The Dynamic Innovations Squad's Consulting Philosophy

For every consultant, there is a brand which represents quality and excellence. For Tom Peters it's "WOW". For Michael Gerber it the "E-Myth".

For me, an ex-military, it's the military commando.

The "Commando" Model as My Consulting Philosophy

The Dynamic Innovations Squad's consulting philosophy is based on the methods the military uses to assemble and train elite commandos for quick, high-impact missions based on agility, speed and surprise.

And since this approach is good enough to turn totally unskilled laymen into world-class fighting units in a fairly short time in a high-demand and high-risk environment, the same approach can also work to turn individual professionals into cohesive, peak-performing teams under reasonable demands.

When I look at helping clients, I look at the army and see two vital ingredients: 1) Cutting-edge systems and weapons and 2) people with the right skills and character. Military recruiting officers know that people with the right character can be trained fairly quickly to master the skills needed to operate the system and use the weapons at an excellent level.

So, the Dynamic Innovations Squad consulting philosophy is to use "commando calibre" skill building and character reinforcement tactics to build "military grade" consulting teams that can thrive under any circumstance life may throw at them, and in doing so achieve an elite level of performance in their industries.

Culture of Service Or Culture of Accountability

By nature humans are allergic to commitment and accountability. Consultants are doubly so. They believe that this allergy gives them freedom to do whatever they feel like doing, but in reality the complete opposite happens: According to various surveys and studies, the professional service firm, the infrastructure within which consultants operate, is one of the most stressful and least profitable business models. Less profitable than junk food joints and manufacturing plants.

The conventional, "service-driven" consulting mantra is to find out what clients want and give it to them. And while this is initially pleasing to clients, since it's quick, easy and traditional, it's deceptive and unethical.

What I've realised is that, more often than not, clients know what to do, but fail to do it. It's not about lack of knowledge but lack of discipline to make commitments and being accountable to those commitments to make things happen.

There is a brilliant Mexican proverb that describes this situation...

"The Saints did not pray to the Good Lord for instructions on what to do. The Bible was already clear on what was expected of them. Nevertheless, the Saints got down on their knees every day of the their lives - to pray that, in spite of daily temptations, they could find the courage and strength to do the right thing."

Similarly, the success of a consulting firm is about making commitments and accepting accountability to those commitments regardless of the temptations to doing other things.

Following the "commando model", where soldiers learn in small chunks and through endless repetition to perfect the newly acquired skill, I've realised that I have to provide "accountability-driven" consulting if I want to see significant improvement in my clients' condition. I have to provide something that is uncomfortable and inconvenient. I have to place tough demands on my clients, squeeze some commitments out of them and then hold them accountable to those commitments. Then repeat the process again and again.

The bottom line is that my clients are not always right, and almost always act as obstacles in their own path of success. Well, we all do. When I'm a client to a professional, I'm not always right and I often get in my own way.

Why is this?

Simple...

Clients know the symptom they experience but don't know the underlying cause. That's what we discover together in a diagnosis process. I knew how to shoot before joining the army. But after learning how to really shoot in the army, I would never call my pre-army activities "shooting" again. It was merely clowning around with an air rifle; a far cry from real shooting.

So the best and most effective consultants' challenge becomes how to hold their clients accountable to do things, sometimes against their natural will, that needs to be done in order to achieve the greater good for their clients, firms, teams and themselves. Briefly, this describes the Culture of Accountability.

I realise that in return for their investments I have to give clients something they can't get from their spouses, relatives, friends and many other consultants: Holding them accountable for their actions en route to achieve their greatest goals. And holding them accountable with clearly defined consequences when they fail themselves. Luckily, being an ex-military, this accountability stuff is a tad easier for me than for most consultants who haven't been in the military.

And what I've found is that when we up the ante on discipline, that is, commitment and accountability, interestingly, not only performance and profitability go up, but so do morale, enthusiasm, fulfilment and pride. Both clients and the firm's people feel better about their work.

So, What Does It Mean To Be Professional?

Ask 10 people how they interpret the word "professional", and you get 11 different answers. But what the answers have in common is that what they call "professional" is merely business-like. And here lies the different. Business-like is about looking. You look or appear business-like. But professionalism is about "being". You can't look, but you can only be professional.

