Commando Consulting: December 2009 - Seven Potential Conflict Sources Between Clients and Consultants

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

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When you ask your doctor what you need to do to feel good, she will tell you to eat well, have a reasonably low-stress or even stress-free lifestyle and exercise.

Nevertheless, out of every $20, $1 is spent on fitness and $19 is spent on cocaine.

Why do people do that?

Simple really.

You snort a little cocaine and a few seconds later you feel like Superman, ready to take over the world.

But fitness. Ahhhh.

You bust your arse for two weeks and nothing happens. Not a sausage. You haven't lost one single inch from your waist, and your triceps Muscles still look like jelly, no matter how hard you try to flex them.

The truth is that people desperately crave instant gratification. They yell...

"I want it all and I want it now!"

And with the proliferation of the Internet, they amend their old mantra to...

"I want it all, I want it now, and I want it free!."

Of course.

And sadly, this instant gratification mentality has penetrated the world of consulting faster than a speeding bullet.

So, consulting clients in search of financial quick fixes soon discover the cocaine of consulting...

Sale, Sale, Sale, Sale! Or The Proverbial Bending Over Backwards To Get Clients

Good consulting is painful first because clients don't see instant results.

So, what do consulting clients do?

They snort a little consulting cocaine, and hire consultants that promise instant gratification and astronomical profit increases in the blink of the eye, and all that at competitively low fees.

But just as junkies never think about the negative effects of their addictions, consulting clients never think about how they destroy their companies' long-term results by going after the low-hanging fruit and the quick buck.

So, the first dose of cocaine makes clients feel great...

"Hey, these consultants work their arses off for us for chickenfeed. So let's dump more work on them, so we can go and play more golf."

But now it takes sexier results to make clients feel great.

And just as it's impossible to convince an addict about his addiction, it's impossible to convince consulting clients high on consulting cocaine that this one-sided work can't last, and consultants ask clients to cut short their golf games and focus on their projects.

And what often happens is that clients won't get the results they expected in the first place.

And now clients and consultants are on their ways to major disputes and even lawsuits.

So, what problems can consultants encounter with clients high on consulting cocaine?

Here we discuss seven problems, but I'm certain there are some more.

So, let's start...

1. Clients Want To Pay For Performance, While Consultants Want To Get Paid For Providing Help, Support And An Opportunity For Improvement

Imagine you want to go to university, but instead of paying your tuition, you propose to the dean...

"Sir, if your university is as good as you say, let me take the course free of charge, and after graduation when I get my dream job, I will pay a percentage of my salary back to the school as tuition. If you 'deliver" me my dream job (desired result), you get your money. But if I can't get me an easy but highly-paid job (You fail to produce MY desired results), you don't deserve to be paid anyway."

Over the years many consultants have trained their clients the wrong way.

Randomly pick up 10 books on consulting, and 9 of them talk about rubbish like "delivering results FOR clients".

Those books look at consulting as if it were about manual labour, dispensed on an hourly basis, like shovelling manure from one pile to the other at a specific shovel load per hour.

So, clients say...

"If you deliver my desired results, that is, all the manure is in the other pile, then you get paid."

But as opposed to consulting, shovelling manure is a fairly predictable job. I know this because I spent a fair amount of time shovelling shit on the family farm in Hungary. If you shovel X in one hour, you just multiply X by 6.5, allowing for lunch, pee breaks and a level of ensuing muscle fatigue, and you get what the person can perform in an eight-hour shift.

But consulting is not shovelling manure. It is a collaborative relationship in which you provide some ideas, advice, new perspectives, etc., but it is up to your clients whether they accept or reject to take action on your advice. After dispensing your advice, your client is in full control.

Yes, we all want to see the desired results, but you can't create results FOR someone else. Only clients can produce results for they are in full control.

All you can do is contribute value that can lead to the desired results.

No matter how hard you work as a consultant, if clients are not playing the game with you, then nothing happens. Performance and achieving results must be a joint effort.

All you can do, not being in charge, is to play the game.

But regardless of how hard your client plays, if you don't play, nothing happens again. So, where the value lies is your "play" because this is what you can control. You bring your best and brightest to the table and play the game in your clients' contexts.

