Over the next 10 years, the world will change as much as it has in the last twenty. If you buy into that statement, then 2020, will make 2010 look like 1990. As a business owner, that rate of change is something I probably can’t fathom too well. I’m focusing on my day-to-day operations (or maybe quarter-to-quarter in a public company). I’m dealing with annual budgets, reviews, sales quotas, economic issues, and so on. On top of all that, I probably don’t consider myself a technology company so I happily run my systems, make sure I’m compliant where I need to be, stay out of the newspaper RSS feeds with data security issues, and hope my BC/DR plans are up-to-date (they’re not). I didn’t see the end of my business coming — until it was too late.

The world of consulting is not immune from this rapid change, if anything, depending upon the type of consulting that you do, you may actually be in a worse position. Not recognizing that you passed the “peak oil” of whatever your specialty happens to be, going from project to project looking for better ways to extract crude from the shale, without realizing that there is an abundance of productive new fields opening up all over – has you looking at the wrong side of the profit margin slope and stuck on projects that don’t position you for the next “big thing”.

I’ve been a consultant for 15 years now after spending about 6 years in industry. I’ve worked for boutique firms, “Tier 1″ firms (Andersen represent!), and “firms” in the middle. One of the things most of them have in common is their general operating model. You know, how they make money, how they sell, and their general outlook on the marketspace. These are some of things that are going to need to change over the next several years in order to move ahead.

As part of this series, the main idea I want to explore is reversing the order of precedence in a consulting company (or any organization, company, department, etc.) where a marketable talent should be the basic unit-of-measure by which that organization is judged. Where the success of whatever organization that talent is attached to is dependent upon nurturing, marketing, and harvesting that talent. Make the talent be the entry point to new projects, not the sales staff. To this end, we’ll be:

1. Building a model that operates more like a sports team rather than like a 1950s, top-down, “Tin Men”, sell-or-die mentality;
2. Avoiding a fall into a “Jennifer Government” type relationship with your employer. Consultants are responsible for their own marketability, thus their voice needs to be their voice. If done right, the voice of the consultant can be of simultaneous benefit to the “firm” too.
3. Focusing the message, generalizing less – but at the same time not becoming hyperfocused.

The selling model will be first. What we will need to breakdown is the notion that because sales is a low-supply, high-demand scarce resource, it is more valuable than the plentiful resources used on the delivery side of the house. While I’m not one to try and turn basic tenets of simple economics on its head, I am one to flip the problem around a bit so that I can show that maybe the types of people we generally think we need to fill the sales and delivery roles, are not the ones we actually do need.

My goal is not necessarily to marginalize the sales effort or the people that perform it, as I don’t think they should be an order taker any more than I want to be considered an order filler. Rather my goal is actually to make people that focus on doing delivery well, worth a dozen dimes instead of being a dime a dozen.