Commando Consulting, July 2010

Techniques To Deliver More Consulting Project Value To Clients, And Raising Your Fees Accordingly

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

Podcast version: MP3 Version. Right click the link and click "Save As".

We all know Aesop's fable about the Sun and the Wind. Well, since the days of Aesop, both the Sun and the Wind have grown up, obtained their MBAs from Harvard and have become management consultants.

On one nice sunny day, unbeknownst to each other, both the Sun and the Wind hopped down to the local pub, the Queen's Arse (a fierce competitor of the other pub, the King's Head) for a pint of beer.

After a few pints, they started arguing about who can deliver more client value more quickly.

So, they made a bet...

Whichever of us can deliver enough value to that traveller to take off his cloak, that will be the winner.

The Wind went first, while the Sun got out of the way and walked to the bar to flirt with the busty barmaid.

The Wind fell good about it, since he's just attended a very expensive consulting seminar on delivering value for cloak-wearing travellers. He's also just attended a one-day motivational seminar with the world's best motivational speakers, so he'd learnt the best tricks...

"Never give up! Keep on keeping on! Go for the jugular! Don't take no for an answer!"

Besides, his boss offered him a special cloak-removal bonus if he can make this traveller take off his cloak.

Our hero was motivated beyond human imagination. He was psyched up to the high heavens. He was oozing motivation.

So, the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller; his eyes almost popped out in the back-breaking effort. But the harder he blew the more strongly the traveller held on to his cloak. Eventually the Wind collapsed in exhaustion, having failed to deliver enough cloak-stripping value to the traveller.

He was huffing and puffing, panting and farting from the herculean effort. The Sun seriously considered calling an ambulance, but eventually a double shot of whiskey nicely recovered the Wind and kept it in the world of the living. Then the Wind comfortably sat down on a sack of potatoes, let out a sigh of defeat and an unceremonious "Oh, shit!" and it was the Sun's turn.

The Sun put on his best MBA charm and started shining on the traveller. The old man soon took off his cloak because it was just too hot to walk with his cloak on.

The Sun delivered sufficient value to achieve his goal without attending any motivational seminars and any other cloak-removal workshops.

Then he summarised his conclusion to the Wind...

"It's not the sheer effort smart clients appreciate. They appreciate the kind of value they're seeking."

"Son, it's not the size of your instrument that matters, but how skilfully you actually use it."

As consultants, we often get obsessed with the effort we put into our projects, and often fail to realise that clients don't care about the effort. Or that effort alone on consultants' part is not necessarily value for their clients.

What I am noticing in my own life is that I work on figuring out new ways of creating distinctive value for my clients using less and less of my time and effort.

Why am I doing this?

Sadly, so many consultants are still living in the old paradigm of doing something FOR their clients, instead of helping (enabling) their clients to do things FOR themselves. That is, they are building client dependency.

Personally I disagree with the "client for life" concept. I find it unethical to cut my claws into a client and then hang in there for the rest of my life on the erroneous pretext that I don't have to market myself ever again.

Of course, in some professions it's a great concept. But not in real consulting.

I have always believed that short, high-impact, high-value projects are more valuable for clients and are more time and profit-effective for consultants than long, dragged out projects.

However, there is one more consideration here about value. It's...

The Difference Between Value Consultants Deliver And Results Clients Create

As a consultant, you can only deliver value to your clients, but they must interpret, integrate and internalise the delivered value in order to realise the desired improvements they hired you for in the first place.

It means you can't create results for others.

An Olympic coach can't create gold medals (result) for his team. He can only help them to become better swimmers. That's the coach's delivered value.

Consulting is the same...

And while you and your client are mutually accountable to each other to put your best foot forward, your client is single-handedly responsible for the realised outcomes.

This is why during your client acquisition process you must focus on accepting only those clients that are ready, willing and able to do their sides of the equation, that is, to interpret, integrate and internalise the delivered value to improve their own condition.

So, remember your project's success is...

Delivering value (this is the consultant's job) + interpreting, integrating and internalising value (this is the client's job).

So, here let's discuss some techniques you can do both to deliver more value with less hard work and make sure that your clients have the capacity to interpret, integrate and internalise the delivered value and improve their conditions.

Improving Talent Recruitment

Isn't it amazing that consulting firm owners and partners love being involved in trivial activities like personally selecting and purchasing the fridge and the rubbish bin for the kitchen in the office, but when it comes to acquiring new associates, they often relegate this "chore" to headhunter firms, give them some anal-retentive specification, like we require a person with at least two MBAs and 3.5 years of experience in doing corporate tax returns for left-handed midgets in North East Ivory Coast.

