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Au contraire! I loved the relationship aspect of the business. Drinks with the client? Sure! Big fancy dinners? Yes pls. Talking to them about their kids? Too e

Au contraire! I loved the relationship aspect of the business. Drinks with the client? Sure! Big fancy dinners? Yes pls. Talking to them about their kids? Too easy ;) That said, all that relationship was sorta BS stuff the client was paying for, but didn't really deliver value, ya know? To your point #1, fair, although partners are really just glorified sales guys selling a really expensive service. And the leveraged model you describe, while true, perfectly illustrates the massive inefficiencies in consulting. To #3, ehh, all the clients kind of want the same thing. More money! More customers! New products with big new markets! I don't agree that they're all a unique, delicate flowers that all want vastly different things. I think this illustrates what you're getting at though, so we may have to agree to disagree: https://blogs.perficient.com/spark/files/2011/07/treecomicbig.jpg https://blogs.perficient.com/spark/files/2011/07/treecomicbi...

exelius 11y ago
Yeah; you make a great point about delivering value. I do think the partners brought a lot to the table though: they had usually done these types of projects before, so you at least had someone to point you in the right direction. And if not them, I used to reach out to other people internally for expertise on specific issues. I don't think that clients are delicate unique flowers, but they do often have a myopic view of the problem, so what they ask you for may not actually solve the problem they really have. Consultants at VERY large companies actually serve a huge communication function: because we get shuffled around from one part of the company to another, we're really good at connecting work that was done in one part of the company with another part of the company. Basically, because our clients don't know how to communicate with each other and form relationships, they hire us to do it for them. That's largely the niche that I see consulting settling into, and it's really not a bad division of labor.

exelius 11y ago

Yeah; you make a great point about delivering value. I do think the partners brought a lot to the table though: they had usually done these types of projects before, so you at least had someone to point you in the right direction. And if not them, I used to reach out to other people internally for expertise on specific issues. I don't think that clients are delicate unique flowers, but they do often have a myopic view of the problem, so what they ask you for may not actually solve the problem they really have. Consultants at VERY large companies actually serve a huge communication function: because we get shuffled around from one part of the company to another, we're really good at connecting work that was done in one part of the company with another part of the company. Basically, because our clients don't know how to communicate with each other and form relationships, they hire us to do it for them. That's largely the niche that I see consulting settling into, and it's really not a bad division of labor.