People can wear Brioni suits with Dolce & Gabbana ties and matching Gucci shoes, and that can make them look business-like, but if they take one full week to return a phone call or an email, or "forget" to follow through a commitment they've made to someone, then they're not professionals... regardless of how business-like they look.

Just think of the super-smooth-talking, hyper-glib, ultra-business-like, yet utterly unprofessional totally incompetent former US president, Warren Harding. He managed to fool both voters and other Senate members all the way to the White House with his empty charisma and deceptive charm. And when, as a result of good PR, he got into the White House, he didn't know what to do.

Being professional is an alignment between skills, values and character traits. You have both the aesthetic elements of being dressed properly (whatever is proper to you based on your core values), but also the functional elements of being excellent in your craft (skills) and you can apply your craft withy dignity, integrity and grace (professionalism).

For example, doing something FOR clients without their participation may sound gratifying for your ego, but leaves clients crippled since they they've grown dependent on you. And to do this is unprofessional and unethical, although it's legal. And I don't care how business-like these consultants look in their new Armani suits, this practice is still unprofessional.

In this "commando" model I thrive to achieve a holistic approach to help my clients to optimise their operation in such a way that is stimulating to the mind, fulfilling for the heart and rewarding to the piggy bank.

And to accomplish this objective and turn it into sustainable improvement we need to practise...

...Tough Love over Soft Pity

The best people in every area of life, including sports and business, reach their peak potentials because someone has put them to tough challenges, expected of them more than they believe they are capable of doing and held the fire under their feet while constantly raising the bar. They are willing to go through a tough process to be the best they can be.

And they choose to go through that tough process because they know that it is in their best interest. They know that is the way to the next level. They also know that most people are not tough enough to go through it and they get stuck at a "good enough" level.

Imagine you're a king and some foreign forces threaten to invade your country.

Who are you more likely to call for help? The French Foreign Legion or the Salvation Army? They both are armies, but have two drastically different mandates, hence they have two drastically different training methods and drastically different tolerance levels in performance and discipline. Which army do you think is more combat-ready to defend your kingdom?

And when I talk about "tough", I don't necessarily mean physical toughness. However, I strongly recommend all business professionals to engage in regular vigorous physical exercise. The other form of toughness is mental and emotional toughness. Making commitments and being accountable to them. Being accountable to one's actions. Having the discipline to do what needs to be done in order to achieve specific goals.

Niceness must be replaced by objectivity. Objectivity is the ability to work and act in the best interest of clients, even if the advisor is risking of being fired.

On summary, if tough love is a good approach to build the "Ultimate Professional Service Firm" (as the army is often referred to) for battlefields, the same method, of course with slight modification, can be applied to build professional service firms that can excel on the battlefields of commerce.

A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Phase Approach

Inputs		Processes		Outputs
Four areas that require constant improvement	Five processes to improve the firms' success level		Three outcomes we're working on to improve
The firm's talents The quality of clients The quality of projects The firm's systems		Strengthening leadership and Management Improving Client Experiences Enhancing Skill Development and Integration Improving Internal Performance Acquiring Better Business		Profitable firm Fulfilled associates Delighted clients

And the process is multi-phase because when you have too many objectives for a project, then you're likely to achieve precisely dick. Nothing, nada, zero zilch. Not a sausage.

For a 90-day programme we can have an objective of "Improving proposal acceptance ratio" but having a grandiose objective of "Increasing sales" is just too vague. And one more thing: The rate of change is not as important as many people think. What counts is the direction of change. If we're on the right track, running in the right direction, then we can increase the pace of progress at any time. But otherwise we can end up going nowhere fast, which is roughly as useful as a fart in a windstorm.

Process 1: Firm Leadership and Management

This area covers a broad range of both strategic (leadership) and tactical (management) issues. This is the people's angle of running a consulting firm. If your people are not fully involved in and committed to your firm's success, but merely show up physically, then it doesn't make a bucket of demented badger's spit of a difference how good your services are.

After all, it's your people who deliver your services. And your people need both strategic (direction) and tactical (operation) guidance and clarity. They need both a clear sense of purpose of where your firm is headed and what it stands for, and what has to be done on a daily basis to achieve it. You also have to make sure that there is an alignment between the firm's objectives and your people's personal goals. If your speciality is to consult with slaughterhouses, you may not want to hire vegetarian or vegan staff.