In the above example, you need good credentials to give you a ticket to enter the stadium and start playing. But it's not a guarantee to getting your dream job.

The school offers an opportunity to obtain the required credentials to play the game. It's up to you what grade you graduate with and how you use your education to optimise your job search.

So, as a consultant, you can't create performance any better than a sound engineer can create a note that the musician hasn't put in the music.

As a consultant you can improve "only" your clients' performance capability, and it's up to your clients how they use this new level of capability.

You can give your client a Ferrari, but if he chooses to grind down the highway in second gear at 50 miles per hour, there is not a sausage you can do about it.

All in all, you get paid for offering improvement in your clients' performance capability.

And as the saying goes...

"You can take the horses to the water, but you can't make them synchronised swim."

The same applies to clients.

On the final analysis, money is the walk of the talk. When you ask clients to invest in their own successes, you will quickly learn how serious they actually are.

People vote with their money. The message as to whether or not they believe in their own abilities to achieve their goals becomes crystal clear whether or not they cough up the dough.

So, if a client gives you the almighty mountain talk that he pays for results, then you'd better walk away because you're likely to be talking to a loser who wants it all for nothing.

2. Clients Want to See Instant Improvement, While Consultants Want to See Lasting Improvements

Sometimes in 2002 I was sitting with the president of a Vancouver-based computer consulting firm. He said he would hire me to help the firm with its marketing if I could guarantee beyond the shadow of a doubt that I could put money into his company's bank account within three days.

This is sweet. He expected me to achieve what he failed to achieve in 11 years. The truth is that in order to create new results in a business, people in the business have to start practising new habits. But this behavioural change can only come after people have shifted the way they think. Stephen Covey calls this a paradigm shift. Without this change nothing can happen.

Also, as we know, fish rots from the head. In most organisations, poor performance is an effect caused by the way the top dog thinks and acts.

However, there is a problem here: People change very slowly or, often, not at all. Using Marcus Buckingham's words from his book, First Break All The Rules...

"People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what's left out. Try to draw out what's left in. That's hard enough."

To battle the expectation of instant gratification from clients, you can include a section called "Transitional Pain" in your proposals and agreements. This is the same when the dentist tells you, "This will hurt a bit".

Wording it differently, in order to enjoy the baby and the joy of motherhood, women have to go through the pain of delivering that baby. And as I learnt during my biomedical engineering years working with doctors and nurses that, regardless of medical advancements, delivering babies is still painful.

Consulting projects are pretty much the same. The drawing below depicts the emotional lifecycle of a consulting project, workload vs. confidence level.

The problem is that when workload [thus expenses] goes up, clients' confidence comes down. Many clients want to quit (Q) before you can reinstate the workload-confidence equilibrium.

The problem is when workload goes up, people get overwhelmed and their confidence levels come down (First crossing). Many clients want to quit the project or roll out the initiative (Q) in the middle of this emotional upheaval and way before you can reinstate the workload-confidence equilibrium (second crossing). So, we have to be careful here.

Using medical language, engagement management must focus both on getting the work done (doing the surgery) and emotionally keeping the client on track and to make sure she doesn't lose hope (good bedside manner).

The problem is that by the time many clients subordinate their egos and ask for help, their ships are in hard-core sinking mode. So, clients announce to their consultants...

"Ladies and gentlemen, for this problem we need a quick fix, but due to budgetary constraints you have to find a shortcut to your quick fix."

And now clients evaluate consultants based on which one can offer the best-sounding shortcuts with impressive quick fixes.

So, make sure you communicate to your clients that your aim is to create lasting positive change, not a quick flash-in-the-pan surge of emotional pleasantness.

Clients can do that by stuffing their faces with doughnuts, and the sugar will give them that surge of joy.

And for the sake of your sanity, you'd better walk away from rapidly sinking ships.

You can also include this in your qualification process for prospects, so when they push you for instant results, you can tell them there is no instant results unless the prospect is a whore, which is really the only quick cash-in-hand business. And from then on it is up to you whether or not you work with these "business prostitutes".

