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| Here's
to the Winners |
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Thanks
to everyone who entered our book giveaway last month
for Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants.
The response was overwhelming. We’ve sent the
book to the first ten people who responded. And the
winners are…
- Denise Deverelle Crown
- Daniel Hays, Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath
- Ian Thornton-Bryar, Bryar & Gaskell Limited
- Anu Venkitaraman, Re|Think Marketing, LLC
- Arnab Banerjee, A.T. Kearney
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- Matt Taylor, IBM Business Consulting Services
- KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz, Organizations That
Work
- Jonathan Donald, Intex Consulting Partners,
Inc.
- Stephen H. Vesce, Hershey Management Group,
LLC
- Woody Armstrong
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Speaking of giveaways, you're invited to register for
my Guerrilla
Consulting Webinar on May 12. I'll be discussing why
traditional marketing strategies are failing miserably
in today’s market and how to use guerrilla marketing
tactics to create an advantage.
Enjoy
this month’s issue and, if you have any comments,
please send me an email.
Mike
McLaughlin
Editor, Management Consulting News
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| Interview:
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
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How
to Make Your Competition Irrelevant
Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne,
coauthors of the bestselling book, Blue
Ocean Strategy, believe that organizations
engaging in the traditional slugfest with their competitors
have created nothing but a bloody “red ocean”
of rivals vying for a shrinking profit pool.
Kim
and Mauborgne contend that leading companies can bypass
that losing battle by creating “blue oceans”
of uncontested market space. Instead of battling existing
competitors in the red ocean of limited growth, the
authors offer six principles and an analytical framework
for successfully reconstructing market boundaries and
sailing on the blue ocean.
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| Are You Bullish on Consulting? |
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You
should be—says the 3rd Annual Survey of Independent
Consultants conducted by M2 Consulting, Inc.,
a US provider of independent business consultants.
M2 asked over 700 independent consultants to assess
the state of their businesses and the market for independent
consultants.
The
survey respondents were optimistic, with more than half
reporting higher revenue in 2004 than in 2003. The top
trend that consultants noted for 2004 was that clients
are more eager to start new projects, dropping the top
trend of 2003, clients taking a more cautious approach
to launching new initiatives, to second place.
The
increasing demand for consultants didn’t result
in higher billing rates for the survey respondents.
In spite of the rise in demand, almost half of the respondents
haven’t changed their billing rates in three years,
and 27% of the respondents actually reduced rates over
the same period. With higher demand and flat, or decreasing
rates, these consultants are either growing their businesses
through hiring new consultants, or working harder to
achieve revenue gains.
The
study also shed some light on the issue of project pricing,
noting that creative pricing trends, such as value-based
billing, are less favored by clients than traditional
billing strategies.
Source:
www.msquared.com.
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| The BPO Beat Goes On |
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Gartner
Consulting says that finance and accounting business
process outsourcing (BPO) is critical for CFOs to increase
their efficiency.
According
to Gartner, CFOs should implement finance and accounting
BPO to allow them to spend more time on strategic activities.
Gartner recommends that CFOs delegate transactional
tasks to a third party whose core business is finance
and accounting BPO.
Gartner’s
analysts believe that outsourcing activities such as
accounts payables, expense management, and payroll frees
up a CFO's time to focus on planning, activity-based
costing, process metrics, and decision support at the
CEO and business-unit leadership levels.
For
the record, Gartner defines BPO “as the delegation
of one or more IT-intensive business processes to an
external provider that, in turn, owns, administers and
manages the processes based on defined and measurable
performance metrics.”
"To
achieve true shareholder value, the efficient CFO has
to focus on decision support, a strategic activity that
makes it possible to focus on analyzing and interpreting
financial data, not necessarily producing it,"
says Gartner VP, Michael Montonen.
Montonen
goes on to say that outsourcing capabilities to support
processes for financial transactions and management
have matured substantially, with financial data often
generated and reported now by service providers. In
the BPO world, finance and accounting BPO can also be
used to facilitate Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance.
Hey,
can BPO wash my car too?
Not
to pick on Gartner, but with so much BPO hype, consultants
should take the opportunity to talk to CFOs about the
realities and the trade-offs of BPO. A CFO may dump
transactional processing responsibilities, but that
gets replaced with complex contract and program management.
