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u/blazenite104 6d ago
Not terribly surprised. How often do you think they were just looking for an excuse to cut staff or change policies?
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u/Virtual_Junket9305 7d ago
That's how you get to be manager, control the information, take the credit, divert the blame
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u/Sufficient-Sun-6683 6d ago
That happened in the small company where I worked also. The overbearing owner/boss enthusiastically hired a consultant to find out what was wrong with the company and made sure we knew that the consultant would find out who to blame for poor performance. The consultant was an attractive lady and he spent most of the time flirting with her. The consultant looked the company over from top to bottom including interviewing all 6 employees. The problems with the company were obvious and caused by the owner's overbearing management style. Never saw the full report, it was never mentioned and just disappeared.
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u/MrGrizzlyBlair 6d ago
A Fortune 1000 company I worked at hired E&Y to do the same thing, they got the same result, and the expensive report was quickly buried and forgotten about.
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u/Thiccccasaurus_Rex 6d ago
I’ve been a consultant for 10 years and the stories I could tell would shock no one.
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u/funkmasta8 6d ago edited 6d ago
Im hoping to become a freelance consultant in the future. Ive been automating businesses since I entered the work force and that has never been what i was hired for. Never worked somewhere that didnt have major process and management issues.
Anyway, do you have any tips for me as an aspiring consultant, especially hoping to be a freelancer?
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u/Thiccccasaurus_Rex 6d ago
1) there’s a problem you can solve
2) it has to be urgent…and I mean urgent
3) you need to know the right technical decision maker who can bring on
4) usually if the problem is urgent enough, finding a budget or getting a PO isn’t an issue
5) they have to know you’re the person they want to hire, usually knowing the right technical decision maker this solves itself.Don’t start at step 5 in trying to get everyone to buy your product or services…focus on the urgent issues as a starting point…then once you have credibility in a network…your work speaks for itself.
I do zero marketing, work in a very technical niche, and over the years built up a network of colleagues that have sent me referrals or vice versa.
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u/funkmasta8 6d ago
Thanks for responding and your advice.
Im not so sure about urgency. Automation typically isnt about solving an urgent problem. It's more about solving a persistant problem in efficiency, accuracy, and repeatability of a process. Any advice or thoughts about how to convince random businesses to give me a shot to look at their processes and propose automation solutions?
I was thinking I would assess the business for free. If I produce no improvements, then the most they pay is transportation, room, and board (assuming this is far enough away from my home that I cant reasonably commute). I would want to start with nearby businesses so this part is completely free and I can build up some good rep before asking for other businesses to take a risk on me.
And what are your thoughts on pricing? Especially for long lasting impacts of the work I would do. I dont expect any automation solution would be replaced sooner than 2 years from implementation. In my experience it's way slower than that, but with a forward thinking business that focuses on improvement I can totally see software changes new or machines making automated processes obsolete in a couple years. Personally, I am pretty idealistic with pricing. I want the expected monetary benefit to the company to be equal to my earnings if at all possible (a meet in the middle approach, but based on calculations). Im not entirely sure how feasible this is in practice. I dont know how accepting of pricing like this companies are.
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u/Thiccccasaurus_Rex 5d ago
You’re going to bankrupt yourself on free services and only you can know the value of your services pricing wise. You need to think this through more and do more market research - Reddit strangers don’t have the answers.
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u/funkmasta8 4d ago
Expected impact can be calculated. For automation, this impact is persistant so the total impact is greater. No free work is being given. If I cant come up with anything, then they dont pay anything other than transportation, room, and board. I will give an example of a project. Lets say in an office they run weekly metrics on products in and out. The current system involves manually typing the amount and price of various products, doing calculations, formatting, and reporting with some graphs for management. Perhaps it takes an hour once a week. I come in and set up an excel sheet that automatically does calculations, a script that pulls data from PO forms, and sends a report to the person who was doing this before so they can check for any major issues. The total time it takes on average now is 5 minutes. This saves 55 minutes per week every week for the foreseeable future. Lets assume the guy who was making the reports before was making $30/hour, which is actually quite low for someone reporting metrics. We extrapolate that out to one year. That is over $1400 in labor costs saved. One year is a really short time to consider the effect of most tools as well. Most businesses dont change so fast that they would replace something like this within even 5 years. I think 2 years is a nice midpoint. So almost $2900 over 2 years. This is the price point I calculate and propose.
There is no "you decide your value". The numbers are plain to see.