3. Clients Want To Avoid Risks, While Consultants Want To Share Risks

Very often clients want to minimise or eliminate their risks and try to abdicate full responsibility to their consultants. You may even have had situations when you realised that you were about to be hired just to become a scapegoat and be blamed for everything ranging from the Holocaust through the 1348 black death wave in England to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.

Many clients don't hire consultants until it is too late. And then they expect their consultants to single-handedly save the day. After the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have put the best captain in the world on the bridge, the ship would have sunk anyway. That is just a bit too late for finding the best captain.

By the way, this is just an example to illustrate a consulting situation, not a judgement on the Titanic's captain. I am certain he was a highly skilled and a very capable chap, and I'm no way qualified to judge him or other seafarers.

In every engagement clients take a risk of investing their money in an initiative to improve their current situations. Re-read please. Clients don't pay for your services per se. They invest in their own futures. And the catalyst to that bigger and brighter future is the consultant's expertise, education, intuition, creative hunches, etc., which has cost the consultant tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire.

As a consultant, all you can do is to help your clients to increase the certainty and velocity of completing certain projects which lead to an improvement both in their businesses and your piggy bank. It is a fair value exchange.

In return for clients' financial investments, consultants take a risk by investing their time, expertise, client work, education, intuition and reputation in their clients.

And I'm fairly certain that every consultant who was involved with Enron or Arthur Andersen during their debacles has also suffered the consequences although they were innocent. It's not fair, but it's guilty by association.

So, when you look at yourself, you may find that you've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of your education, past client work, reading, learning, attending seminars and conferences, etc. even in a short project like reviewing a proposal for a client.

This is easier to understand if you realise that your expertise is about 20% explicit knowledge, that is, memorised data and information memorised from books and other resources and 80% of tacit knowledge, that is, intuition, gut feeling, trench work, etc. Actually some people think this ratio is 5% explicit knowledge and 95% tacit knowledge.

Anyone can read the same books you have read or attend the same seminars, but each person will chunk all that into different level of expertise. I've read somewhere the wisdom that...

"Having s library card doesn't give your clients the wisdom of Yoda."

4. Clients Want Guaranteed Results, While Consultants Want Guaranteed Commitment from Clients

Clients know they take a risk every time they reveal their businesses to outsiders. Hell, some consultants may just obtain sensible information and run away to apply it to a direct competitor.

So, upon engaging external help, clients want to get an ironclad guarantee from their consultants for the achievement of specific goals. There is a problem here. Unless you are a god of some kind, you can't manage outcomes, only activities. And while we define the projects in terms of expected outcomes and results, we have to take certain actions to achieve those results. We must also understand that we can't manage results, only activities leading to those results.

If you don't believe this then try to manage the weather. Good luck. For me, all I can do is take my brolly with me.

Again, who is the ultimate decision-maker? The client. Clients decide what action they take or refuse to take. Consultants can only offer their advice. That is all.

Based on what they say, most people in this world want to be successful. But are their words and actions congruent? No. Why do you think there are so many homeless people all over the civilised world? I don't think they live on the streets because they prefer to. But it's not painful enough for them to take the kind of actions that would lead to a different lifestyle.

Clients say they want to be successful. Yes. But how can a consultant guarantee specific improvements for them regardless of whether or not clients get out of bed in the morning at all?

A few years ago I worked with a woman who wanted to start out in consulting. She simply didn't show up for 63% of our meeting, and never returned a phone call or email. After one month she bowed out accusing me that I hadn't delivered any value to her, and she could learn more about business from her husband... A union rep in the truck driver's union.

How can consultants guarantee client's actions, behaviours and attitudes to the successful completion of the project? That is why I believe guaranteeing results is just plain unethical. It is a nice lure to close deals, but it is just as much of an oxymoron as a virgin prostitute.

Consider consulting is like giving birth. The improved condition (resulted in completing the project) is the baby, the client is the mother in labour and the consultant is the midwife. The midwife (consultant) can reduce the mother's pain, and improve the chance of survival of the baby, but it is the client's baby, thus the client's labour. And if the client is not willing to go through the pain of creating the new condition, there is only one way to avoid the pain: Abort the baby and it is all over.

