The Consultants

In the crudest vernacular, a consulting business makes money selling access to the brains of consultants (usually in half-hour increments). Purchased wholesale and sold retail. You could say, and you'd be right, that a consulting business is in a real sense a brain broker, or brain brokerage. You could, but I won't.

The abstraction we gave a name to and called a 'business' began with four consultants and me, the overhead guy. I'd chosen a name, incorporated, set up the accounting, rented space, bought letterhead and liability insurance, furniture, computers, and supplies. All of it necessary and functional. And there it sat.  

Distilled to its essence as it was, the relative importance of the consultants to a consulting business was obvious. So I managed to quickly sign-up some billable work. Then I brewed and delivered their coffee, typed their letters, retrieved their lunches, and would have gone to the dentist for them if I could. Anything and everything to enable their focus on the business of the business, without costly interruption. Because when you sell time, every minute has a value.

It's not always obvious to people working at a consulting company that all the money the business spends is money recently earned by the consultants. It's like they're just doing a different job in another department.  Income? Consultants? Haha!  There must be some other source. Something 'corporate'.

The consultants fund all salaries, benefits, raises and bonuses; all transportation, internet and telephones; marketing, HR and PR; leaders and leadership retreats, board meetings, staff meetings, seminars, conferences, company parties, bottled water, and the doughnuts in the break-room. Everything. It's a 'consulting business', and there can be no consulting business without consultants. You'd have to call it something else.

Every consulting business is forced to continuously compete to remain buoyant. Like twenty people in the water with only seventeen lifejackets, it's survival of the fittest. But the existential threat of the competitive environment doesn't get talked about a lot, probably because it makes most people queasy. Especially those with bills to pay. The reality is this: competing companies (and there may be many) have a written plan to weaken, cripple, or extinguish yours. Need proof? Just look at their strategic plans, under the heading GROWTH.

Growth requires adding consultants and clients, ideally the best of both. But the best of both are already providing jobs and income for someone else. So growth for one company almost certainly comes at the direct expense of another. Behind their polite conference handshakes and smiles, your competitors are actively pursuing aggressive, relentless, surreptitious campaigns to seduce and lure away the lifeblood of your business i.e., your best consultants and clients. Such is the Darwinian nature of the free market, and the heightened urgency and focus it demands. It's a jungle out there!

So, given this backdrop of merciless competition, and the singular importance of the consultants to every consulting business; they being its namesake and sic code, the brains behind the business product, the source of all its income, the job upon which all other jobs depend, and without whom the business would cease to exist... one wonders, how does the typical consulting company depict the central role of its consultants on the company organization chart?

Let's take a look..........here we are...

BANG!!! Right through the foot!

Till next week then, have a great weekend,

Dave

dave@goodnewsfriday.com