There is a version of advisory work that exists primarily to confirm what a client already believes. The research is thorough and the presentation is polished but the conclusion lands within the range the client expected. The good news is that everyone leaves the meeting satisfied.
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The bad news is that this is not really advice. It is an expensive pat on the back.
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The reason it persists is structural. Large advisory firms are built to retain clients, and clients who receive uncomfortable conclusions are harder to retain than clients who receive encouraging ones. The incentive to soften, qualify, encourage and hedge is baked into the commercial model. The goal isn’t dishonesty, but relationship maintenance and the gradual erosion of candour that becomes more important over time than the recommendations themselves.
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Independent advisory, genuinely independent, with no house products to place and no retainer to protect, operates differently. The adviser's only interest is in being right. That fundamentally changes what gets said in the room.
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It also changes what a client does with it. Advice received from someone with nothing to gain from a particular outcome lands completely differently. The decisions made on the back of genuinely independent counsel tend to be better decisions. More honest. All because the counsel itself was formed without the distortions that institutional advisory almost inevitably introduces.