Why hire a local consultant?

Posted by Robert Merrill on July 25, 2009 under uFunctional Values | Be the First to Comment

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. Their expertise and fresh perspective is real, and they can say things that no employee would dare. After an intense couple of weeks, they brief the brass and leave behind a report full of recommendations.

But then what?

The consultant’s report that gathers dust is a business cliché. As Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising point out in Fearless Change, the Big Jolt is only one of many tools in the change agent’s kit. Three weeks later, when you’re actually trying one of the recommendations or talking with a skeptic in the hall, it would be nice to have the expert back.

Consulting is about change, and change takes time. The best learning happens at teachable moments, and those follow the rhythm of the client’s business, not the consultant’s travel schedule. The local consultant can do a brown-bag seminar one week, spend a half-day coaching in the programming spaces the next, and sit in on the quarterly steering committee and deliver a half-page of timely observations the third, for a dozen billable hours. The knowledge, coaching, and recommendations are delivered just-in-time, at the point of both need and effectiveness. The economics work for the consultant because s/he has several such long-term, part-time local engagements, no travel expenses, and minimal travel time.

The Information Age has already transformed consulting, and I believe two new trends are about to transform it again. Call me a pessimist, but the time is coming when motor fuel is $10 a gallon (when you can get it) and air travel is once again for what used to be called the “jet set.” The economics of the local consultant will then be as compelling as the economics of offshoring are today.

An opposing trend will hit when economically viable tele-presence technology finally delivers on the promise of “just like being there.” I’m counting on the fact that there are only so many Big Dogs out there relative to the needs, and I’ll be able to scrape by as the insect that eats the bits that the little mammals who ate the dinosaur egg missed.

Beyond local consulting? Maybe my wife and I will have moved to a rural location where we can be content on the cheap, and I will still be able to earn a little by “teleconsulting” for an established client base, and maybe a little “rural-source” programming too.

And no travel, except when I really want to.