

Have you solved this problem before? Not a problem that sounds like this one — this one. Do you understand the fundamentals of what we're dealing with — the metallurgy, the process chemistry, the mechanical realities, the economics? Can you explain it to me in plain language, without reaching for jargon to cover uncertainty? And when things don't go to plan — because they rarely do — do you have the experience to adapt, or will you retreat to the methodology you were trained to sell? Dust off the flowsheet that has “worked” countless times before?

A 300-slide deck doesn't answer any of those questions. It obscures them.

The best technical consultants I've encountered over a forty-year career were not always the most polished presenters. Some of them had ordinary websites, or no website at all. What they had was deep, genuine knowledge of their subject — the kind that only comes from having actually done the work, in the field, when the pressure was on.

That's what solves problems. Not the framework. Not the brand. Not the slide count.

When you're selecting a consultant, ask harder questions. You'll get better answers — including some you may not like to hear, but which are important to hear — and better outcomes.