Here is the leverage model that we talked about earlier. It's that pyramid where you have the owners of the firm, the managing directors, the partners at the top, and as you might imagine, there's many more roles here at the bottom. One nickname for this that I read about in a book by David Maister called "Managing a Professional Services Firm" is called finders, minders, and grinders. Even if I didn't tell you which word goes at what spot, you probably would be able to guess. First, finders actually find the business. If you think about it as like a hunter or gather analogy, these are the people that go out and hunt the bear, kill the bear, and then drag the bear back to the tribe. The number one responsibility really is to sell work, and a lot of times what you'll find is that some people who go through a professional services firm they may not like selling, and as a result of that fact they don't really ever make partner. Because partner or being an MD or being a senior partner in a law firm involve selling and keeping clients happy. If you look at the major responsibilities and roles side of it, you can see the things that you might expect. You develop client relationships, you keep them, and you want to have very predictable and profitable projects. What does that mean? If you're running a firm, you want to make sure that you have an even number of projects coming in the door, because you can't not have projects and then have a bunch of projects and then have no projects. It's like a factory where you want it to be very steady as much as possible. Also as you might expect for the owners of a firm, they need to recruit talented staff and basically keep them happy. It's not enough just to get new business, you actually need to have the people, the professional services, practitioners to do the work. Minders, so this is the middle group, so senior managers, managers, people like this. They actually mind the project, they make sure that the client is engaged, make sure the clients are happy. Also, if you have a team of 10 people, let's make sure all 10 of them know what's going on. When things come up at the client project site, this is the person who's there every day fielding the emails, fielding the calls, basically, a little bit of firefighting, want to make sure that the project is on time, on budget, and everything goes well. If this works out, what happens is the client is confident in you. They're not giving you a hard time, they're not jerking your chain, asking you all the time what's going on, but they give you a little space to do your work. Also, a lot of times because this is consulting you don't necessarily know the answer to the problem when you first start. There's a lot of thinking and hypothesis based-consulting, which we'll talk about in a little bit more detail later, on how do you actually crack this problem that we've never seen before? Also, if you think about the project as being a factory, it's your job to run the factory smoothly. If you have consultants who are not well or on vacation, you need to make sure that you cover for them. If you find out that there's some friction between one of the consultants and one of the clients, you need to do a little bit of the corporate marriage counseling to make sure that that works. Managers and these minders play a really critical role in this leverage model because they bridge the strategy from the top and the promises that they're making, as well as the people in the bottom who are actually doing the work. Also, we all know that consultants are pretty famously good at putting together a PowerPoint slides, as well as telling stories very persuasively to clients. Those are the types of things that minders do. So far, we have finders who find the business, and we have minders who are minding the project, minding the team, and minding the client. Grinders, now this might sound a little pejorative or a little bit dismissive. I didn't come up with these words, David Maister did in 1997, so quite a while ago. But the idea is that the grinders actually do a lot of the work, whether it's data collection, data cleansing, analysis, Excel, interviews, surveys. A lot of the guts of the project, the stuff that has to happen is done by analysts, and consultants, and senior consultants at the bottom of this leverage pyramid. What are these folks need to be really super good at? Being very reliable. They're given a task and frankly, that task better be close to perfect. Whether it's Excel or putting together analysis or even putting together a PowerPoint slide, the idea is that you're a great apprentice. You learn quickly, the partners, the senior managers who tell you and give you instructions, they don't have to tell you two or three times. Also, it's okay to make mistakes, but you shouldn't be making the same mistake multiple times. Super coachable, great apprentice, you're the type of person that people want to mentor. Finally here, what I wrote down is professionalism. That seems obvious. Management consulting firms, they spend a lot of time recruiting the best and the brightest. Apart of that too is that when you're at the entry-level of a consulting firm, a lot of times you're a lot younger than the people that you're working with. You could be 22 years old and you're working with 55 year old. There's certain amount of maturity, business acumen, and professionalism that really is required for you to succeed. We went through the roles and responsibilities and then what I'd like to do is translate that into the different people who are watching this Coursera video. Let's start with the entrepreneurs or the solo consultants, I have here as the red airplane. First thing is, if you're only one person, you are basically the head chef and the dishwasher at the same time. Essentially you're playing all three roles simultaneously. That's #1 exciting and #2, exhausting. But this is what we signed up for. To run your own shop, to be your own consultant, to set your own hours, to do the work that you want to do. I will also say though, and anybody who is in business for themselves would probably agree, that the #1 business priority is getting a client. Getting a client, selling work, and having the opportunity to show to that client that they should hire you again. For the blue ladders, these are the corporate managers. Maybe you've been in accounting for quite some time and you like your job, you're good at it, and you don't plan to move, you plan to be there. Well, what I would say is a lot of times you've been super successful and you've been very successful basically owning your accounting projects. This is what you've done and you've been very good at it and none of that's changed. What I would perhaps challenge you with is, have you had experience? Have you ventured out? Have you tried to manage larger more complex and ambiguous projects? Maybe there's a really big ERP implementation that's happening globally. As a function of that, in addition to managing your own little area or your own farm, have you been able to reach out and have a broader scope of work and be able to manage projects that honestly make you feel just a little bit uncomfortable? Then finally here, for grinders