The chap who lived behond my parents' house (before he left his wife and married his secretary) was a consultant to small family-owned businesses.
He was a very pleasant fellow.
I assumed that he was generally hired to tell a family (in a nice way) that the idiot son was too stupid to take over the business.
Of course everyone in a family that hired him already knew that the son was an idiot, but they needed an outsider to tell them so the blame would lie outside the family.
Talk about meeting one of society's needs!