Before you see this as a sadistic rant, read through till the end.
I’ve had my own consulting firm for almost 2 years now, and to be honest, I’ve always hated consultants ever since I was in Sales, and I still do. But after doing consulting myself, I realized that it’s only a subset of consultants that I feel strongly against; the resource wasters.
Typical Consulting Firms are:
-
Generic: They will briefly listen to your pain-points, needs, company background, and offerings, take note of all of them charge you for the hours and resources spent, and then turn around, throw all of that in the garbage, and give you a massive PowerPoint deck and report that they’ve developed for your industry and given to everyone else.
-
Hiring Kids: They chuck several 24 year olds with MBAs and almost no experience into a project and having them do point 1 above.
-
Politically Correct: They want you to be happy, so that you give a good feedback to their management on the job done, possibly purchase more services during or after the project (happy customer is a buying customer) and recommend them to others.
On the flipside, a good consultant is:
-
Specific: They will tailor the approach, content, discussion, and everything around you to make sure you benefit the most given your company and operations out of the exercise. The output is concise and approved by you, and they make sure to shove it down your team’s throat whether they like it or not before they exit the project, not just leave a large file on the table.
-
Experienced: Yes, academics play an important role, but nothing beats experience. They’ve been where you are now, they’ve seen situations like yours as well as similar ones with variations, and they’ve gone through them all.
-
Honest and Inquisitive: I believe this is the most important point of all. A good consultant will challenge you, your team, and your ideas, will ask you questions that you didn’t ask yourself, and will help you set clear objectives and then guide you through a structured approach to reach them, hand in hand.
So, in conclusion, going full circle, yes, I am elated when my clients frown, sigh or tell me I’m giving them a headache, because it means I made them think of something that they didn’t think of before, but that is important enough to keep thinking of.
And that’s how progress is made, quoting a great artist: “Whoever said progress was a slow process wasn’t talking about me”.