If you have any doubts about the problems with data
security, just read the news of the latest hacker hitting
an unwitting computer system and running off with company
information.
And
don’t forget that BPO could land the CFO and CEO
behind bars. If your client outsources SOX compliance,
the client—not the BPO vendor—is responsible
for that compliance.
There
are many appropriate opportunities for BPO of financial
processes. After all, payroll has been outsourced for
decades. But make sure you give your clients the whole
story before they sign on the dotted line.
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| Prospects for Telecom Consultants |
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In
March 2005, the consulting firm, Oxford Global Resources,
asked telecommunications consulting clients to forecast
their upcoming demand for consulting services.
For
the second quarter of 2005, most telecom clients (60%)
expect consultant hiring to remain the same, while 15%
expect an increase. Not many clients (10%) believe they’ll
pull back spending on consultants. The rest (15%) aren’t
sure how they’ll use consultants this quarter.
For
the third quarter of 2005 through the first quarter
of 2006, telecom clients’ plans for hiring consultants
are optimistic, but mixed. More than 40% of respondents
forecast an increase in consultant hiring, but others
are less certain—30% are planning no increase
in hiring, and 27% aren’t sure.
The
telecommunications consulting business appears strong,
despite some potential softness in the months ahead.
If you hope to win work from the clients who are planning
to increase their use of consultants, you may find an
even more competitive environment than today. There
will be more consultants chasing fewer buyers, especially
if so many telecom clients hold spending on consulting
flat or rein it in.
To
head off a potential problem, it is a great time to
focus on the health of your current client relationships
and review the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Source:
www.oxfordcorp.com.
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| The Looming Talent Crisis |
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Recently, Deloitte
Consulting researchers asked more than 120 human
resource executives in the US about the important workforce
issues they face now, and in the future. Almost 75%
of HR executives are concerned that the inadequate skills
of incoming workers will negatively affect their company’s
profits. Surprisingly, only half of the companies surveyed
have defined the critical skills needed for future growth.
Making matters worse, almost half of the HR executives
said retention of key talent is the issue that will
most impact business performance. With a pending flood
of retirees looming, many organizations are in a real
talent bind—how to keep business performance strong
in an era of skill shortages and employee turnover.
For HR and Organization Design consultants, clients
will need you now more than ever. Consulting firms offering
comprehensive approaches to employee recruitment, skill
development, and retention should see a pick up in demand
that could last for several years. While this issue
may not rival the frenzy created by reengineering, Y2K,
or Sarbanes-Oxley, talent management, at all levels
of organizations, will be a boardroom topic and a market
opportunity.
If
you want an additional perspective on the talent crunch,
take a look at our September 2002 interview
with futurist Roger E. Herman, author of Impending
Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People.
Back then, Herman was talking about statistics projecting
that the US could have ten million more jobs than people
by 2010.
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| Upcoming
Events |
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Guerrilla
Marketing for Consultants: Join Michael
McLaughlin for the no-cost Webinar, “Guerrilla
Marketing for Consultants” to be held on May 12,
2005.
Wellesley
Hills Group Seminar: “How to Sell
Professional Services: The Rainmaker Program”
will be offered on both May 12-13, 2005, and September
22-23, 2005, in Boston.
Institute
of Management Consultants (IMC USA) 2005 Conference:
“New Frontiers of Consulting: Trends, Tools and
Alliances to Take Your Business to New Frontiers!”
will be May 21-24, 2005, in Kansas City, Missouri.
Top-Consultant
Seminar: “The Art of Selling Consulting
Services” will be June 17, 2005, in London.
National
Speakers Association 2005 Convention: “Dare
to Enjoy the Journey” is set for July 9-12, 2005,
in Atlanta, Georgia.
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| Coming
Attractions |
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Join us next month when our guest will be bestselling
author and consultant, Marcus Buckingham, whose books
include First, Break All the Rules
and Now, Discover Your Strengths.
In his latest book, The One Thing You Need
to Know, he challenges the conventional
wisdom of leadership, management, and individual success.
Find out why Tom Peters said, “Buckingham performs
the most magical of acts: He speaks with uncommon sense,
yet reaches profoundly uncommon conclusions.”
Look for the next issue of Management Consulting
News on June 7, 2005.
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Most
companies are too numbers-driven. They do lots
of comparative industry analysis—especially
on the competition—but that blinds them
to the big picture.