5. Clients Want To Pay Lower Fees, While Consultants Want To Receive Fair Fees

Prospective clients often ask how they can get certain services for as cheap as humanly possible. The basic question is this:

"I want to go on a world-wide trip, but my budget only let's me take the bus to the next stop."

Consultants know they have been hired for improving a situation clients have failed to improve. So, the senior partner of a law firm, earning $500,000 per year with 65% annual talent attrition (Some $2 million annual loss) wants to hire a consultant to reduce attrition and save some of that annual $2 million, but is willing to pay the consultant only $10,000. Can you see the problem?

You're about to address a recurring $2 million a year problem and receive a one-time payment of $10,000. It's ludicrous.

The $500,000 a year partner failed to solve a $2 million a year problem, but he carries on receiving his hefty compensation, while wanting to hire consultant for a mere $10,000 to solve the same problem. If the consultant is expected to solve a problem the $500,000 a year partner can't, maybe the consultant is entitled to a nicer than $10,000 compensation package.

Maybe even out of the senior partner's pay package.

It is only fair to say that consultants require clients to make fair investments that are proportional to the problem consultants help to solve. Everything else being equal, working on reducing a 50% talent attrition rate in a large firm of 250 associates (250 associates multiplied by $75,000 average annual salary = $18,750,000) justifies higher fees than doing the same in a small firm of five associates (5 associates multiplied by $75,000 annual salary = $375,000).

Do you think it is fair of you to charge some $500,000 in the first case and some $50,000 in the second case to start improving the situation? Clients will save an annual $18 million and $375,000 respectively every single year, but pay you only once. Is it a good deal or a great deal for clients? Man, it is a nipple-piercingly brilliant deal!

6. Clients Want Predictability, While Consultants Want Flexibility

Some clients want to do the impossible: They want their consultants to guarantee outcomes. And that's why they ask for strong guarantees. However, the only sure-fire way of reaching our goals is by putting one foot in front of the other again and again in the right direction.

Clients have been putting one foot in front of the other for years, but if they still have problems, in most cases it's not because they're not putting one foot in front of the other fast enough, but they're moving in the wrong direction.

They are like a rocking chair. Lots of motion but no progress. A sort of managing by being impressively busy...

"We must be making progress because we are terribly busy."

And the normal human response to improving performance is by doing the same what we've always done, but doing it harder and longer.

So, soon we're working harder than a prisoner in a Gulag labour camp somewhere in Siberia, but by working hard on the wrong things, we still keep achieving... precisely dick.

So, more walking faster in the old direction won't do the job. Putting one foot in front of the other is predictability, and accountability of doing what it takes to achieve the selected outcomes.

Changing direction is flexibility. However, no one can change direction without an external force of some kind. Just imagine. You roll a ball in one direction. That ball cannot change direction until and unless an external force acts on it. This is plain garden-variety Newtonian physics. And the ball stops because there is an external force, called friction.

The sad reality is that so many clients fall in love with the initial plan they make with their consultants which they refuse to modify once the execution of the plan is in progress. They get so wrapped up in tactics that the strategy goes down the drain.

Or as Spanish philosopher and poet, George Santayana puts it...

"Fanatics are who lose sight of their goals and redouble their efforts."

Clients expect their consultants to get it right the first time and produce unprecedented miracles. But the reality is that nothing worthwhile is done right the first time. It takes quite a bit of polishing and fine-tuning. Just think about it: After almost 15 years, Microsoft Windows is still full of bugs and repeatedly crashes millions of computers all over the world.

Yet, it rules the land... for now at least.

But this is when clients tend to say...

"You are the expert. I am paying you for the right answers and not for experimenting on my dime."

Again, you could include this in your qualification process, so you can eliminate idiots before it is too late. I think Machiavelli was right in writing in the Prince...

"Only the Prince who himself is wise, can be wisely advised."

Consulting with idiots is like teaching a pig to sing. The pig gets pissed off and we get dirty.

7. Clients Want to Make Money, While Often Expecting Consultants to Do All the Work To Create It

I had a client in 1999, who, shortly after engaging my services, went on vacation leaving me with a note...

"I expect you to do this and that for me while I am away, and report progress to me upon my return."

