On the business side of things @Kingalan1, I can totally understand looking at SEO from a consumer perspective it should be only reasonable that if you're paying a doctors wage that you could get at least a time estimate. The problem we face is that there are so many factors beyond not only the consumer, but the SEO strategists control.
I think what Chris Menke said, "you should be very, very well educated on the topic of link building before investing your company's money in it." is very crucial in the fact that the more research you put into SEO the better results plus the more money you'll save. In your position what I would probably do if you want VERY HIGH authority links is actually research into each one you want individually.
News Websites seem to be rather heavy hitters for example. So every News website has journalists that write articles which have email addresses to contact them. With some time and money invested you can very much expedite the link building process. I wouldn't go into setting goals of link quantity, but rather target quality. Because as I'm sure you know sometimes 1 link could be worth what 1000 others would provide you.
So if you hire a professional SEO strategist to do these things for you, I would research into the quality of their work, and their results. But I wouldn't go into it with a certain expectation or time frame for any particular result.