How consultants work

Years ago while I was collating all the deliverables after finishing a business planning project for a new client in the financial sector, the director looked at his laptop said, "You know you guys are?"

I was not looking for his completing, rather naturally, I supplemented "Documents movers?"

"Company doctors." He replied.

Then I thanked him for the genuine feedback. On the way back I immediately shared his write-up with with our project collaborators. "I thought he was gonna say virtual assistants." One of the teammates joined the discussion. Another junior consultant nodded. I kinda agree to certain extent given the nature of our segregation of duty by then.

It does takes different pitching methods for clients in various industries. Some prefer extensive industry experiences over generalists; some prefer general practices for cross departmental assessments and synergy; the half of the rest do not know how to use consultants, and the other half, want their consultants to review every single decision they made regardless of the nature of the work. The very basic deck presenting to the stakeholders would be: given the budget and quality required, what would be an optimal result and what are the possibilities for continued improvements?

Let's take a step back here. Management are often mistaken that consulting is like a pre-sales job; while to certain degree I agree. We have to look at what the demands and pain points are. Is there any problems need to be assessed and resolved before approaching customers on hardware, software, integrated products or solutions, quite often that is the case. Nowadays executives seem to be overly obsessed with computing power, the danger of the tilt would be lots of communication glitches happening across the enterprise. Generative AI is here to bring effectiveness to our daily interactions with the unknown topics by built-in aggregation of all sorts, but never a replacement of intervention and innovation.

The business planning project at that time was to refinance a portion of its business expansion in the western part of China, where its provincial headquarter was based. As a listed Co., there are certain regulatory disclosures that operations directors have to follow compliance guidelines accordingly, while the driven factor was to penetrate the underserved market with the blessing of local policy releases for new business models and capital inflows.

As for standard market terms like total addressable market or serviceable addressable market, arguably there were quite a few ways to assess using different viewpoints or scoping. Benefits of having the listed Co. guiding towards financial yields? It provided possibilities to reconcile the differences between the top down and bottom up approach when management team did not have clear visibility on end touch points towards consumers, making the future business results more reliable.

To start off, we did get ourselves familiarised with the local licensing requirements, through desktop research, subject matter experts interviews and voices of directors within the company. By the time we agreed on the expected growth projection and regulatory specifications, the value proposition page already stood out and well communicated across the management team, for both listed Co., and the to be licensed entity.

Since the selling point of the new business placed much focuses on innovative solutions and bridging gaps amongst key stakeholders, the majority of the undertaken was to articulate the model by explaining business flows, identifying participatory parties amongst the supply chain nodes and downstream consumers; and for the to-be licensed entity, a high level process flow necessitated the foundation from administrative perspective, which was often overlooked by default settings.

During the conclusion session for future business development direction, a credit facility concept was one of the major hurdles on the table for stakeholders to contemplate. We can certainly see spreads already across different business entities/units, yet for the new business to thrive, it was the list Co. that did the heavy lifting to nail down the details. We benchmarked similar initiatives to facilitate intermediary services and trade financing related discussions. Feedback was well received and implementation was largely localised by teams performing the ground work.

Usually when we are given instructions of populating templates for clients' internal communication, making assumptions is not a major concern. However, if such exercises are to be channeled for mass comm, we will have to take a bit of time for clients' education on getting comfortable with certain disclaimers.

A typical team of four is necessary for a business planning project, usually lasts half a year with possible revisions depending on the follow-up implementation schedules.  An analyst/researcher, works on desktop materials and onsite interviews; a financial modeller, crunching numbers for forecasting and P/L specifics; and a project manager plus a team assistant responsible for quality assurance of deliverables and clients communication. Sometimes we bring in subject matter experts for industry and regulatory guidelines.

At the very beginning of my consulting career, one of the most illuminating message my first director ever briefed me about is that when you start with nothing, your progression is simply 'cheaper, faster then better.'