And his expectation was way beyond the original scope of work.

This guy truly believed he was my boss, master and commander. I gave him a bit of reality on how we can work together, and I can tell you he didn't like it. He was desperate to become my "boss", and regarded me as his "employee". Then I walked away from the gig, sat down and toughened up my qualification process.

Often clients want to use consultants as brawn workers, while consultants want to be regarded as brainworkers.

In the cartoon strip Family Circus by Bill Cain, a little boy is holding his homework out to his mother. She looks at him a bit annoyed, and says...

"You misunderstand. I'm a homework consultant, not a homework subcontractor."

That is, she can work WITH him to help and support him to get the homework done, but she won't do it FOR him.

This is a typical problem with owners of very small businesses. They busily run around like dickless dogs, proclaiming they don't have time to work with their consultants in a collaborative manner, so they often say...

"I pay you pretty well, so make money for me, hotshot, while I get busy repeating my daily mistakes again and again."

They try to treat their consultants as fungible vendors, as depicted by Scott Adams in one of his Dilbert strips...

Some clients have this misconceived notion that consultants are outsourced labourers working FOR clients on issues clients have neither time nor inclination to deal with.

In a way the situation is similar to going to a personal trainer and telling him...

"I pay you for exercising and going on a diet, and then I want you to pass the weight loss on to me. But I don't have time to do the work. So, perform FOR me."

Consulting is collaborative process. It is not done for, to or at clients.

It requires that clients are fully engaged in the whole process. As the late Jim Rohn once said...

"No one else can do your own push-ups."

Consultants can provide advice and direction, but at the end of the day clients must make a decision to start moving their arses in the direction of their choice.

Summary

As you see, clients need some serious education about what consulting is all about, and how to work with consultants. So, before you commit to doing anything with prospects in person, make sure they read how you work, so they come to you with the right expectation.

Clients must understand that while you have high level of expertise in your area, you are not the proverbial Merlin The Magician who can make clients ride on the dragon's breath, and achieve whatever they want to achieve, including shagging the king's wife, as in the movie Excalibur. And all that by chanting some magic words.

Business owners know more about their own businesses than consultants could ever learn. So, the key is the synergy between consultants' process skills and their content skills. So, the whole engagement must be a joint effort.

Or no deal of course.

Discuss this newsletter with me on my blog...

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Recommended Reading

Talent Advantage: How To Attract And Retain The Best And The Brightest

By Alan Weiss, Nancy MacKay

Consulting is the ultimate profession in which it's people's brainpower, not brawn power, that creates value for clients and profit for their firms.

Yet, when we look at how so many consulting firms acquire their associates, what we find is a 24/7 recruitment machine running in overdrive, collecting resumes from masses of people and then the consulting firm's HR experts plough through these resumes and select some people who look good on paper, perceived to be able to conform the firm's dogmas and are willing to put in 70 plus hours of work week in week out.

In this book, the authors debunks conventional wisdom that has made HR practices stuck in the industrial age, and build a great case for attracting talents not merely hiring workers as per HR best practices.

Then they proceed to explain step by step how companies can reach out to the "Vital few", as quality management expert, Dr. Joseph M. Juran called the 20%, while carefully avoiding clogging up their shops with applications from the trivial many.

The authors also debunk the conventional belief is that what people are seeking in their employers is job security and great money.

For me the big message of the book is that it's leaders and managers who create environments and cultures that either magnetically attract or magnetically repel top-notch talents.

The other, obvious but often overlooked message is that the tighter management holds the reins of command and control, the harder time they have to attract top talents. Basically, talents resent the management practices that are used to manage minimum wage unskilled labourers.

So, from reading the book, I've concluded that workers are managed but talents can only be coordinated for they are volunteers who can leave at the drop of a hat. They don't tolerate the amount of crap workers put up with because, unlike workers, talents own the means of their production in their heads, so they are free to go greener pastures when they are pushed around.

To me, this is one of the most practical books on the topic of talent, full of Weiss-ian pragmatism and witticism, coupled with organisational wisdom from fellow Vancouverite, Nancy MacKay.

Place your order with Amazon.com for "Talent Advantage". You'll be glad you did.