Why are we here?

If you are a consultant arriving on client site for the first time this is a good question to consider. This isn’t existential introspection, but rather seeking an understanding of why the client hired you to ensure you solve the problem you are asked to solve, but also to meet the emotional or political needs that the client and/or the project partner may or may not have mentioned.

To start let’s surface a counter-intuitive fact, companies don’t hire consultants; company executives hire consultants. That may seem like splitting hairs. After all, company executives work for their companies and are charged with acting in the interest of the companies, right? Right (mostly).

But if one starts with the concept that a client is an individual, even if that client is part of a collection of individuals or a client system, it makes serving clients more personal and the process of acquiring clients, or selling, less of a mystery.

Sometimes the client who called you isn’t the originator of the idea.  Sometimes the CEO told the division head or the board suggested to the CEO that hiring a consultant  “might be a good idea.” Sometimes that is a very specific suggestion, “call this senior director at McKinsey/” Knowing this in advance defines the “client system,” that group of people who must be pleased including the “decision maker, the one who can say ‘yes,’ when all others say ‘no.’”

Next, a client hires a consultant to solve a problem or to help make a change. Here some clients might push back because some people react negatively to either the word problem, or the word change. They may substitute “opportunity” for problem or words like “improvement” or “innovation” or descriptors like “leap-frogging” or “updating” for the dreaded c-word (change). But no board of directors ever approved a hundred thousand or million dollar expenditure to maintain the status quo.

So some of the problems, issues, and/or concerns that a company executive might hire a consultant to help with include:

Grow revenue, or

Grow profit, or

People stuff

Wait, that’s it? What about a new strategy? (We need more customers than our competition, or innovation, or new products and services to grow revenue.) What about digital transformation? (We need streamlined operations to reduce cost and grow profit; we need better customer information to speed our product to market time to grow revenue.)

Actually it’s all people stuff – culture, climate, employee benefits, organization design – and shouldn’t be a separate category. (Attracting and keeping people = profit growth and/or revenue growth.) But often clients who have a “people problem” aren’t thinking economically. They can’t hire enough, or the right ones, or people are leaving, or they’re unhappy and want a union, or we don’t know who to put in what role, or how to organize. So I’ve listed people stuff separately.

What about meeting regulatory requirements such as HR, safety, environmental, tax and financial reporting, [insert your favorite regulatory agency here]? These issues have both revenue and profit implications, but I don’t talk much about them in this book because I never worked in these areas. When a client has a regulatory problem they are grateful for the expertise of regulatory-savvy consultants.

Consultants can bring new ideas or they can legitimize an internal idea by proving a hypothesis. They can bring new processes, methodologies or systems, or they can help improve existing ones, all in the service of solving a revenue, profit or people problem.

So clients hire consultants as problem solvers. They may expect that these consultants have solved their problem before. They may expect a certain rigor to the problem-solving process that is data-based and akin to the scientific method. Mostly the client wants a specific result, i.e., more revenue, more profit, or both.

This is ideally a true statement. In the real world, however, sometimes a company executive hires a consultant because his or her boss insists on it, or to do an unpleasant task like reducing headcount, or to justify an idea over a rival’s. Sometimes a client hires a consultant to try the latest management fad just to “shake things up.” In my career I tried to avoid these kinds of projects, because I believe they are a waste of money. I wasn’t always successful.

So why were we hired?

First, there’s the work: i.e., what the client is hiring you for. The work is always about making a change the client can’t figure out on their own. The client always has a problem:

1. They need to grow revenue, which might mean a new strategy, new products, new customers, new ways to reach those customers (channels), etc.
2. They need to make more money, more profit, which might mean operational improvement, process improvement, new systems, supplier relationships, etc.
3. People stuff. They need to hire more people, or the right people, or people are leaving, or they’re unhappy and want a union, or we don’t know who to put in what role, or how to organize.  As mentioned, even if the problem is growing revenue or profit because guess who is involved? People. Customers, staff, workers, suppliers, even bankers and shareholders – they’re all people. (Hint: Be careful about saying this out loud. Some won’t take you seriously. Really. No kidding. Many executives talk about business as if people are an inconvenience to endure.)

Your firm may be known to specialize in such problems or there may be e referral source where you solved just such a problem in the past. They may not have the skills nor the bandwidth. There may be too much uncertainty or complexity. In short the client believes that hiring you to solve this problem will be faster or better than solving it themselves.

Why were we hired?

The answer to this is always relationship and trust.  Regardless of reputation or referral source, there was a meeting where the partner demonstrated trustworthiness. In that meeting perhaps the project lead explained your understanding of the problem and your approach. The client listened to that explanation and said to him or herself, “Sounds like this person can be helpful” (i.e., the consultant knows what he’s talking about) and “I can work with this person.”

That relationship with the client is what everyone on the team must protect. Yes, you must solve the problem, and achieve the promised result, but the client must perceive you to be as helpful and easy to work with at the end of the project as she did at the beginning. Consultants forgetting that is the genesis of all those jokes. (“They borrow your watch to tell you the time. Then they steal your watch.”)

I used to train new consultants. I used to tell them:

• Be authentic – never let the voice coming out of your mouth say something different than the voice in the back of your head.
• Be helpful – never forgetting that what is help is defined by the recipient, not the giver, and must be asked for. Otherwise it is likely interference or worse.
• Get results – this is hard in content consulting where your work ends with advice and results are the client’s responsibility. It might be easier in process consulting where you do more implementation, but you still have to teach the client to maintain results. But results matter. People will remember the results even if they take credit for them.

Consulting as opportunity for improvement

At a minimum, clients should be better able to solve this problem themselves next time. A consulting engagement can be an opportunity for growth, the consultant’s and the client’s. This doesn’t happen by itself, but only by focusing on it.

Consultants can be arrogant self-serving people only interested in bilking companies for whatever they can charge. Or they can be authentic, helpful and deliver results, a force for positive change in business.

Which kind of consultant will you be?