Category: business advice

Nine steps to choosing a consultant

A good consultant can help your business, but choosing the right one takes a bit of time and research

As much as we’d like to think we can do everything, the truth is we can’t. Even the biggest organisations don’t always have the right skills for a task that needs to be done. Enter the consultant.

Consultants have had bad press in recent years due to a combination of misunderstandings and misuse by big and small organisations. Ideally the consulting company will bring a fresh set of eyes and skills to projects that are not central to the daily running of your business. So how do we go about choosing a consultant?

1. Do they show up on time?

If a consultant is unreliable when they are chasing your work, what makes you think they will be any better when you hire them? If you’re hounding them for quotes and proposals then you have to wonder if they are really capable of doing the job. The time required to reply to an enquiry is a good way to whittle down the short list.

2. The internet is your friend

An experienced consultant will have a digital footprint with articles, white papers, blogs and a website. These are a good guide to the areas the consultant is an expert in. For consulting firms, those white papers can be powerful marketing tools to show off their expertise.

3. Read their public utterances

Reading into articles will dig up that consultant’s or their staff’s views on the market and different solutions. Comments on other peoples’ sites by the firm’s principles and employees is a great way how deep their expertise is and how they are regarded in the industry, this is also a good check that their values align with yours.

Something that catches out a lot of the self-proclaimed “social media experts” and marketing people is they often show their talk of trust and openness is little more than talk. If a consultant’s tweets, comments or Facebook wall posts are at odds with what they are telling you, then that should be a danger sign.

4. Check references

The consultant’s website will cite the clients they have worked for. Pick up the phone and talk to them, did the consultant really do this work? How effective were they?

If your consultant is an individual, part of that digital footprint is social media. Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook help in checking references as well.

LinkedIn in particular has a recommendations section that is handy quick reference checker. Don’t be shy to contact those people to check the veracity of their recommendations.

5. Understand their biases

We all have biases towards certain solutions. As the US industrial psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “When all you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail”. In technology this is particularly pronounced as consulting firms small and big have made a substantial investment on one platform or another. This isn’t a bad thing but keep their biases in mind and ask questions why they are proposing a certain course of action over alternatives.

6. Know their expertise

The whole point of hiring a consultant is to do a task you aren’t familiar with. If you ask the consultant to do something outside of their immediate area of expertise then your fees are paying them to train in a new area. Good for them but not for you.

7. Are they too agreeable?

If the consultant agrees with you all the time, then there’s little point in hiring them except for self-validation. A good consultant will be prepared to gently steer you away from silly decisions. On the other hand one who screams at you or puts your staff’s views down is best let go.

8. Trust your instincts

If something doesn’t work for you about a particular proposal, individual or organisation then look elsewhere. If you’re uncomfortable before signing an agreement, imagine how you’ll be when the invoices start arriving.

9. Price should not be the factor

Choosing a consultant purely on cost is risky. As I addressed in a recent blog on the crowdsourcing revolution there are real traps in going for the cheapest option. Invariably, the cheaper and inexperienced consultants will require more handholding and demands on your management time.

A good consultant is worth their weight in gold and finding one is a great help for your business. A little due diligence through the hiring process makes sure you get the person right for your needs.

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The coming global race for talent

Assuming immigration can grow the nation and fill skill shortages might be flawed.

Yuan Yandong is a Guanzhou factory worker who is saving to open a hotel management company. The New York Times recently followed him through a night on the Foxconn hard drive assembly lines.

The New York Times article asked “is an unlimited supply of Chinese workers waiting to migrate from the poorer provinces”? Joseph F. Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, points out this isn’t the case and China has a demographic hump far bigger than our own baby boomers.

Recognising their workforce problems, China is beginning to move up the value chain as we see with Yuan’s ambitions and the recent strikes in Guangdong factories challenges our assumptions that China will just be the world’s centre for cheap T-shirts and electronics. These changes in countries like China and India were among the topics discussed by the speakers and attendees at last weekend’s X Media Lab in Sydney, in fact X Media Lab itself relocated from Sydney to Shanghai a few years ago.

China’s aging population though is tomorrow’s problem; Japan has this problem today and Western Europe isn’t far behind which means it’s going to get far harder to find workers anywhere in the near future.

For Australian businesses, this means we can’t rely on importing young workers to overcome skill shortages as we have since World War II. The Big Australia idea of using immigration from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East to fix our workforce shortages ignores the competition we’re going to be in with other nations and regions facing much bigger challenges than ours.

In that competition, we don’t offer a great package; traditionally we’ve ignored all non-British qualifications and expected new immigrants to drive our taxis regardless of their skills. Unless we recognise the contributions professional arrivals bring, we’ll struggle to attract those workers.

