Magnus Marketing Blog

Oh, my. The world is filled with consultants. When I talk to prospects, I tell them clearly - I am not a consultant. My role may encompass consulting advice to a certain degree, but I am not a consultant. Why? Because I actually DO the work and provide the advice while I do it.

Recently, one of my major clients who IS a consultant - actually, he is only partially one because he actually does some of the work for clients and teaches them how to do work better - had a request from a prospect for some business documents. He didn't have them. I told him that he needed to get these particular business documents because it would help his business. He listened to my advice, checked it further, and subsequently obtained the appropriate business documents. That is small business consulting at its finest.

There are many "consultants" who are paid hundreds of dollars an hour for developing plans or strategies who then drop a book of paperwork, an invoice, and a computer disk, then leave a client to implement the academic study in a real-world environment. Meanwhile, I would bet you that there are employees with great ideas and insights sitting right under the idiot manager's nose who engaged the overpriced fount-of-wisdom who would love the opportunity to contribute to the organization.

Addenda: Long ago, while I was with Hexaware, the company engaged the services of McKinsey - the most "brilliant" people in the world. They were engaged to provide market insight on offshoring which involved interviewing CIO's at leading companies asking what their thoughts were. They were largely able to do this because they were from McKinsey, however - in retrospect, it probably would be smarter to have the reps call in or myself to converse and generate some interest. But, I do see the point in having McKinsey do that. Conversely, they asked McKinsey to select tradeshows for the company to participate in. I could easily do that, in fact, I had done that quite successfully. The company paid a few million for McKinsey's jr. consulting staff to do work that I could do for a fraction. I do not believe that that work resulted in any earth shattering new strategy either and, if I recall, most of their advice was commonsense crap.

I came across this advisory company, for example, that promised a 25% increase in leads, did talent management, and provided sales coaching. I was amazed because very few people can effectively guarantee a 25% increase in leads, hire people effectively, and make salespeople close more - especially all under one umbrella. My take is, if they can't tell you what the last conversation was with a CIO to sell a solution, then they shouldn't be advising on how to generate leads. If they didn't run an executive search firm and can't talk about sourcing, fill rates, and delivery - then they shouldn't be advising on hiring.

Small businesses especially need to be very cautious of engaging consultants. Unless there is a proven ROI established or, like in my case, results that are demonstrable, then it is wise to question whether there is value in engaging them. If they do the work and provide advice or feedback in the course of execution, then that is valuable. If they provide advice without any execution or indication of reality for execution - dump em.