When I had just joined Consulting, I failed to understand why people would pay thousands and millions of $$ to get hold of the leading Consulting firms to do their projects. Seemed like they should be smart enough to figure all this out, and yet, we kept getting more business in similar types of projects.
As I grew within the firm, I got exposed to the reasons why most client executives bring in Consultants:
This one is controversial and you may disagree, but many times (not ALL), the main outcome the client or project sponsor is looking for, is not a deck, but a validation of their own agenda.
Here's a client executive, who is aware of the trends in the industry and wants a particular solution for the organization. Buuuuut.....he/she has a tough time convincing peers and doesn't want it to seem like it was ONLY his/her idea.
Also, there's a big risk that the idea may not fly and be a flop.
Enter....top Consulting firms who provide the detailed research to back the business case that provides this executive the ammunition to convince peers, seniors, the Board, etc. etc.
Ability to connect the dots across the organization and see the bigger picture.
Most Consultants work with a hypothesis-based approach, wherein they assume a set of reasons are responsible for the key challenge that the Company/ organization is facing. Then they go about eliminating each of those challenges one by one, via interviews or analyses. Consultants also have access to mid/senior-level executives across the organization, which helps them put the pieces of the puzzle together faster, vs. people who have been working in siloed teams.
Since consultants are also neutral third parties (in most cases), these executives somehow open up more to describing the challenges and risks their teams face, more than they would internally.
Consultants come in with a knowledge of Industry best practices.
Management Consulting firms are in the business of making the latest and the best in the industry trends available to their clients and helping them figure out how to execute the strategy or implement that cutting edge software.
Consulting firms spend thousands and millions of dollars in developing research and training their people to get up to speed with these latest trends.
When I worked in a leading Big 4 firm, they had a goal of training their 40,000 people workforce in digital tools within a year! Just goes to show the importance attached to learning and reinventing yourself in Consulting as a profession.
Leading Consulting firms also maintain a benchmarks database
This is a database of key ratios/ metrics/ performance indicators across multiple industries (Banking, Insurance, Telecom, Healthcare etc.) and functions (such as Finance, IT, Risk, Sales, to name a few).
They keep adding to this with every project and also invest in creating annual or quarterly surveys, which are sent to leading executives (CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CROs, CDOs, etc.) to get their insights into what their organizations are seeing in their numbers, key challenges faced, risks and priorities.
These databases are the goldmine that most clients want, to compare their organizations against, to get insights into their performance and areas of improvement.
It also helps that Consultants are great at dealing with change and ambiguity, are super organized, work on deadlines and create superior quality deliverables. And when things don't work out, it's easy to pass the blame on them too!
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Got more questions on Consulting? Comment below or email me at punya@byondgood.com. Punya is a former management consultant with 15 years of experience at 2 Big4 firms, serving top Fortune500 clients. She has lived and worked in 6 countries and changed 3 careers working across several industries. Punya is passionate about coaching new and aspiring Consultants to succeed in Management Consulting.