It is just surprising how many consulting firms look at talent acquisition as hiring manual labourers to a construction site. While I believe in the importance of developing automated systems and processes, on the final analysis performing consulting services boils down to one-to-one interactions between clients and associates. And for this reason consulting firms constantly compete for the best talent available in that specific industry. However, I am not saying the best talent means the highest number of diplomas and certificates.

While industrial companies hire brute muscle power and raw technical skills, consulting firms must put more emphasis on recruiting soft attributes (they are not really skills), such as passion, ambition and enthusiasm.

Improving Internal Skill-Building

The sad fact is that many consulting firms get so bogged down taking care of existing projects and servicing existing clients, that trivial issues like skill building goes down the toilet.

Actually, it's skill building and marketing whose budgets are first cut when firms hit some hard times.

A few years ago I attended a workshop on tax issues. I am not an accountant, but certainly want to know my rights and how I can reduce my taxes legitimately. It was a rewarding and eye-opening experience.

Firstly, I was surprised to find out how many entrepreneurs were there, wanting to learn about the ins and outs of taxation.

Secondly I was amazed how few accountants turned up.

Thirdly, I was shocked beyond imagination when I realised how breathtakingly obsolete many of these - both certified and chartered - accountants were.

They are so busy doing client work, basically doling out obsolete advice, that they have no time to participate in ongoing education.

Yes, they all have a certain number of hours of mandatory education programmes, but they are just as effective as pinching an elephant's arse.

So, there was that guy, one of the chief advisors to Revenue Canada teaching how to reduce taxes legally, but accountants were too busy to come and learn something new.

But what I don't understand is that if they are obsolete in their own trade, why do they try to pose as business advisors? Just to add another craft to their repertoires of obsolete skills?

You must make sure that regardless of how busy you could be with client work, you participate in some serious skill-building to keep your expertise on the top. I even say, when it comes down to some client work and a conference or workshop, you'd better reschedule the client.

At the workshop you may well learn some valuable bits and bobs which you can use in your client work.

Understand that it is not your busy-ness your clients pay for, but your knowledge. And they expect you to be up to scratch in your craft. If your knowledge is obsolete, then there is a bit of a problem. Nothing major, but it certainly means that you have nothing left to be paid for.

And without getting paid, it is very hard to put food on the table and sooner or later you starve to death, which is a rather miserable way of ending the day.

Remember the priority: First you have to acquire knowledge and only then you can dole it out and get paid for it. In the best interest of your prosperity, your family's happiness and your clients' success, keep this order.

Improving The Management Of Engagements

Every engagement must be sufficiently supervised and managed. However, in most consulting firms both partners and managers are evaluated on their personal billable hours (yes, far too many firms are still wage slaves, peddling time chunks), and not on what their teams achieve.

So, what is the outcome? They get busy boosting their personal utilisation, and manage their projects and coach their people as spare time activities. And while this behaviour should be unacceptable, it is tolerated because of these people's positions in the firm as partners and managers.

Managers are not supposed to be managers for the sake of rank. It is a job description. The job of partners and managers is to bring out the best in their people. Period. They have to hold their people's feet in the fire, while protecting them from burning out. They have to stretch them, while protecting them from snapping. All in all, they have to be great coaches to inspire, enthuse and excite their people.

They also have to provide high quality project management. Yes, one of your people (re-read: NOT an army of juniors) is working with the client's tactical team to implement the project, and one manager from your firm, who is not involved in that project, must supervise the project. You need objective supervision, and that is why someone who is not involved must supervise it.

In order to make both implementation and supervision consistent, you need some systems and processes in place. For instance you can request clients to journal their experiences in a document called the "client impact report". In that report they document what they've learnt and achieved during the project and what they like or dislike about working with you.

Improving Associate's Counselling And Coaching Skills

You can have the best subject matter experts from the most prestigious MBA schools in the known universe, but at the end of the day consulting is a people's game. That is your firm's future depends on your own and your people's counselling and coaching skills and ability to interact with clients.

This is why Anthony Robbins is wealthier than most psychologists. He may not be licensed, but he knows how to interact with people, and how to dispense his expertise such that people pay attention. Oh, and based on my observation, he is a people person. I've met not one or two psychologists and counsellors who actually hate people and the only reason why they interact with them is money.

Consultants need excellent intra- and interpersonal skills. There are differences in these people skills in that some people are very soft, tender and pampering with clients, and some are rather tough and demanding. My justification is that the tougher I am with my clients and the more I expect of them, the easier they can live up to what the marketplace expects of them.

On this I totally agree with General Patton...

"When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag."

You simply can't sweet-talk and pamper your way to the top of your industry. And this is why your people must be good at counselling and coaching. They must know how to administer, what Patton called, "double dirty" stuff in such a way that clients don't get offended but rather get inspired.

