An independent or small-scale consultant faces many challenges an aggregated Big Box consultancy doesn’t need to deal with, but has advantages as well.
There are two large Orders (in the biological sense) of consulting clients: Those who want to be instructed to do what they’ve already decided to do, and those who want to be told that something they’re already doing is wrong. In both cases, whether small or large-scale consultants are called in, the point is in the telling by a vetted, credentialled outsider—not the doing. Clients typically manage to do things just fine, all by themselves, which is how they come to have the money to hire consultants in the first place. But like normal poor people like you and me, corporations like to redecorate once in a while, and need a second opinion to set their mind straight on the task. Somebody who’s known to be following the latest fashion, or done the neighbors’ place up recently.
Otherwise, they’re classic go-getter do-it-themselves kind of entities.
Rarely a client will pay a consultancy to tell them what they’re doing wrong, and also to implement the thing they’ve already decided to change. Until I see a good counterexample, I have to say that’s a dangerously overextended relationship. It’s certainly the source of most of the horror stories I’ve ever heard. One consultancy, one problem.
Smaller consultancies seem to have an edge on the second front. The larger mob-consultants carry sample-books full of popular fashions from site to site; the smaller operators are somehow more often the fixers, the inspectors, the “Now see, there’s your problem right there” folks with their pants riding threateningly low as they shine a flashlight on a pool beneath the clients’ sinks. They—we—do our work diligently, often throw in a bit of extra advice, write out an estimate, offer a little discount if we think we can play it off for some extended relationship points later on, rip it off the clipboard and hand it over. Often as not, the client ends up phoning the mob with the big splashy ad in the Yellow Pages to do the actual work.
But that’s OK. Tricky having the two jobs done by the same folks.
The economics of the consulting relationship is an interplay between risk amelioration, hush money and real cost. Real cost is driven by the size of the consulting firm, not the clients’ needs: more mouths to feed, more black suits to press, and of course prices will skyrocket. By “risk amelioration” I mean the consultants’ risk: if you look at the actuarial numbers, a small consultancy risks either a shorter relationship, or being acquired outright by the client.
But the strangest cost of all is what I think of as the hush money. Nondisclosure. A consultant’s business is built by reputation, by evident success, by testimonial, and by proof of insight and tacit and explicit domain knowledge. Often as not, an NDA obscures most of those from other potential customers. A small consultancy’s prices must reflect the loss of reputation and other social capital caused by an NDA. In some cases, the client themselves cannot be mentioned by name; in other cases, the fact of the relationship is even hidden by contractual silence.
Free speech is a right. Silence costs.