Some Considerations About Leadership and Management

• We have a clear vision of where our firm is going, and this vision is regularly communicated to our people
• At our firm everybody is required to develop leadership skills
• We practise financial transparency. All our people know how exactly how the firm is doing
• Our leaders demand free flow and sharing of information from everyone
• Our leaders believe in selling and doing work by the same person
• Our leaders require an uncompromising commitment and accountability to achieve firm-wide excellence
• Our leaders consistently bring out the best in people
• Our leaders build this firm's future on high calibre professionals
• Our leaders make significant investment in the future
• Our leaders actually believe in our strategy and have the courage to act upon it to achieve our vision

Process 2: Raising Client Satisfaction

Before you go out and try to acquire new clients, you must make certain that the current clients are as satisfied and delighted with your services as they can possibly be. If you have shortcomings in your services (Hey who doesn't?), first you have to address those shortcomings, so new clients can receive more valuable services from you and you can rightfully charge higher fees.

The better service and more value your clients receive from you, the more ready and willing they will be to furnish you with both referral and repeat businesses, so you can reduce your marketing time, effort and investment.

Top Tier Talents: While industrial companies can hire lots of lower-skilled employees to operate water-tight systems under close supervision, consulting firms need to attract a steady stream of top-tier talents who are willing to build their careers at your firm and offer both their expertise and unique character traits to you. Instead of hiring brawn power, you must recruit brainpower. And when talking about top-tier talent, we are talking about more than the right schooling on the resume.

To heal a person you need a good doctor and a person with strong will to live. Similarly, for successful consulting projects and to build a great firm, you need both great clients and great associates.

Cream of the Crop Clients: Consulting is a collaborative process. You need clients who are willing to engage with you in collaborative relationships, so together you can pull off projects with maximum success and client satisfaction.

Some Considerations About Raising Client Satisfaction

• Our clients treat us as trusted advisors not as fungible vendors
• Our clients and we actually like each other
• Our clients pay our invoices on time every time without haggling
• Our clients never keep us waiting or cancel appointments on short notice
• Our clients give us very clear understanding of their situations, so there is no need for guessing
• Our clients tell us exactly what sort of help they need/want
• Our clients trust us, thus actually act upon our recommendations
• Our clients give us regular feedback, which we quickly respond to and act upon
• We regularly prune our clientele to maintain balanced growth (annually abandon the bottom 10-15% of lowest performing clients)
• Our clients and we forgive each other for occasional screw ups

Process 3: Improving Internal Performance

Consulting firms, while helping their clients to improve their performance, are notorious for their own substandard performance.

One of the reasons for this problem is creating the wrong environment. Former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch had a rule at GE: Every year he fired the bottom 10% of employees. What did he achieve with this approach? His employees lived in constant fear and terror, and did everything to avoid being fired. No, they didn't work better or more effectively. They simply manipulated the system to stay in. Remember, there is a world of difference between getting an education and passing exams. A whole lot of book-smart MBAs with impressive resumes miserably fail in the real world. Just read some stuff from Henry Mintzberg.

The other problem is that, instead of cohesive teams, consulting firms run like lots of individuals who happen to work under the same roof. The team spirit is missing. But is the team spirit missing from these people? Usually not. It is management who kills their team spirit using the wrong incentives, including compensation methods.

Managers read some stuff in books written by corporate celebrities, and they think they can apply that approach to a consulting firm. They read something on Wal-Mart or GE, and try to apply it to their firms. What they fail to realise that consulting is not discount retailing or mass manufacturing.

Some Considerations About Improving Internal Performance

• Our managers are more focused on long-term success than short-term "making a quick buck"
• Our managers work with our people 1-to-1 to bring out the best in them and to achieve what is expected of them
• Our managers provide instant feedback and suggestions for our people
• Our managers are excellent team leaders and personal coaches
• Our managers actually practise what they preach
• Our managers combine a drill sergeant's toughness, a den mother's loving care and a cheerleader's enthusiasm
• Our managers offer open access to our people to discuss our concerns
• Our managers, besides instant feedback, also provide timely performance reviews
• Our managers constantly remind our people of what our work contributes to the firm's vision
• Our managers regularly are appraised by the people they manage; They regularly discuss managers' performance and suggest areas for improvement

Process 4: Enhancing Skill Building and Talent Integration

Consulting firms have one single distinctive asset: Their people and their talents. Once upon a time I used to write skills, but then I learnt that it's irrelevant. Anyone can learn skills. All your competitors can get the same schooling you have. What really matters is your talents. That's the innate stuff your competitors can't have.

