What is a consultant anyway? is it someone who comes to study a problem and remains to become a part of it?
This is the opening line of the book Million Dollar Consulting, by Allan Weiss which I reviewed here. Consulting covers a wide range of services from doing the work, which I call resourcing, to advice and at the top end professional expertise.
Allan’s excellent analogy of this that I like so much is the Ski Instructor. We all know the adage of teach a man to fish and it’s also useful to distinguish doing the job vs teaching and empowering. But there are not many professional fishing teachers and many amateurs out there, so I will leave the fishing teacher as the analogy of an amateur consultant who at best shows and trains their subjects and leaves having had a once off engagement.
So back to the Ski Instructor analogy. The Ski instructor is an expert and a professional. You pay for a short block of their time but ultimately you are paying for an outcome, to ski better after each engagement. Like with any good professional engagement, there should be measurable value at the end of a session. There would be something specific that you are able to achieve after your half day with them and they are able to improve your technique at every session.
The other comparison here that is necessary, is that your instructor can’t ski down the mountain for you. They need to coach and check your technique so that you can do it for yourself. This is the goal of professional expert level advice of a consultant. And expert advice normally means that there is room for a long running engagement providing the client wants to keep improving their skills or maturity.
So yes, if you come to study a problem, and remain to be part of it, you may be down the food chain in terms of professional consulting as defined by Allan and many others. You also can’t scale your own consulting advice well because you will be constrained by doing the work for your client instead of teaching them to ski for a few well paid hours and then letting them enjoy their skills for the rest of their holiday till they come back next year!
My focus is to take this advice too, and I’m looking to empower and advise Technology Business Owners on how to setup and fix their Sales and Marketing Processes and find the right people to run their sales operations.
Drop me an email on craig@b2bs.co.za if you would like to know more.