So, what can you do here? Make sure your people have access to great resources to learn coaching skills. While you can learn a lot from these institutions, you must also be careful. In recent years coaching has become a bit of a fad, has been blown out of proportion and has been commercialised quite a bit. Look at the web and you find that everyone and his kitchen sink offers coaching certification courses for some good money.

However, coaching is a pretty innate and pragmatic skill (parents practise it successfully without certificates), and while I believe we can always polish our skills, we don't necessarily need a certificate essentially saying, "Fred Tigernuts successfully regurgitated XYZ Coaching Institute's point of view and is hereby allowed to spread it further".

That's bullshit.

Improving Your Firm's Ability To Dissect Information

Information dissemination includes three stages. In these stages you can turn information into structured knowledge which can then be put into systems and processes for easy repetition and duplication.

Analysis is about dissecting information into easy-to-chew bits, so you don't choke or get constipated on extra-large info chunks. Sadly most firms place 100% emphasis on analysis by filling up their positions with people who can look at issues only from one perspective. So, as a result, they end up tearing everything apart, and spend the rest of their lives admiring torn pieces and call them "Our proprietary approach".

Diagnosis is about inspecting the individual pieces. This is the microscopic view. You look at each piece one at a time, and assess its merits in relationship to the whole you are working on.

Synthesis is about putting the pieces together in new ways. And this is where the problem lies. Most consulting firms are pretty homogenous. People have the same schooling, same education, think alike and dress alike, so in the synthesis stage they keep coming up with the same old tired ideas, ending up running around in circles and working damned hard to end up in the same place.

Every piece of information can be synthesised into different "wholes", just as the filing cabinet, phone and the fax were synthesised a few years ago into a rather interesting "whole", called the Internet. What is email really? Paperless fax. What is the web? A paperless filing cabinet. These are simple explanations, but simplicity is not a bad idea.

It is the synthesis that helps us to create new templates, systems, processes, statistics, market survey or other market research material in the industry, which you can then turn into new value for clients.

Remember, with the web anyone has access to any information. There is enough information on the web to make nuclear warheads in your kitchen, but information is not knowledge, and especially not easy-to-follow step-by-step process.

Your clients are time-strapped. They don't have time to collect and digest tons of information, so if you do that once and then customise it into a short report or checklist for many clients, they will appreciate it.

Improving The Process Of Becoming An Industry Master

You always have to thrive to achieve mastery in your industry. Think about how you can do valuable industry research, which then you can also package and sell to the same industry. This is proprietary research, and you can sell it as such. Show me a company in any industry which is not interested in learning something about the industry it is in. Every industry is flooded with conventional wisdom.

If you show something different, then there is a good chance they buy into it. Hey, this is how we gradually gave up on MS-DOS and migrated to Windows-based systems.

What we've implemented with a number of clients is that every associate is put on a professional development path with specific learning objectives and quarterly milestones. At every milestone, associates assess their own progress on the learning path on a percentage basis.

Then this percentage becomes a multiplier for their bonuses. It seems to work rather nicely.

My clients sell expertise not hours, so bonuses have to be tied to sellable expertise not billable hours. My clients don't even track hours.

Designing And Implementing Systems

While I buy the concept that consulting firms' work, depending on their positioning, is very diverse, borderline haphazard, there are many aspects of a firm's operation that can be turned into systems and processes.

According to W. Edwards Deming, also called The Prophet of Quality, who basically single-handedly created the Japanese industry and put it on the map to keep the western world in fear, some 94% of business problems, including failures and lacklustre performance could be eliminated by implementing effective systems.

Far too many consulting firms chronically underperform because they rely on superstar people ("rainmakers") but when they leave for various reasons, they leave a hell of a storm behind. And as we know, superstars don't leave alone. They often leave with other superstars.

Expressed in simple language, a system is to automatically, affordably, practically, measurably, repetitively and predictably execute a specific sequence of actions, in order to achieve specific outcomes, like to attract a preponderance of quality prospects to your business without lifting a finger.

No, contrary to conventional wisdom, this first stage of lead generation should be automated in every firm, so everyone could increase billable work, skill-building, or other productive activities, while the system generates new business.

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

Also, using FedEx's co-founder and innovator, Michael Basch's words...

"You systemise the routine and personalise the exception."

Consulting firms all over the world would be financially better off by turning their mundane activities into automated processes and systems, so they could give more attention to paying clients and those prospects that are about to become clients.

But if you consider that a typical consulting firm spends over 140 person hours to craft a proposal, often for tyre-kickers, then you can see where the time is lost. These proposals are very often initiated by a casual chat in the local cafeteria over a cup of coffee. And what is the result? Often nothing.