As businesses, this means we need to be investing and training and making sure our own workplaces and the nation’s workforce are as productive as possible. The first step on an individual business level is to understand what is happening in your sector and how technology is changing it. Regardless of what your industry is, technology is changing your supply chain, customer and supplier behaviour and you need to be understand those changes and how you can profit from them.

Your competition is no longer down the street, it’s around the world and there are millions of young, hard working people like Yuan Yandong looking at your industry right now and thinking how they can do it better. How is your business going to deal with competition like that?

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The bedrock of trust

Trust is the foundation of business; without trust you have no business

An article in last weekend’s New York Times described the problems of AXA Rosenberg; a quantitative funds manager owned by the French financial giant AXA. The role of quant funds is to use sophisticated share trading programs that maximise returns to large investors.

Sometime in mid 2009 an error was discovered in the software AXA Rosenberg used to trade on behalf of its clients. They didn’t tell their clients until April 2010, at least ten months later.

As a consequence, AXA Rosenberg are finding clients are fleeing them. This illustrates just how important trust is in business.

You don’t have to be a big corporation to fess up to mistakes; we all make them and the sooner we admit them the easier it is to rebuild or keep the trust of those around us.

Trust is the bedrock of business, as AXA Rosenberg has found without trust you have no business.

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Choosing a content management system

There’s no such thing as a straight answer in technology, so you need to ask the right questions.

Last week I was asked by a business owner what is the best open source Content Management System for their website. Like many questions in technology, the answer was “it depends”.

Discussing open source and CMS in the one sentence is dangerous as you enter a world of religious geek wars were relationships and reputations are ruined over arguments concerning which product is best; think of the Mac versus PC war fought on a thousand fronts.

There’s also the danger of business owners misunderstanding what “open source” means; to many it means “free” because they don’t realise most of the implementation cost of technology is in the labour time of setting the systems up, not the initial purchase cost. Another risk lies in being blinded by the word “free” results in the business being locked into an inappropriate and ultimately more expensive solution.

This isn’t say the same thing can’t happen with a proprietary system either and often you’ll find being locked into one software vendor means you’re forced into expensive upgrades whenever it suits the vendor’s marketing plan.

Software licenses themselves are a source of risk, in the case of one major technology company I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half their customers are in breach of their user agreements due to some obscure, arcane and contradictory clause buried deep in the legalese. Not that the software company itself would know, being just as befuddled by their own license conditions as their long suffering customers.

Of the open source Content Management Systems, three options stand out from a crowded field; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Each one has it’s own benefits;

WordPress

One of the features that marks WordPress out as the leader in the blogging world is its CMS functions. For most websites and business, WordPress combines ease of use with a vast range of plugins, templates and features. Because of its popularity, there’s an army of consultants and webmasters who can get a professional, corporate looking WordPress based website up and running.

Joomla

Coming from website development roots, Joomla based sites don’t have a habit of looking like blogs that WordPress based sites sometimes do. Like WordPress, Joomla has a large base of developers and supporters and offers access to a wide range of extensions and templates. It offers more flexibility than WordPress if you want to customise your site’s look or feel.

Drupal

Drupal is the best if you want a technical solution. While it’s more expensive and time consuming to set up, it offers more flexibility and power for the business. Drupal is probably the best choice if you have a high traffic site with lots of often changing content.

The ultimate solution comes down to what is right for your business so it’s best to get an expert in to have a look at what your current needs and future plans are for your website. Both Smartcompany’s Aunty B and Craig Reardon have previously looked at how to find the right experts.

One thing to keep in mind when asking experts is that religious aspect; many websites designers are evangelists for one platform or another, so ask widely and remember to be firm about your budgets.

I’d be interested to hear from business owners what their experiences have been with the different platforms and in seeking advice, so please comment below on what you’ve found when shopping for a CMS. Religious geek flamewars on the topic are welcome as well.

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Every business is a people business

Our businesses are all about people regardless of what we sell.

Facebook’s problems with privacy shows how all business are about people. When managers and business owners forget, their businesses are heading for trouble.

When you’re running a web based service, it’s easy to forget those valuable views and clicks are people. Facebook’s current problems are a reminder that it’s people that sit at the core of every business; as staff, management and customers.

Facebook satisfies a basic urge;  our desire to share our experiences, like party and baby photos, with our friends and relatives. We don’t want to share them with some sleazy tooth whitening advertiser and certainly don’t want them shown to the entire world.

Each time Facebook makes a change that opens more data to the world, it loses a little more of their customer’s trust and while the recent Quit Facebook Day only saw a tiny fraction of users leave the service there will be a point where most people stop trusting Facebook and look elsewhere.

