List of Productized Consulting Services
christophengelhardt.com
christophengelhardt.com
1) consultants are traditionally really expensive (as a 23-year-old, non-technical little shit, my firm would bill the client at $200+/hr), so as a result we could only be there for a few months. We'd come in, make things better, and then were gone. So within a few months afterwards, things went back to the way they were (aka a disaster). Productized consulting services, on the other hand, are generally cheap enough to be perpetual.
2) Businesses generally suck at executing the consultant's recommendations. We'd provide really rich data and detailed action plans to clients -- and this powerpoint printout they paid a ton for would just sit on the desk or on the shelf. It was frustrating. But other client priorities would get in the way. At best, someone would half-ass our plan.
3) Consulting is a machine; 80% of what you do is the same for all clients. We're taught to search internal databases for past work and frameworks before doing anything from scratch. For that reason, it actually lends itself really well to automation.
This is a crucial insight because information asymmetry forces you to pay a premium for that 80% that can be systematized or worse, pay a low price for that 80% and end up getting the lowest quality work on the 20% that needs deep expertise.
This leads to adverse selection or overpaying...
I read somewhere about travel agencies and how the low end work like booking hotels and cars was replaced by websites, but the more complicated travel services like planning a vacation are still sourced to travel agents.
Hopefully every industry would move towards an environment where you can pay a premium for the part that needs expertise and pay fair market value for the part that can be systematized or reliably sourced for less.
That's a great insight. I hope that's where things are moving!
Scale will win since consulting (and the larger professional services market) has both huge network effects and huge economies of scale/scope; so I'd look for the consolidation trend to continue and the "big 3" strategy shops to either merge with or form a close alliance with the remaining "big 4" professional services firms (PwC and Deloitte have seen such a boost in consulting revenue from the network effects with their tax and audit practices that ENY and KPMG will be expanding consulting soon as well). There's too much overlap in the overhead functions (travel management, billing, finance, HR, training, branding, etc.) of any professional services business.
1) This is true; consultants are very expensive. But the $200/hr you're paying for the 23-year-old little shit also has to cover all the hours the partner with 30 years of relevant, awesome experience he can't bill against because he's too busy fixing the little shit's messes all day. It's a leveraged model; the guys at the top have the relationships and experience, while the guys at the bottom have energy and ambition that impress the client.
But on the flip side, I've also had enough clients burned by productized consulting services that they avoid them in general. Quality control is hard, even in the consulting world, which is why brand perception and relationships matter so damn much.
2) Relationships are everything. Management consultants are valuable exactly because they can help you solve #2 above: we make recommendations as to what you should do, then we sell you the follow-on work to actually do it for you (or at least train up a team inside your company on it). With "productized consulting as a service" you don't have the relationships, and you don't have a pipeline to win those relationships.
3) Maybe in strategy consulting (which is disappearing now anyway because it was always of dubious value); but in the management consulting world, 80% of what you have to do is understand what the client wants to accomplish. Once you have done that, you can go and take a deck that you already have, change a few things, and you're good to go, but getting there is the hard part. I can't tell you how many projects I've sold where what we eventually sold the client was something totally different than what they asked for initially.
But this last paragraph is why consulting will never go away (because it's what a consultant will tell a VP with budget after he's built up a rapport):
Ultimately, "productized consulting services" are simply shared services for small businesses. They come with all the ups and downs associated with shared services, and as such are not appropriate for every company. Might I suggest a short consulting engagement to identify areas where a shared services cost reduction plan might be effective?
That said, all that relationship was sorta BS stuff the client was paying for, but didn't really deliver value, ya know?
To your point #1, fair, although partners are really just glorified sales guys selling a really expensive service. And the leveraged model you describe, while true, perfectly illustrates the massive inefficiencies in consulting.
To #3, ehh, all the clients kind of want the same thing. More money! More customers! New products with big new markets! I don't agree that they're all a unique, delicate flowers that all want vastly different things. I think this illustrates what you're getting at though, so we may have to agree to disagree: https://blogs.perficient.com/spark/files/2011/07/treecomicbi...
I don't think that clients are delicate unique flowers, but they do often have a myopic view of the problem, so what they ask you for may not actually solve the problem they really have.
Consultants at VERY large companies actually serve a huge communication function: because we get shuffled around from one part of the company to another, we're really good at connecting work that was done in one part of the company with another part of the company. Basically, because our clients don't know how to communicate with each other and form relationships, they hire us to do it for them. That's largely the niche that I see consulting settling into, and it's really not a bad division of labor.
These productized things look like they actually _do_ something, which puts them in a completely different product space.
(source: worked for one of the big six, back when there were six of them)
Also, depending on the company, most consultants can be paid for out of CapEx (depending how you word the contract), but you'd have a hard time convincing accounting that a SaaS service billed periodically is anything but OpEx...
A former colleague once quipped, "no one ever got fired for hiring McKinsey."
