Management and Technical Consulting Firms...

Are You Frustrated Selling Your Expertise For Less Than What It's Worth?

While every business is based on utilising most up-to-date industry-specific knowledge, turning it into products and services, consulting firms are the ultimate embodiments of Professional Knowledge Firms. They dispense highly customised intellectual capital which can't be touched. It must be comprehended. It can't be measured. It must be judged and discerned by intelligent prospects and clients.

And this is where the problem lies. Converting that dispensed expertise into distinctive value clients are ready and willing to pay for. However, over the years many consultants, accountants and lawyers and other sellers of intellectual capital have ill-educated the market. Buyers have learnt that time is the knowledge professional's stock in trade, and what consultants sell really is their time. The common notion is that consultants have an inventory of time chunks, and in return they get paid.

All in all, some consulting firms have successfully turned the profession into a cheap commodity. And the recent Arthur Andersen and Enron fiascos proved that since consulting firms can't be trusted anyway, their expertise must be procured at the lowest price possible. And the world started buying and selling consulting services like sacks of potatoes.

And gradually the once trusted consultants, who used to be engaged by top executives, have turned into vendors requested to bid by the "Purchasing" or "Procurement" departments. Look at many companies' vendors lists. Next to their janitors, bottled water suppliers and fire extinguisher maintenance guys you find the consulting firm that provides vital strategic, leadership or marketing help and support for the company.

Clients have started counting hours and weighing deliverables. The value of consulting has become the equivalent of the number of hours consultants performed manual labour and the weight of deliverables. Consulting firms are mired up to their eyeballs, some of them up to some other balls about halfway down, but pretty much with the same impact. In sophisticated time-tracking systems associates are required to account for their times in 6-minute chunks. Firms have started assigning billing codes for everything they use during client's project work, including bottled water and toilet paper, and whatever they use or consume while working on clients' projects, get invoiced to those clients.

And what is the end result? Well, trust between most consulting firms and their target markets is an all time low. More and more potential clients find out that many consulting firms are pretty poorly managed and more often than not clients pay the price of this poor management.

The other problem is the notorious billable hour. More and more clients reject the billable hour scenario because they know what it means to them to pay the hours, and they know at the end of the day they can get ripped off pretty easily but pretty badly.

How These Recent Changes Impact Your Firm?

Do you feel that your firm has great potential, but...

...you are lost as to how to bring out the best in your people...

...you are frustrated with the ever increasing competition...

...you are puzzled about how to find good people nowadays who are actually willing to stay...

...you are growing more and more tired of finding great clients in the ever fiercer competitive hubbub and brouhaha...

...you're often forced to accept clients and associates your competition has already rejected...

If your answer is yes, and you're looking for remedy for any of these business "illnesses", then you're at the right place.

Hi, I'm Organisational Provocateur Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a practice management and development advisory firm, based in Vancouver, Canada. Using my diverse, somewhat eclectic, experience, including my time at the "world's finest business school" and the "Ultimate Professional Service Firm", as many people refer to the military, I help forward-thinking consulting firms that grappling with stiff competition and increasing fee pressure to sell their expertise for what it's truly worth.

As a result, my clients can sell their services at the highest possible profit margins, while constantly reducing the time and effort of delivering their services. This enables them not only to outperform their competitors on profitability (net profit per person), but also to attract the cream of their target markets, which in turn makes them an attractive career choice for top-tier talents.

In our quest for improvement, we're seeking the answer to the ultimate question for consulting firms:

How can we deliver more value to our clients at higher fees, and doing all this using less of our time and effort, while getting more joy and fulfillment out of the process?

Thus, my clients establish themselves as low-volume, high-margin "premium" servcice providers of consulting service, which in turn also contributes to the improvement of the individual practitioners' personal lives.

And since consulting firms, unlike industrial companies, are non-compartmentalised entities, it's vitally important to examine each function in context of the whole firm. This is the reason why consulting firms are best examined through the perspectives of one "deep and wide generalist" as opposed to many "narrow specialists." And if you try to run a consulting firm as a large industrial corporation, then you are in deep yoghurt.

And Now You Have Two Options

If you are looking for some help, then just follow this link to see if we have a connection for some work together. I have certain skills and you're seeking someone with some specific kills, and who knows... We may even meet one day and work together on some interesting, sexy project.

Or... If you are looking for some information on a premium consulting firm in general, then start digging. On this site you find a large selection of resources created specifically for consulting firms. I suggest you start with my free Malpractice booklet and the booklet on the sensitive topic of setting your fees. In this booklet you discover some practice development mistakes so many consulting firms make.

Or...

If you feel you are sitting shackled and locked up in the dark and dreary dungeons somewhere in the most pestilential pit of Per Diem hell, desperately trying to stay alive on selling billable hours and deliverables? This new programme is for you if you already deliver tremendous value to your clients, but somehow your prospects and clients just fail to recognise the value they receive, and....

The old CIA mantra is that, "There's always an enemy if you know where to look." Similarly, there's always room for improvement if we know where to look. So, look long; look hard! See?

Now follow the link and figure out what kind of clients Dynamic Innovations Squad works with. It may be for you too.

Raise your sights! Blaze new trails. Compete with the immortals!

Bald Dog, Organisational Provocateur

P.S.: You will find several words - like realise, programme, favour, etc. - on this web site that seem to be spelt incorrectly. I learnt English in The UK, thus this whole web site is written in British English. Yet, there may be some true typos here and there. Please feel free to let me know and I shall correct them. Thanks.