It’s a classic case of a technology business not understanding the people aspect of their market.

There’s a wonderful scene in the Mad Men TV series where Kodak have a problem selling their new rotating slide projector, the advertising people fix it by telling the human story behind slide shows, that the pictures are about memory and belonging.

In a funny way Facebook is the modern slide night.

Even if you aren’t in technology, it’s easy to forget the human side of the business. For instance the excellent plumber who walks his dirty boots through the customer’s house doesn’t get invited back.

Mix technology with business and things get worse. We get so tied up in the shiny bells and cute whistles of our toys that we forget our staff don’t know how to use those tools and our customers don’t understand them.

Big businesses are probably the worst for this; over the weekend I came across one of the big telcos using an artificial intelligence web bot to bounce sales enquires between their equally uninformative website, Facebook page and Twitter feed. They were actually messing around potential customers who were looking to spend money.

Those managers responsible in that organisation probably think the system is working fine. Because they’ve been dazzled by the tech they’ve forgotten the whole point is to engage their customers and get them to buy something, not get them stuck in a continuous loop whichadds little value to the business or the client.

Understanding the human aspect of the technology you deploy gives you the advantage over those big telcos and the hottest Silicon Valley stars. So how are you dealing with the human side of your business?

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The Outsourcing Revolution

Could your business be a victim of the outsourcing revolution?

Matt Barrie, CEO of freelancer.com proclaimed at The Insight Exchange’s Getting Results from Crowdsourcing that “outsourcing and crowdsourcing are revolutionising business”.

This is true and we need to keep in mind revolutions result in some eating brioche while others walk to the guillotine. The question for every business owner should be is their industry at risk when there’s a global supply of cheap labour at everyone’s fingertips.

Smart Company covered the pros and cons of crowdsourcing in an earlier article and the interesting thing is many people, including experts and business owners, still confuse crowdsourcing with outsourcing.

Outsourcing is hiring in labour to do the job, there’s nothing really new in this except the Internet now allows providers from around the world to bid for work through sites like Freelancer.com, elance and odesk.

Crowdsourcing is where groups of people volunteer their efforts either for free or in the hope they will be selected to do a job such as logo design. Many of these sites rely on free or marginal cost labour with a few exceptions like Yvonne Adele’s Ideas While You Sleep.

One of the points we need to keep in mind with both crowdsourcing and outsourcing is while there are massive savings to be made, there are risks as both require project management skills which are often underrated and undervalued, as anyone who’s built an extension to their house can attest. The big banks found through their outsourcing adventures in the last 15 years that managing your foreign service providers can be expensive, time consuming and not without elements of risk.

As low cost solutions for relatively simple tasks involving no intellectual property, Internet outsourcing and crowdsourcing are a good solution for big and small business. It also makes you fear for a lot of local skilled businesses like designers and programmers competing against these low cost countries.

It’s not the solution for everything though and many tasks are best outsourced locally or kept in house.

Another thought is that if we accept we’ve moved to an ideas based economy, what makes us assume an American, European or Australian idea is any more valuable than an Indian or Chinese idea? So the outsourcing revolution may have some surprises for those of us who think we’ll be untouched by this. Indeed many of the websites and local business advocating outsourcing programs could themselves have competitors from low cost locations.

Regardless of these thoughts the global market is now at your doorstep even if you don’t compete overseas. The question is will your industry be going to the guillotine or one of those eating cake as the global outsourcing revolution evolves?

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You are what you tweet

Being careful with what you post online is essential to maintaining your reputation.

“This software you recommended doesn’t work. I want a refund!”

“Sorry, but I wouldn’t dream of recommending that product.”

“It’s on your website! I trusted your company to give me the right advice. Are you telling me now I can’t believe what you write?”

That recent exchange over a third party ad on a computer advice website illustrated the risks people and businesses have when they post online. Even if the post is an online ad, a comment or something else you haven’t done yourself.

Anything online that has your business or personal name attached makes you accountable to the entire world. This was one of the points in our recent discussion about about why advertising may not suitable for your business website.

So you need to be careful with what’s posted online in your name or by your employees. A few weeks back we discussed how one Engineering company deals with employees using social media with the basic rule you have to act online with the same professionalism as you would in your work dealings.

That professionalism also extends to your online ethics. If you are making recommendations it’s best not to receive commissions, rebates or freebies and if you choose to then you need to be clear about your affliations.

It’s not just websites; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, any of the dozens of other social media services or the thousands of web forums hold just as many traps for ill considered comments.

The key rule is to never post anything online that you’d be embarrassed to explain to your mum.

There’s a million voices online and if you’re not one of the trusted ones you’ll be lost in the massive crowd. Your reputation is your most valuable asset.

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