FAQ: Don't We Reveal Our Weakness by Hiring a Consultant?

No more than going to an accountant and saying, "I think we've already minimised our taxes as much as the law allows, but can we take another look together in case we missed something before?"

What does this sound to you? Weakness or wisdom? To me, it's wisdom.

Smart business owners hire consultants in three cases

When they feel their businesses have reached plateaus and have got stuck there longer than they can like
When they don't get the results that they desire and fail to reach their projected goals
When their operations are humming along nicely, but they think to themselves, "What about that next level. I wonder if we could do that?"

But the problem is that as a result of our past successes, we keep doing what has always worked for us. After all, those actions have caused our current level of success. And we're becoming better and better at those actions. And this leads to a limited level of success.

But new approaches are not brought into the mix. For instance, your salespeople may get better and better at cold calling, but never realise that with a different approach they can generate sales leads on autopilot, so they could sell more with higher margins without making one single cold call.

and this approach leads to two other phenomena...

The winner's curse happens when a company becomes so good at one thing that it wins big by using it. But when times change, the company just can't stop doing the things that made it so successful in the past. So it keeps repeating very efficiently a very ineffective approach. Think of the old IBM before Lou Gerstner...

"We sell mainframes and mainframes alone. The future is for mainframes."

Well, at one point it seemed. Then the world changed but IBM didn't. Luckily Lou Gerstner, a high-tech laymen, saved IBM from almost certain death.

The loser's curse is when a company fails at something so badly that it never wants to try it ever again even if there are other and better ways to do it that may result in a better results.

"We've tried advertising and it didn't work. Advertising doesn't work in our industry and it is a waste of time and money."

In the meantime the competition runs rings around the company through better advertising. Advertising works when it's done correctly. But it requires a huge amount of wisdom to say...

"We've tried advertising and it didn't work. Now we'd better call someone who knows how to properly write advertisements and run advertising campaigns, so we can learn how to do it properly."

Many IT companies are so insular and egotistical that they think their people know everything. But if you have just one competitor who's doing better than your company, then you don' know everything. But since you're already doing your best, you can expect help only from outside your company. But not by mimicking the competition but rather doing something that works in other industries.

Remember, we all need the independent, constructive insights of an unbiased, professional outsider that include an external frame of reference and new perspectives. Without that we end up improving at what we are currently doing, and often this is the very root of the problem that we are struggling with.

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