I want to say that the very first smart thing you did was to go ahead and choose SharePoint as your platform of choice. It will make everything in your business work much better. The next smart decision you made was to go ahead and realize that bringing in consultants to help out in the process will make it so much better. I am sure you will agree over time.
While it’s tempting to want to believe that your company will just learn how to use it as you go along, the real life experiences I have seen say otherwise. It will probably take you many countless years to master SP. It might take a ton of mishaps and costly errors to learn even basic pitfalls and only a stubborn person would want to go through such torture.
The reason using consultants is much cheaper in the long run is that they are master at optimization. I’ve seen cases where a company was using 3-4 servers to barely support their SP implementation, but then a consulting team came in, and made it work smoothly using just one server.
Ok, ok I get, you get it, you know you want consultants, but just want to know how to pick them in the first place? Obviously, like picking any sort of consultant, the first thing to look at is all their previous work and experience. I highly suggest looking at folks who have worked with big-name companies and have an impressive list of clients.
Next, see if the specific SP consulting company that you’re considering actually has a similar management philosophy as yours. Remember, they’re coming into your company almost as if to act as an intermediary or temporary manager. If their style doesn’t fit your style, there will be problems! I know that this is true.
For more info, all you need to do is bing a keyword such as sharepoint consulting or sharepoint experts. I wish you the very best!