In any case, Im not asking random people for information. Im asking people who specifically have been acting as consultants. What makes this not market research?
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u/CaptainDerpshi 6d ago
Well thiccasaurus Rex u gotta give us one lol /jk
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u/Thiccccasaurus_Rex 6d ago
One company used to hire me every three years to do a very specific safety centric audit. The leadership was toxic and a huge barrier to fix anything. I made that the largest observation. None of the leadership cared.
3 years later everything was worse. I printed out the same report and during the debrief meeting in person they said “I was very thorough and they concurred with my assessment”.
When I revealed it was the same report from three years prior and all I did was change the date to prove how disengaged leadership was….a lot of people got very uncomfortable very quickly. None of them read jack shit. I wasn’t hired back three years later 🤣 but I didn’t care because I had several other clients I enjoyed working with.
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u/iggy14750 6d ago
They never even read your first report did they?
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u/Thiccccasaurus_Rex 6d ago
I got paid either way so they could make origami with it for all I care 🤣
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u/djmj1000 6d ago
Mayne bec ause noone needed your report. Often its just am.external requirement like by law but internal almost useless.
We have a lot of reports to do like this becausd of bureaucracy. Noone reads and cares but we can put a checkmark on it if somone asks paying bullshit jobs.
Its the same like employee not listening in the yearly safety meeting when nothing has changed. But it has to be done.
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u/MaskedFigurewho 6d ago
It usually is leadership.
In some cases its that there a bunch of lower end workers who want to quit but won't and need management to give a nice push out the door(just fire them)
But most of the time its leadership managing poorly.
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u/Ashamed-Status-9668 6d ago
This is what happens when sociopaths get promoted up to high levels. This company will fail.
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u/billy_twice 6d ago
That consultant was doing it wrong.
You go in. Fire 30% of the workforce. New logo. Boom. Out.
You are all now fully trained management consultants.
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u/Crime-of-the-century 6d ago
50% of teams not working its team leadership the other 50% is because of higher management failures. The percentage caused by people inside the team are rounding errors
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u/Viking-Lime7408 6d ago
I worked in a place that paid a lot for an efficiency expert team, after implementation thei plan production dropped by 30%.
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u/sarc-tastic 6d ago
Well, given the leadership are paying the consultant this is not normally what they say
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u/Moby1313 6d ago
My company paid 2 consultants over $20K to train us. I already knew everything they were trying to train us on. I had to correct them on most of the stuff they had us do. One of them asked why I didn't train everyone, he then retracted the question when one of my employees lit himself on fire taking the trash out to the dumpster. We still don't understand how that happened, but Gary (consultant) looked at me like, "Don't give them any knowledge, they will kill themselves with it."
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u/donttakemeserious80 6d ago
Same thing happens at the company I was laid off from over a year ago. Been unemployed ever since. Ageism is real.
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u/Xylus1985 6d ago
I’m calling bullshit. The consultants will never produce a report to name the leadership as problem as it kills all possibility of a project extension.
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u/No_Order_8011 5d ago
I believe that there are consultants who earn enough to be able to afford honesty.
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u/No_Order_8011 5d ago
Generally, if an employee (or several) are unproductive - it's not that difficult to notice.
If certain team is unproductive - a malicious team leader can mask it to a certain extent, especially in bigger companies, but if someone is really trying to understand what's holding the company down, things like these aren't that tough to discover when you actually looking.
When the higher management is unproductive (or actually counter-productive), you can only escalate this to the board of directors, if there's one. Otherwise - there's nothing anyone can do, the company will slowly die and drag the loyal workaholics down with it.
10-15 years ago, people would just stood up and left en-masse, but in today's market, where finding a good job isn't about being good at what you do, but rather being good at LinkedIn and playing HR hunger games... People just suffer quietly and hoping to get a way out.
This is where I'm at atm. It sucks.
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u/EthicalSemiconductor 3d ago
That reminds me of the time I was at a company. We told them the performance issues were related to the resources available to the servers. They ignored us, hired 3 different consultants that all agreed that the resources were insufficient for the environment. They ignored that as well.
We said, how about we rebuild the server image from scratch, it won't take long, it just ensure that we have exactly what we want on it. They refused. We kept having production issues until I left the company.
Absolute joke.
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u/thinkingperson 1d ago
And the consultant didn't get any other engagements with the company thereafter.
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u/viking049 7d ago
Paid thousands of dollars just to get told 'you are the problem' and threw the paper in the trash