When Someone Is Taking You on a Drive

There is a particular kind of professional encounter that feels productive right up until it isn’t.

The conversation flows well. The person across the table is articulate, experienced, well-credentialled. They reference impressive engagements. They speak your language. You leave the meeting feeling like you’ve found someone who understands the problem.

Then you engage them. And something shifts.

Not dramatically. Not in a way you can immediately name. But the energy that was present during the pitch isn’t quite there in the delivery. The timelines stay loose. The commitments stay vague. The person who once seemed so available becomes harder to pin down.

You’ve been taken on a drive.

What It Actually Looks Like

The signs are visible before you sign anything — if you know where to look.

They tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. This is the oldest signal and the easiest to miss. It feels like alignment. It is actually calibration — they’ve identified what you want confirmed and they’re confirming it. Real advisors disturb comfortable assumptions. They don’t validate them.

They impress you with what they’ve done, not what they’re doing for you right now. Credentials, past clients, scale of prior engagements — all deployed to establish authority. But in the actual conversation, they add little. No diagnostic questions. No challenging observations. The value is always positioned as something that will materialise later, once engaged. That later rarely arrives in the form promised.

Their attention shifts after you commit. This is the most reliable signal of all, and you only see it in hindsight. Before the contract, you are the priority. After the contract — once the payment is flowing — you discover where you actually sit in the queue. Urgency disappears. Response times lengthen. The engagement becomes managed rather than driven.

They stay non-committal on the things that matter. Milestones, timelines, measurable outcomes — all kept deliberately soft. Vagueness is not oversight. It is protection. When nothing is specific, nothing can be missed.

They give you what you asked for, not what you needed. A capable advisor with genuine experience will sometimes push back on the brief. They’ll tell you the question you asked isn’t the right question. They’ll reframe the problem before they try to solve it. Someone working to their own agenda just fills the brief and invoices.

They make simple things complicated. This is worth paying attention to. Complexity that serves the client looks like clarity — it breaks down a hard problem into something navigable. Complexity that serves the advisor looks like the opposite — it makes a navigable problem seem harder than it is, which justifies the engagement, extends the timeline, and obscures the gap between what was promised and what was delivered.

The Honest Diagnosis

None of this requires malice. Most people in this category aren’t dishonest. They’re operating their own agenda in parallel with yours — and when the two conflict, theirs wins. They need to meet a target. They need the engagement to run long enough to be profitable. They need you to stay satisfied enough not to escalate, but not so informed that you start asking hard questions.

That’s the mechanism. It doesn’t require bad faith. It only requires misaligned incentives — and misaligned incentives are the default condition of most professional services relationships.

What Protects You

Not scepticism. Scepticism without structure just makes you difficult to work with.

What protects you is knowing what a genuine advisor looks like before you need one — and holding that standard throughout the engagement, not just at the start.

A genuine advisor tells you uncomfortable things early. They push back on the brief. They name risks you haven’t asked about. They are specific about what they can and cannot do. They don’t need complexity to justify their presence — their value is visible in the quality of the questions they ask and the clarity they bring to yours.

And when you’re mid-engagement and something feels off — when the energy has shifted, the commitments have softened, the timelines have drifted — that instinct is worth acting on. Not with confrontation, but with directness. Ask for what was promised. Name what’s changed. Watch how they respond.

The response tells you everything.

A Few Questions Worth Asking

Before you engage anyone in an advisory or delivery capacity:

• Are they telling me what I want to hear, or what I need to hear?
• Where is the value in this conversation — in what they’ve done, or in what they’re doing right now?
• How specific are they about outcomes, timelines, and what happens if those aren’t met?
• What do they stand to gain if this engagement runs long or stays unresolved?

And mid-engagement, if something feels off:

• Has their availability or attention changed since we signed?
• Are problems being solved or being managed?
• Am I getting clearer on my situation, or more dependent on them to explain it to me?

The last question is the most important. A good advisor makes you more capable of seeing your own situation clearly. Someone on their own drive keeps the map to themselves.

SP Singh is the founder of Bhani Consulting, providing independent ERP oversight and advisory to WA local government and Aboriginal corporations.