Observing And Listening To The Market

Paying more attention to what the market is saying, so instead of doing market research (which gives you lots of false information) you can listen for and observe real unadulterated information.

In spite of being schooled in engineering, I dare to say that research has its limits. This is doubly so when observing humans. People don't operate in their default ways under observation.

Researchers always find what they are looking for. Avant-garde physicist, cosmologist and philosopher John Archibald Wheeler named this phenomenon the Participative Universe principle.

Just think of it. Not even eyewitnesses can agree that a certain car accident took place the same way. One would witness some trivial bumps and bruises, while others may witness a massive bloodbath.

The sad truth is that research supports mediocre ideas and kills great ones. Many years ago, Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM spent a small fortune on hiring a prestigious consulting team to research the computer market. The team concluded that the world market for was "maybe only for a few computers."

With that IBM lost its foothold in the PC business once and for all.

Remember, research doesn't expose the truth to you. It blinds us to the truth.

Market research is a hypothetical situation. People give you answers which make them look good and smart. Accept it at your own peril.

The other problem is that the more cutting-edge and innovative your idea is, the more likely you have to jam it down your clients' throats.

You are much better off collecting soft evidence through observing and listening than wasting huge sums of money on hard evidence.

Remember the tale called "The emperor's new clothes". Based on "researching" his "trusted wise" advisors opinions, the emperor was nicely dressed in the most stupendous fabric in the known universe. The advisors wanted to please the emperor, so even by leading him to village-wide ridicule, they told him he looked amazing in his new clothes. Only the ignorant boy who didn't know what the emperor wanted to hear, had the courage to say what the emperor needed to hear: "Cover up your arse you idiot."

So, make sure you too cover your up arse, and don't leave it exposed just because the crowd you survey "admires your new clothes".

Summary

As you can see, there are several ways your firm can deliver more value using less time and resources to do so.

As consultants, we have to be able to see beyond the "selling time" paradigm, and we have to discover new ways we can add new value to our clients, and if they are interested in acquiring that new value, they can pay for it.

The percentages indicate the impact each component can make on the overall financial performance of your firm. In case you're interested, this was published in David's 2003 book, "Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture"

This is how it works...

Rate your business in each area on a scale of 1 to 6. The increase of only one notch in each category can increase your firm's financial performance by the indicated percentage. So, if you rate your firm 3 at "high standards", and you push it up to 4, then you can increase your firm's overall financial performance by 40.4%.

And yes, only one notch improvement in the area of client relationships can double your firm's financial performance.

One message is very clear. Something David repeats in all his books...

"You can't make money by chasing money."

Or as the late Jim Rohn was fond of saying...

"Success is not something you pursue, it is something you attract by the person you've become."

Great financial performance is the effect of success, not its cause.

So, look at the above areas in your firm and see where you can improve the current situation.

And the good news is that all these factors are internal and independent of your country's economic situation. As you improve your firm on the inside, the situation on the outside starts improving too.

Look at your firm as a magnet, and just change what it attracts and what it repels.

Come and let's discuss this newsletter issue on my blog...

Recommended Reading

Neuromarketing: Understanding The Buy Buttons In Your Customer's Brain

By Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin

The authors discovered how to communicate with the old brain, and now in this book, they bring this knowledge to marketing.

It turns out that the neo cortex is the proverbial gatekeeper and the old brain, he reptilian brain is the decision-maker. Between the neo cortex and the reptilian brain, we have the mammalian brain, which is a sort of second gatekeeper.

Now imagine that your message hits the neo cortex, and it considers whether or not let it pass to the mammalian brain. If the neo cortex likes the message, it passes it to the second gatekeeper, the mammalian brain, which considers it on an emotional level.

If the message passes both the intellectual and emotional tests, then it can go to the reptilian brain for decision. And the reptilian brain decides based on 6 criteria...

Show survival needs for the reptilian brain: Money, love and health

If you have something valuable to sell, you obviously want to show it to the decision-maker, the reptilian brain. But what if the mammalian brain and/or the neo cortex, like two anal-retentive procurement flunkies, get in the way and block you from presenting to the reptilian brain?

That's when we are in deep shit and get all the objections and hassle from the gatekeepers.

To learn the authors' 4-step process of presenting to the reptilian brain while bypassing the two procurement flunkies, place your order for Neuromarketing. You'll be glad you did.

[1]The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6 in Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, whose blockbusting book, "The Big Bang Theory: A Personal View" has achieved galaxy-wide notoriety. Legend has it that her erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body. But Ford Prefect, accomplished space traveller and the half-brother of the notorious Zaphod Beeblebrox, argues that it's not four but actually five miles. Continue where you've left off...

"Dynamic Duo" Mentor Programme... ...has 0 opening for January and 4 for February 2012. Click here to continue to read the fiendish details.