The market for Consulting services continues to grow apace, with reported global revenues of somewhere between $100bn-$200bn in 2024. That's an astonishing figure for a profession with the time-honoured reputation for taking your watch, telling you what time it is, and then keeping the watch along with your money!
However, the less cynical amongst us would surely acknowledge that the best Consultants can show us how to adjust the time on our watches or even provide us with better and more accurate ones. But, how can we know which Consultants those will be?
In this piece, I attempt to answer that question from my own experience of having been on both the buy and sell sides of this process and having learned the hard way in at least one of those!
I believe that the critical starting point in selecting the right Consultants is, of course, to have an agreed understanding of what the objectives of the consulting assignment will actually be - is it to develop and implement a business strategy, to create a target operating model, to recommend and onboard a tech platform, to create and manage a stream of projects, or what? In other words, the first and perhaps most fundamental part of making sure the selected Consultants won't simply be the ones who take your money and your watch is to have a clear and shared understanding of what you're asking them to do and, in that context, of what the expectations of each party will be.
Consultants typically approach their clients in one of two ways - expansively ("we're here to help you with everything you're getting wrong") or selectively ("we've got proven credentials in the following areas where we're agreed you need some help"). You'll be unsurprised to hear me say that I believe the expansive approach risks losing focus on the definition of actual client need and is the one most likely to result in the Consultants midway through the assignment desperately looking for someone's - anyone's! - watch to take. Conversely, the selective approach should allow the Consultants to work jointly with the client, and in a detailed manner, through the layers of the so-called Consulting hierarchy.
That hierarchy is typically seen in pyramidal form, with 'providing data and information' at the base layer of the pyramid, moving up from there though the layers of 'using that data and information to identify the problems to be addressed', 'proposing solutions to those problems', 'assisting with the implementation of those solutions', 'driving process and operating model changes to ensure the problems can't reoccur', and finally to the top layer of 'becoming an embedded strategic business partner'.
Savvy clients and trustworthy Consultants will work jointly and transparently through this hierarchy to identify what the problems are that need to be addressed, how this will be achieved based on proven past experience, and what the success measures to be applied to the assignment will be. The clients and their Consultants should also explicitly agree how many layers of the Consulting hierarchy are to be included. In this way, scopes are clear, timelines and outcomes are set, and both parties know the chosen Consultants already have all the watches they need to be able to tell everyone involved what time it really is!
Now, to be fair to the Consulting profession of which I'm today a part, achieving that shared and agreed assignment scope, timeline and desired outcome requires some challenging questions to be asked upfront - questions which can sometimes appear to be heading toward the hoary "Can I please have your watch?". Those could and should include "What approaches have you tried in the past, and with what outcomes?", "Do you already have a solution in mind?" and "Are you the sole stakeholder or are there others, and if there are others do they agree that there's a problem here at all?". The client on the receiving end of these questions can often feel frustrated, but surely it's in neither party's interest to end-up with the right solution to the wrong problem - or even with the right solution to the right problem but which isn't implementable?
So, that process of creating transparency and building joint and holistic firm-wide commitments to the activities to be undertaken will be key to the success of the assignment - and to the sanity of both the client and the Consultant!
And, in that spirit of transparency, Consultants that don't want to have to take their clients' watches should either operate within the boundaries of their in-house expertise or implement partnerships with proven experts who operate in aligned areas, allowing them to expand those boundaries and be credentialised to have a broader discussion with their clients. In my experience - again from both the buy and sell sides - the partnership approach can be truly value-adding to both parties and can often lead to a more inclusive assignment outcome.
Finally, as a means of ensuring the Consultants don't reappear further down the line saying "Sorry, I forgot to take your watch, but can you give it to me now?", in addition to regular ongoing reviews during the assignment itself, conducting a joint and comprehensive end-of-assignment review of its effectiveness is a must. Did we achieve what we wanted? Did we do it as co-owners of the mission? Did we adhere to the assignment's scope? Did we deliver within the agreed timelines? And did we achieve an outcome that both parties are satisfied with and believe was delivered at an appropriate cost-level?
So, in conclusion, in my opinion the key to ensuring a Consulting assignment involves no transferred ownership of watches before, during of after that assignment is to:
And, in case any of you are wondering, whilst on the sell-side I haven't (yet) actually asked a client for their watch. But, whilst on the buy-side, I did come perilously close to being asked to hand my watch over during one assignment. And, that's why I felt it might be helpful to share my thoughts about how we might all better understand which are the Consultants least likely to ask us to do that!
I hope I've achieved that in this piece, and that you enjoyed reading it.
Projective Group is opgericht in 2006 en is een toonaangevende change specialist voor de financiële dienstverlening.
We worden binnen de sector erkend als leverancier van complete oplossingen en werken samen met klanten in de financiële dienstverlening om oplossingen te bieden die zowel holistisch als pragmatisch zijn. We hebben ons ontwikkeld tot een betrouwbare partner voor bedrijven die willen gedijen en bloeien in een steeds veranderend landschap van financiële dienstverlening.