That's why there was only one General Patton or Genghis Khan. They stepped into the history books because of their applied talents, not merely because of what they learnt in military school. Yet, look at most consulting firms. They hire smart-looking resumes whose owners often don't give a rat's arse about their firms or their clients' success. They are just there for the money and ready to jump ship when another job comes up at another firm for slightly more dough.

Some Considerations About Skill Building and Talent Integration

• We encourage any kind of skill-building as long as it is somehow related to what we do
• We have a dedicated budget for skill-building, and always invest in it regardless of profitability
• We allow our people to select what skill building they want to pursue
• We regularly hold "war room" sessions where we can exchange stories and lessons learnt from the trenches
• We have our own resource library (books, audio and video materials, etc.) which we expand and update it regularly
• In skill-building we encourage 80% personal development and 20% technical skill advancement
• On the top of skill-building we also have 1-to-1 mentoring programmes to help people to integrate new skills
• We regularly hold "lunch and learn" type mini workshops
• We constantly survey our people's skill-building need
.
• Most of our skill-building sessions are facilitated by our own people, but we use external experts to help us to design courses and coach our facilitators for maximum effectiveness

Process 5: Acquiring Better Business

Unlike industrial businesses, consulting firms should focus on acquiring better clients and projects not merely more of them.

Most consulting firms spread themselves too thin because they mistakenly believe that the more clients they have the more profitable their businesses will be. And the result is that consulting firms barely tolerate most of their clients and projects and downright hate some of them. But how can you build a world-class firm if you do what you do simply because someone gives you money for it? The dictionary definition of this scenario is prostitution.

The whole idea is that you acquire great clients who bring you sexy, exciting projects to work on. And of course, the term "great client" means, they pay you for the value you bring to the table.

A key is to create a client acquisition system that seamlessly blends into your client work and other practice development activities.

If client work is an interruption on client acquisition or vice versa, then you have a problem. While performing premium work is highly personal, a large part of client acquisition can be automated.

The Three Ingredients Of Client Acquisition

Lead Generation is an ongoing process of any good consulting firm. And the key is that you need at least four channels through which qualified prospects come to you consistently and predictably. You want to create more demand than your firm can supply, so you can start cherry picking your clients and projects.

Lead Nurturing, again, is a continuing process of following through with leads from first contact to their buying decision. Traditional businesses use sales forces to "persuade" prospects to buy. In contrast, consulting services cannot be sold in the typical "peddler" manner, although many idiots try. Clients buy consulting services when they are ready and willing to change their current situations. In the B2B world, lead nurturing can be anywhere between 9 months and 3 years. And any attempt to try to rush this process can only backfire to the consulting firm.

Lead Conversion is the process when committed prospects become clients. This is where prospects, who are one tiny step away from becoming clients, go through an extensive diagnosis process. Note that this is not the old-fashioned needs analysis peddlers use to manipulate prospects towards their solutions. This is not a qualification but rather a disqualification process.

I hope this document has given you a better understanding of my perspective on building consulting firms. Some may say, it's weird to compare business to warfare. Maybe. The common thread is that both in business and warfare we compete with ourselves, how we can improve ourselves and give ourselves another day to live. In a way it's like losing weight or overcoming addictions like smoking, drinking and drugs: We have a big vision and take it day by day. That's all we can do. Just remember the Mexican proverb you read at the beginning of this message...

"The Saints did not pray to the Good Lord for instructions on what to do. The Bible was already clear on what was expected of them. Nevertheless, the Saints got down on their knees every day of the their lives - to pray that, in spite of daily temptations, they could find the courage and strength to do the right thing."

The question is if, in spite of the daily temptations for the quick buck, do you have the discipline to balance your firm's short term-success and long-term prosperity?

This is the enormous earth-shattering question here.