While consulting firms come with a cost that subtracts from their value to you, some of them come with some gains. An established and experienced firm has built models around your problem statements before. What they may know and you don’t is what are the derived predictors that can dramatically improve a model’s performance. This is ‘golden’ knowledge but comes at a price. Best case is you get the details of the derived predictor and the transformations.
For those new to this subject, a derived predictor is a data element created from combining two or more features that is more predictive than the individual features. In many models, the derived predictors create most of the lift. It is part of the art of analytics to understand how to create values that represent the target phenomenon more accurately than any raw data can.
The Analytic Executive 