That said, making decisions is EXACTLY where productized consulting services get interesting. I have a productized workplace happiness service (https://worknice.co), and a massive part of the value is that the AI has the authority to make decisions for the client (granted, they're not big strategy decisions; it's more like whether we should bring puppies to the office or have a wine & cheese night).
Tl;dr no one at a company likes making decisions because they don't want to be blamed if it goes bad. But AI built into productized consulting services can potentially make decisions, taking it off the humans' plate, and that's capturing the same value consultants provide.
Also, you might want to fix this on your pricing page: "But cancellations within the first 60 days and receive a full refund for the remaining time."
Doesn't read properly.
Tips if you're going to do this:
1) Get a IP-protected MSA to begin with.
You'll need to pay a lawyer a lot of money to get it right because most MSAs are work for hires. Get one that says you own all the IP and can re-use it, and your clients get a perpetual, non-exclusive license - otherwise you'll build a product and then realize later that clients from two years ago actually own the core IP of your multi-million dollar product. Makes due diligence (either fundraising or acquisition) stressful.
2) Build in time to work on product.
If you're selling yourself at 40hr/week, there's precious little time to effectively funnel your work back into a cohesive product. Take a page from Thoughtbot and work 4 day weeks, have that 5th day be refactor and integration into your main product day.
3) Test, test, test
Your consulting clients are a perfect test bed for you to lean-startup your way into your product. Experiment, experiment, experiment. You'll get great feedback and iterate your way to something that profitably, already, has product-market fit.
4) Have fun!
Productized consulting is much more painful than getting a check for a few million dollars and building a team. You grow organically, incrementally, and it can be tough to realize "we're n-months away from MVP but at 1 day a week that's 6 years!". It does require a certain sense of "it'll get there" but it also really encourages you to cut scope ruthlessly, because given the little bit you can work on it, you'll never get there.
As a side note, microconf has some exceptionally high-quality speakers if you're thinking of bootstrapping. Healthy dose of realism from a lot of the speakers.
Some vids are up on Vimeo for MicroConf talks (https://vimeo.com/user12790628/videos)
ugh, vom. can we kill this already? my friends mom has forgotten more about antenna design than I will ever know. my grandmother was doing computer based typesetting since it was possible and remembers when LaTeX was new.
I have worked with other moms who suck at details but do incredible brand strategy, etc.
Seriously, if you're not running a study and you need to typologize to _any_ degree, you should at least pick up e.g. MBTI because it is so much further down the road than "moms".
It's like any time someone mentions something that is statistically the most common scenario people can't wait to come out of the woodwork to exclaim how they had a different experience, so clearly the OP is wrong/mean-spirited/sexist/racist/ageist/whatever rather than just acknowledging they had a different experience.
The idea that older people, on average, are less comfortable with technology is not some meme that needs to die. It's a statistical reality.
> Think a drunk UX expert is the worst challenge you can put your website through? You’re wrong. There’s one thing worse than that: A less sophisticated user. Here you can hire a less sophisticated user to torture your website.
Not to mention the fact that the website in question is literally theuserismymom.com.
> Even better than a drunk UX expert: an ordinary user. Developer Scotty Allen makes available his actual mom, a high school tutor, to give you her take on what's wrong with your web site.
The difference for me between theuserismymom.com and the "moms are worse than drunk people" spin is respect. Scotty is promoting his mom as a savvy person. Whereas the, "so simple even your mom could use it" stereotype is typically lazy, sexist bullshit.
Seriously, pick half a dozens groups you are a part of and write down a negative stereotype for each one. How do you feel about those.
When I was growing up, "nerd" was the stick used to beat me a lot. Were the things said about nerds statistically true? Often, yes. Were they true about me? Some yes, some no. Did the stereotyping help me in any way? Not really. Did it harm me? Definitely.
How would you feel about The User is My Latino Neighbor, where instead of the user being Scotty's mom who happens to be computer-illiterate and stereotypically into quilting, it's his Latino neighbor who happens to be computer-illiterate and stereotypically working as a gardener?
I don't even mean to pick on the site, just the defense of stereotypes that you're making.
A lot of pages have the share buttons on top of text almost in the middle of the page.
I mean something more novel than "traditional" I/P/SaaS ala AWS or any old API.
His name is Charlie, you interact with him like you would any other consultant via email or Slack, and he's focused on executing culture initiatives that make people happier @ work.
The old "Here's a list of products/things with a 'catchy' headline to incentivize linkbacks and boost my search engine ranking for the words in said 'catchy' headline" trick.
But the contents of the article are kind of empty. And as codeulike said, at least one of the entries is satire. The quality is questionable at best.
Or maybe I haven't had my morning coffee yet and I'm overlooking a crucial detail. Please fill me in if that's what's happening.
I think we can also probably point it out here as relevant discussion to the linked content. That's what might give HN a stay of execution on being ALL buzzfeed.
In all seriousness: The title was stolen from (IIRC) Michael Buckbee of ExpeditedSSL (great guy) and I consider it a bit tongue-in-cheek - but hey, that doesn't work on the internet apparently.