Why hire a local consultant?
Posted by Robert Merrill on July 25, 2009 under uFunctional Values | 
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When you’re on your own like me, you take what comes in terms of client engagements. There’s that daughter in college, after all. And I can’t seem to shake this food addiction.
But my compass consistently points towards local, part-time, long-term engagements. That’s what I sow and cultivate.
I have a value-proposition reason, a forward-looking reason, and a personal reason.
- Change for the better grows best in a steady, soaking rain of consulting, not a cloudburst.
- Rapidly rising travel costs and finally-effective telepresence technology are about to transform the economics of consulting.
- I don’t like to travel.
The Information Age has already transformed consulting. You no longer have to fly in the expert knowledge. You can webinar it, podcast it, blog it, feed it, Tweet it, Kindle it, or still use old-school ink-on-dead-trees. Information isn’t the problem, it’s application. In the area I know best, software development, the gap between “best practice” (if there is such a thing) and current, local practice is typically huge. Good-enough information that soaks in steadily, beats a downpour of best-of-breed information that runs off.
In the traditional “Airborne Consulting” model, the high-powered experts parachute in. Read more of this article »