54 On being a consultant

This episode of the blog is not directly to do with drainage and wastewater, but is sparked by something that probably came about from people reading the blog. Recently, within the space of a week, I was approached by three separate “expert networks” about providing advice to a major client. Before responding, I found out a bit more about how they operated and this got me thinking about the different models for providing consultancy advice that I had come across in the last couple of years. This blog is the outcome from my point of view as a senior technical person, the views from others will be very different..

I identified five models; there may be more.

1. Employment based organisations
2. Freelance families
3. Individual freelancers
4. Taxi-meter networks
5. AI such as ChatGPT

Employment based organisations

Everyone is familiar with the operation of conventional consultancy firms. They range from small specialist consultancies of maybe a dozen people to global mega companies of hundreds of thousands. 

For most staff the organisation takes on the responsibility for finding an ongoing pipeline of work although for the more senior staff this can become a burden of having to find enough work for the rest of the team.

At all levels there is the benefit of working closely with a team to exchange ideas and experience and some opportunity to interact with the client to really understand their objectives and issues.

The disadvantage for the staff is that they have little choice in what projects they work on and on how they are delivered.

The strength of the business model is that it offers security and continuity to the staff, stability to the organisation and simplicity to the client. Once the client has chosen the consulting organisation that they want to work with, most of the worry over staffing and delivery is transferred. 

For the consulting organisation therefore a key strength is to have got all of the key staff on board so that they are less able to work directly for clients or for other consultants. There is therefore a reluctance to allow freelance flexible working as if everyone was freelance a key selling point evaporates. In the post pandemic world of hybrid working and the individualistic society that we now live in, maybe they need to rethink their position on this.

Freelance families

There are some specialist consulting organisations that do take a more relaxed attitude to freelance workers. Their business model is to have a family of freelancers who also do other work direct for clients or for other similar organisations. There are generally some constraints on not working for direct competitors and not poaching clients for similar work but the principle is one of more freedom.

The strength of the model is to build the “family” relationship so that there is social pressure to work on projects when required and to work on them in line with the organisation’s ethos.

This is balanced by the freelance staff having little responsibility for work winning or administration so that they can focus on their speciality. The organisation also acts as a shield between the specialists and the contract terms of the client by negotiating contracts and providing liability insurance. The freelance staff will also have a support network of their peers and often a close working relationship with the clients to really understand their needs.

Individual freelance

It is a big step to change to the freelance model and become part of the “gig economy” and seek to develop a “portfolio career”. The Centre for Research on Self Employment, [link] a London-based think tank, estimates that 250,000 UK workers who define their work as a portfolio career.[link]. Most are defined as being in the “creative industries”, which bizarrely, in the official government definition, does not include engineering. 

The advantages of freelance work are flexibility, close working with clients to really understand their needs and the ability to focus on projects that really interest you.

The disadvantages are of course the financial pressure to take any work that comes along and the hassle of having to do all the other roles as well such as winning work, negotiating contracts and doing the boring admin. 

Taxi-meter networks

As I mentioned at the top of the blog, I was approach by three different expert networks wanting to recruit me to provide advice to a client for a major stormwater project. Their business model was to provide advice against the clock in 15 minute chunks with a minimum chunk of 1 hour. This is why I refer to them as taxi-meter networks. 

I don’t think that it is a good model. The end client is watching the clock wondering if they are getting good value for money and the consultant is watching the clock checking how much to invoice. Neither are therefore fully engaged in understanding the issues and what to do about them. When providing advice, I need to take the time to understand a client’s problems, to sleep on it, to give the client a call the next morning with some second thoughts, to have a sudden insight a few days later and send the client an email. I cannot be confident that my first response is completely correct, especially when I haven’t had time to really understand the project.

(There are other reasons why I declined the offers to work through these networks. These included that their Ts&Cs are very vague on liability and on intellectual property. So although they claimed to be large professional networks, their approach seemed very amateurish.)

AI such as ChatGPT

Everyone has heard about ChatGPT and similar large language model AI systems. But how could they replace consultants providing advice to clients?

I have a confession to make. One of the taxi meter networks that contacted me wanted proof that I had the knowledge necessary for me to support their end client. They therefore asked me to answer four initial questions that their client needed answers to. They would not pay for my time to do this. I didn’t know the answer to one of the questions and could only partially answer another and I was reluctant to spend unpaid time reading up on the topics. I therefore pasted the questions into ChatGPT, tidied up the grammar on the responses and sent them off.

A few days later I got a reply that my answers were brilliant, and having seen them the end client would love to speak with me the following Monday.

I then admitted what I had done and suggested that the network needed to review their business model and procedures.

I haven’t heard any more from them.

Conclusions

Providing consultancy advice to clients involves the three key steps shown in the graphic at the top of this blog:

1. Understanding their objectives and goals
2. Discussing the issues preventing them achieving those and digging into their underlying causes
3. Providing expert advice to help them resolve the issues.

Without the first two steps, the advice in the third is unlikely to be helpful. So the first two are the most important and all consultancy business models need to be structured to deliver these.

If your consultancy model is to provide pat answers to clients’ questions without digging into their objectives and issues, then you could literally be replaced by a machine. And probably deserve to be.