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"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true. You'll never know how easy/hard it is to find clients as a consulting company as big and probably a
by edwinnathaniel 15y ago
"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true.
You'll never know how easy/hard it is to find clients as a consulting company as big and probably as expensive as Pivotal. Maybe at some point the business model isn't as good as it could have been. Maybe potential clients balked down. Maybe the sales cycle is long enough that the profit has become marginal.
- drumdance 15y agoConsulting is also a real PITA management-wise. You have to map billable hours to available resources, sometimes even unavailable resources you haven't even hired yet. That's really hard to scale.
- edwinnathaniel 15y agoIndeed. Managing human-resources to make every single second profitable is hard. Not to mention the varieties of technology out there: some people use Erlang, Haskell, Node.JS, bunch of NoSQL, Python while Pivotal is more known as the Agile, Ruby, and probably Java to some extend. Also, we don't know what the startup owners/CEOs want; they could come to Pivotal with unreasonable requirement: cloud-scale or money back guarantee?
- tptacek 15y agoIt's easy to make every second of the business profitable without making every second of every consultant's day profitable. Most well-run consultancies have target utilization rates way south of 100%.
- Timothee 15y ago"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true. Absolutely! I wanted to add a disclaimer that I have no idea how it really goes on the inside, but my bus stop was coming up. :) My comment in this thread are all from the perception I have of EMC and Pivotal Labs.