Consulting Journal: Techniques - One-to-many consulting

Techniques: One-to-many consulting

by David Blakey

You do not have to consult entirely on a one-to-one basis with your clients. You do need to get the fees right for the alternative methods.

[Monday 15 September 2003]

I shall try to get you to think about some other models for your consulting business, apart from the traditional one-to-one consultant-to-client relationship.

Consultants

One of the reasons that people become management consultants is that they have several years of experience in management and they want to use that experience to work with a number of clients. They believe that there must be several organizations that could gain benefit from their experience and knowledge and that these organizations are willing to pay for that benefit.

One of the incidental benefits to management consultants is that they gain even more experience and knowledge by working with those organizations. They become even more valuable. The additional experience and knowledge can be within a sector or industry, or within a function or process, or generally.

Consultants and clients

The classic model for consultants has been that they work with each client individually. The client writes the terms of reference (ToR) for the consulting assignment and the consultant completes the assignment according to the ToR. Usually, the only time that consultants work with a number of clients is when they speak at conferences.

Let's look at conferences. Conferences are arranged over one or two days, with up to eight sessions of forty to fifty minutes each. Each session has its own speaker. Often, these speakers are management consultants. Many consultants view conferences as opportunities to meet new prospects rather than as consulting assignments. Thus, they do not charge the conference organizer for their session.

This view - that conferences provide sales opportunities - would be more convincing if consultants did more work at finding those opportunities. Here's the irony. Consultants work perhaps 40 hours on a 40 minute session at a conference. Then they spend little more than 40 minutes at the conference. If they are speaking after a break and before another session, consultants tend to arrive during the break and set up the technology for their session and then leave immediately after they have finished speaking. What kind of sales opportunity is that?

If you are serious about conferences as sales opportunities, you should be at the conference for the whole day of your session. You should talk to everyone. You should get to know what problems they currently have and what new projects they are considering. You should have made appointments with as many of them as you can, to discuss some specific topic of interest to them.

Conferences extend the consulting model. Instead of a one-to-one relationship, consultants have a one-to-many relationship with their audience.

Extending the model

Let's now see if we can extend the model further. Instead of consultants speaking at single sessions in conferences, we can provide our experience and knowledge at seminars and workshops. Many of these are organized by local chambers of commerce or industry organizations or by central or local government. They tend to be focused on a particular topic, such as selecting external service providers or analyzing and managing risk. Their audience is people who have an immediate interest in that topic, probably because it is causing them problems. Their audience, therefore, is people who are looking for real help.

You can treat these seminars in one of two ways. First, you can view them as small, focused conferences. You can run a session at no charge and expect to gain consulting assignments as a result. This probably is not possible. Many of the audience will be small to medium businesses who simply cannot afford a professional one-to-one consulting assignment. They may recognize that the assignment could save them much more than it costs, but their cash flow may not permit them to spend money on a consultant now to gain those benefits later.

The second way for consultants to view these seminars is as consulting assignments in themselves. You should be able to charge your standard fees for your time and effort, but these fees will be shared by a number of clients. This may be a theoretical model, as some seminars are hosted at no charge to local businesses, but you should still receive a fee from the seminar host.

As with conferences, you will probably have to prepare the sessions at your own cost, but, unlike conferences, you should be able to re-use the seminar material. You are likely to be able to present the same material to a different audience in a similar seminar in future. Having this material already prepared will make you attractive to seminar hosts. They like the assurance that you have this material rather than the uncertainty that someone else will be able to prepare all the material from scratch.

Action

You can find out about local seminars by keeping in touch with local business organizations and local and central government departments and agencies for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Many organizations are supporting projects to improve the business skills of people in these SMEs. Some of these involve seminars and workshops. Others involve coaching and one-to-one mentoring. You should check on the fees that you will receive. The mentoring projects may not pay anything at all: they are often intended as a way for retired business people to continue to be useful. There may be some project that will pay you at your normal fee rate.

The perspective to take is different from the one that consultants usually take, that their fees are a relatively small expense for a client that will reap much larger benefits. With SMEs, each client will pay a small fee and that these fees will collectively add to a ‘proper’ consulting fee. You cannot expect to see even one of these clients who can quantify the benefits that they get from your advice: many SMEs do not operate by continually looking at their ROI.

You might consider starting some projects. You might approach a local organization with your ideas and find, to your surprise, that they have been looking for someone just like you to get things going.

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