Hopefully you can afford to have database servers that take hours to return answers to queries. I would be willing to bet there are any number of other suboptimal/unfortunate things in place, such as maintenance practices (LOTS here), integrity checks, server/sqlserver/database settings, ability to recover in an outage, etc. Many of the clients I come across (especially the small ones) truly could not afford to NOT get a person on board for at least a short time to fix critical items. I have also seen many clients spend WAY more on hardware than was necessary because their systems were not properly tuned/maintained.

Anyway - best of luck resolving your performance issues!