The three-dimensional space between consultants and clients

I know: it goes against the grain to suggest that there should be any space at all.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the problems the consulting industry faces is how to re-establish a difference between themselves and clients that’s big and important enough to be worth paying money for. One in two consulting projects are primarily driven by a client’s need to access specialist skills, yet the concept of “working in partnership” can too easily start to elide into situations where consultants and clients are so similar that the rationale for using the former simply evaporates.

It’s tempting to see the space between the two purely in terms of specialist expertise. “Hire me,” says the consultant, “because I know more than you do.” And that’s still a vital part of the picture: clients know far more about their business than they used to, but they still don’t know everything (the old wood for the trees problem) and they may work in a more transparent world, but having the time to understand the implications of a competitor move remains difficult (the urgent and unimportant still crowd out the rest).

But this is not the only gap: alongside the “what” is the “how” – a point I made in my last post. It’s here that the working in partnership idea has some relevance: knowing something your clients don’t shouldn’t translate into arrogance; being able to ensure your recommendations are acted on requires a good cultural fit between you and your client.

But consultants still need to differentiate themselves in the way they work. They can – indeed, perhaps should – work faster than a client’s team and be more disinterested, for example. Crucially, they’re focused on projects with deadlines, rather than open-ended tasks. So it follows that this second dimension isn’t just about the gap between consultants and clients, but between consultants and interim managers and contractors. Both groups may have similar technical knowledge, but the interim manager really is working in partnership. Consulting firms, if they’re to be successful, need to ensure that they can articulate and quantify the benefits of being organisations rather than individuals.

But there’s a third dimension, the significance of which is only just emerging: the global mindset, by which I mean the ability to move from region to region, able to exploit differences between markets within a single, efficient organisation.

All consulting firms start or started as specialist boutiques. The successful ones grew to provide a wider range of services and competed in terms of range and scale, but found it hard to maintain their depth of expertise. This third dimension changes the landscape yet again. A boutique firm might be global, to the extent that it comprises a small group of gurus who travel the world while being focused on a very specific field. A large firm may claim an office in every country, but may not be able to field individuals who can see beyond their borders.

But this is a scarce commodity among clients as well – equivalent, if you like, to the proportion of people who had MBAs 20 years ago. For consulting firms that can demonstrate a genuine gap between themselves and their clients in this respect, the opportunity is immense.