Volume Consultants vs. Quality Consultants

I came across a great post today that relates nicely to the way clients base their decisions on who to hire for a piece of work.

As context, often Work Industries competes with larger web consultants. Those larger consultants often have large portfolios of work and big, brand-name clients. They have in-house teams dedicated to specific compentencies: design, development, content, information architecture, public relations, marketing. Some of them (the consultancies and their teams) do great work and some of them do mediocre work. Overall the quality of output you get as a client depends on who you work with within the consultancy. The people make the difference.

But clients only rarely get to check out the people they’ll be working with in the sales process. Instead, they get the sales team, variously called ‘client management,’ ‘engagement services’ or some other obscured word for sales. Their job is to sell consulting services. If you’re in doubt about whether you’re in touch with a sales person, ask them how their compensation package works. What are the incentives?

So Work Industries often has to communicate to clients and prospective clients why they should choose us, which is really me, James Sherrett, a generalist who has been involved in all the stages of web projects but isn’t an expert on any of them, instead of someone larger, with built-in specialties. I usually tell them that by engaging me and the Work Industries team they are tapping into a flexible, scalable network of experts; people I’ve worked with before who I can draw on and into the team for specific pieces of work and periods of time. This tends to work better as an example. So here goes…

Work Industries recently submitted an Expression of Interest (EOI) to the North Shore Chamber of Commerce to build the North Vancouver Tourism website. In the EOI I put together a crack project team, incorporating the right mix of skills - design, development, marketing, project management - and experience in the local tourism industry - building and managing websites like Vancouver.com and Whistler-Blackcomb.com. A larger consultant would have difficulty proposing the same team because they are beholded to proposing their own team. Work Industries custom-tailors project teams to projects. When a client engages Work Industries they are able to tap into a larger network of skilled, experienced experts that can flex and be adjusted to fit their project.

At least, that’s how I describe it. Jürgen Ahting, who writes for the blog E-Valuation of Information Systems describes it the following way in his post Volume Consultancies vs. Quality Consultants:

Another case where there are significantly different business models is with consulting services.

• A Volume Consultancy has a lot of employees to pay. Hence it would rather like to increase the scope of a consulting gig and thus volume per month than decrease it. Muddying the waters by unearthing more problems than solved is a time proven method here. Additionally the larger the number of employees the more difficult it is to keep the average quality above the market average.
• A Quality Consultant is either alone or has a few partners. She either can not or has not interest in increasing her capacity. Hence she simply does not want more work but follow-on assignments and higher quality work. She is comparable to an employee who doesn’t want more work but further employment and possibly a promotion.

Obviously business model of the Volume Consultancy depends more on the quantity of work. While the Quality Consultant can only live on the quality of her work. A manager who asks “Why should I hire one consultant to select and supervise another consultant?” has certainly not yet realized this crucial difference in the business model of different consultancies. But it certainly makes no sense to hire one Volume Consultancy to select another one.

So now I have another way of describing what we do. In Ahting’s binary, Work Industries is a Quality Consultant. We work with a focused group of clients delivering excellent value and building long-term successes. I wonder, is there a seal of approval? Inside you’ll find one (1) Quality Consultant.