Robert Schaffer
Robert Schaffer is the author of High-Impact Consulting, The Breakthrough Strategy, and Rapid Results! How 100-Day Projects Build the Capacity for Large-Scale Change. As the founder of Schaffer Consulting, he has decades of experience helping companies to maximize results from consulting projects.
He was a founding director for the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) in the US, and served as chairman of the Professional Development Committee of IMC. Schaffer helped launch and served as an editor for Consulting to Management (C2M). He has also written numerous articles for the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and other publications.
We asked Schaffer to shed some light on how consultants can avoid the flaws he sees in conventional consulting.
McLaughlin: You’ve written that it’s not unusual for consultants to deliver good solutions that end up providing little or no value to their clients. Why do you think that happens?
Schaffer: It can happen because consultants come up with solutions to client problems that intellectually seem to be the answer, but the consultants don’t take into account all the changes the client would have to make for the solution to work. Even modest consulting recommendations can involve hundreds, or even thousands, of interrelated changes in what people are doing and how they are doing it.
As an example, assume a company hired a consultant to help eliminate stock-outs without raising inventory. The consultant then completes a modest project on inventory control and re-ordering. When the client really considers the business functions that would be impacted by the project recommendations, little by little it becomes apparent that the company must make an enormous number of organizational changes to achieve results.
The consultant assumes the client will make those changes happen. But, of course, if the client does not have enough competence, skill, and motivation to do so, the ultimate aim of the consultant’s project will not be realized. It’s somewhat analogous to a golf lesson: the golf instructor can give you three great things on which to focus, and say with assurance that if you do those things you will cut ten strokes off your score. Well, if you aren’t capable of doing those three things, it will be great advice that you can’t implement.
McLaughlin: Is there something in the consulting process itself that causes these problems?
Schaffer: Yes. What I call the five fatal flaws in conventional consulting lead consultants and clients down that path. To briefly summarize and boil them down to their essence, the flaws include: defining a project in terms of consultant deliverables rather than client results; determining project scope with little regard for the client’s readiness for change; aiming for grandiose solutions instead of incremental successes; lack of real partnership between consultant and client; and, labor intensive use of consultants rather than leveraged use of them.
I think all of the fatal flaws are by-products of the nature of the contract between client and consultant. For most consulting projects, that contract is for the consultant to deliver a consulting product, usually a set of recommendations. The consultant is not really accountable for whether or not the recommendations are successfully implemented, only for whether the ideas are great.
High-impact consulting closes that implementation gap by focusing on results, rather than stopping at the great ideas.
McLaughlin: Why don’t clients and consultants move in the direction of results-based projects?
Schaffer: Well, the whole business culture–clients and consultants–expects that recommendations are what you buy from consultants. Clients aren’t used to the concept that they can contract with consultants for final results.
To return to the stock-out example, the client could hire a consultant to introduce a new system that would reduce inventory by 10% without increasing stock-outs, and maintain the same level of customer service three months after implementation. But, most clients don’t think in terms of building such results into the consulting contract.
Another barrier is that the conventional consulting contract is very cozy for both parties. If a project doesn’t work out, the consultant can say, well they asked for such and such, and I delivered, on time, the correct recommendations, and the best system they could buy; if they had followed my recommendations they would have achieved all their goals. The client can say, the consultants gave us something we couldn’t digest, or can say to the boss, hey, you know we gave them a half million dollars and even they couldn’t solve it, so it’s what I’ve been telling you–I’ve got a really tough problem here. It lets both parties off the hook.
Whereas, if client and consultant commit publicly to a result, for example, that they are going to work on entering a new market, and by X date will be doing $500,000 a month of sales in that territory, both of them are on the hook. They would both be very embarrassed if they didn’t reach the goal. So, specifying a result can be great when everything works as planned, but for people who are a little anxious about that exposure, the conventional consulting model gives everybody a nice hiding place.
McLaughlin: But from that perspective, the conventional consulting model doesn’t seem the best way to create solid, long-term client relationships. If there is a failure, don’t both parties suffer?
Schaffer: In a big organization such failures sometimes disappear. Also, clients may not have an accurate way to measure the bottom line impact. They might say, we needed this new inventory control system or this new product development system, and we got that from the project. The client might feel that the consultants were really smart and provided good ideas, but often they don’t analyze what they got for the fees paid to the consultant.
I’m not saying that the conventional consulting model is never successful. On the contrary, there are plenty of successes. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, so there must be something to it. But the success rate ought to be close to a 100% and it’s very far from that.
McLaughlin: If the client and consultant could describe and agree on expected results in the contract, would they have fewer arguments around fees?
Schaffer: I was just discussing setting fees for a client with one of my colleagues, and I realized that within the first three months of the project, the client is getting enough return to cover the fees already spent. By the end of the first year, the client will have gotten back many multiples of the consulting fees. That doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned about those fees or that they don’t pay attention to them, but it makes for a simpler discussion when the consultant is delivering in terms of value, rather than just consulting output.
McLaughlin: How can consultants make the transition to the high-impact consulting model?
Schaffer: Well, it doesn’t have to be like a religious conversion where you take vows never to go back to the old way. What I suggest is that you sit down with a willing client and say, let’s see if over the next 100 days we can introduce some new methodology that will increase sales by a specified number, reduce costs by X amount, or reduce cycle time from audit to payment by ten days.
You can do everything you would do normally, just build in some focus on results, and get a feel for how you and the client would have to work differently with one another. You would find it’s much more of collaboration, and that your project would probably move ahead in stages, rather than as a big study after which you deliver a big set of recommendations.
The client doesn’t say to the consultant, you go off and do your study, talk to anybody you want, we will give you an office and all the data you need, then when you finish your job you can come back and tell us what your product is. That approach won’t work if you are going to contract for results.
Instead, the consultant would do a little preliminary work, then get together with the client and begin to talk about how to make it happen. It’s a collaborative project–you work together to achieve the goal. Some consultants might worry about getting credit when the project succeeds. The point is, when you start making things happen, you don’t have to worry about credit. And, if the client’s people want credit for some of the work, the consultant should say, great, you guys did a terrific job.
McLaughlin: Because if the client is successful, the consultant will ultimately benefit?
Schaffer: That’s true, and some firms around the world use this methodology and have made it their central way of working. But it does require some experimentation and a different view about the nature of consulting, and it has to fit the culture of the firm.
McLaughlin: Last question: What’s the first piece of advice you would give someone who is embarking on a consulting career?
Schaffer: What we call management consulting has proliferated into so many different things that you could put a hundred management consultants in a room together, and none of them would do the same thing. So, my first advice would be to do some research, find out about all the different kinds of consulting and see which one best suits your skills and interests. You can do almost anything in management consulting if you find the right clients and the right environment.
McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.
Find out more at Schaffer Consulting.
You might also be interested in our interview: Robert H. Schaffer: How to Get Rapid Results.
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