Five Awesome Benefits Of Keeping Your Consulting Firm Small

Do you know that the old saying of "give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day; teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime" is not from ancient Chinese proverb and it has nothing to do with the Torah or the Bible.

It was coined in 1885 by Anne Isabella Ritchie, the daughter of the English satirical novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. Nevertheless the innate wisdom of the phrase is valuable.

A slight, and somewhat satirical modification is that if you build a man a fire, he'll be warm for a night; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Anyway... It's also true if we say that if you do things FOR your clients, you improve their businesses today, but if you do things WITH them, you improve their businesses forever.

And this reminds me of the cartoon strip Family Circus by Bill Kaine...

A little boy is holding his homework out to his mother. She looks at him, a bit annoyed, and says...

"You misunderstand. I'm a homework consultant, not a homework subcontractor." 

That is, she can work WITH him to get the homework done, but she won't do it FOR him. Sadly, most consulting firms are in the "doing it FOR them" not in the "doing it WITH them" business. The other day I had an email interaction with the CEO of an IT consulting firm.

He was looking for someone to do marketing and sales for his firm.

"I'm looking more for a salesperson that actually makes the calls and meets with customers and sign contracts.

Sales and marketing I can do it myself but I hate it and I don't want to have nothing to do with this part of the business.

I see that you are more like a consultant and I assume you will just tell me what to do and I have to do it but that's what I try to stay away from.

I'm good on IT and I love it. I'm a firm believer that everyone is good at something and they should do what they are good at and what they love.

Sales and marketing is not my dream so I need somebody to take over 100%."

And this is the type of client most consulting firms chase. Since they have large headcounts, they try to keep their staff busy by taking on "Done FOR you" type projects.

More often than not, they give away their intellectual capital during the pre-project interaction, and by the time the purchase order is signed and down payment is made, all they have to offer is manual labour.

And to perform all that manual labour, they need lots of people. But here is the problem, and this is what we discuss in this month's neuron-titillatingly exciting episode of Commando Consulting, entitled, Five Awesome Benefits Of Keeping Your Consulting Firm Small.

Enjoy!