here at the base of the pyramid, what I'll say is, I'd really ask that you'd be a little bit patient. I teach many very precocious, smart, ambitious, motivated undergraduates and MBA students. Maybe one of their principal complaints going into a consulting firm is, I end up doing the same work over and over again or this is a little boring. I know how to do this pivot table and Vlookup, and I really don't want do this again. What I would say here is that, here the title and this is the very important part. Even though the work isn't perhaps as glamorous as you'd want it to be or as exciting or innovative, you need to do a couple of things. You need to do it well. Of course, you can have errors in it, but you also need to be able to do it very consistently. What I mean by that is, you do it great once, great twice, and then you drop the ball. That's not okay. No matter how basic the task is, do it well, do it consistently, and this is also important too, do it quickly. Clients, they're very savvy and very demanding. More than likely they didn't give you enough time to actually do this work in a very lackadaisical, pleasant, relaxing way. Instead, there's actually a tempo to the project and the faster you get, one, you can exceed expectations. #2, you can start taking on different kinds of work. It's really, after you do things well, consistently, and quickly, that frankly they're going to start offering you more exciting and potentially complex things to do. From what we've talked about, it's clear that a consultant needs to be good at a lot of different things. Isn't that really why you're even taking this Coursera class? There's something about consulting that's attractive. As a function of that, yes, you're joining a fairly elite group of people. To be a part of that elite group, you need to be good at several things. I'm going to list them here. You can see them on the PowerPoint one through five. Number 1, is you need to be able to work with clients, keep them happy, and then also find new work to do. Here we talked about sales. Number 2, as a professional services person, if you're not working on a client engagement and billing time, B-I-L-L-I-N-G, you're not billing the client for your time, that's a problem. You want to stay busy, you want to stay staffed. Number 3, if at all possible, you want a very high bill rate, which is to say you are special. You have a certain expertise that you can't just find anywhere. Over your career, once you turn 30, 40, 50 years old, your bill rate continues to go up because you know a lot. Number 4 and 5. Number four is you know how to run projects. You understand how to make teams work, and then number 5, you're not just a contributor, you're actually leader in the consulting firm. Since it's an apprenticeship model, as you rise through the firm, you also want to be able to have a followership, other people who want to work with you, and other people who are learning from you. Early in your career, and you can see here at the very bottom there's a little bit of a caveat at the bottom which says that this is actually going to vary by firm, by industry and by career path. This isn't like the only way that it happens, but by and large it's true. Here in the stars, let's say out of four stars, four out of four stars means that you need to be super focusing on that. One-star in gray it's important, if you're better at it, great. Let's really focus on the red. Here, early in your career, Frankly speaking is you just need to stay busy, stay billable, be on client projects, you need to learn like a sponge. You need to be the one that people call and want to staff on their project because you're super reliable and you're just like a good egg. Here, early in your career, stay busy, stay utilized, you want to be billable. As you become a manager or a minder in this particular case, you're getting a lot of skills at managing clients, sometimes very difficult client conversations too. With that also, how to run a team. Running a team of, let's say 10 people is not easy. You have some people who are motivated exactly like you and there's some people who are very different. Whether you're introverted or extroverted you have somebody who's very analytical, someone who's not. Sometimes you have somebody on your project who's really ambitious but doesn't do the work. They're always asking for more responsibility and they want to interact with a client and they want to do presentations, but frankly, they're just not that good. They're not ready yet, so you, as a team manager, want to make sure that you're providing opportunities to folks, but also making sure that the team deliverables happen. Here on the right-hand side, you can see as a team manager, you're very focused on project management, making sure the team is being effective and contributing to the firm. As you might guess, once you become a partner or a finder, in this particular case, you are an equity owner in the firm. That's just a fancy way of saying that the firm's money is your money. Typically when you have a partnership and you're a partner, that means you actually took money from your bank account and put it into the firm. Not only are you potentially an employee of the firm, but you're actually an owner of the firm. The firm does better, you make more money. You own the firm. Here in the title it says itself, it's your job to keep the lights on. If you don't have work, then they're going to be layoffs or you're not going to be able to hire consultants or something not great is going to happen. Basically two things, one, making sure that you have enough steady flow of new clients and work coming in the door, and then also building eminence, which is a fancy way of saying becoming famous for something. There are many consulting firms out there, there are many partners out there. What is it that you are the top 50 in the world at doing? What can we do to continually build your economic moat and become more special? For key takeaways; one, consultants. We're not great at everything trust me, we're not. But you want to make sure that you understand the core skills that you do need to be good at and those were the five listed on the previous page. We will cover most of them in this specialization. Over the specialization, we'll talk about content, we'll talk about client, we'll talk about teams, all of those things that you need to get better at, but you can take a breath. You don't have to get good at all of them at once. There's a little bit of a progression. Get good at these then these, then those. It is an apprenticeship and I'm going to highlight that only because one of two things is going to happen. Either you're going to be the junior consultant that partners and senior managers want to mentor, or you're the one that they don't. Obviously, what does it take for you to become the person that they want to invest their time into? I'd say one is be a little bit humble, be eager to learn. Be a quick study. If you hear it once, write it down, don't ask the same question two times. Then this last one, and I think this really builds on a quote too is it takes time. I think that a lot of us, especially we're in this era where everything can be Googled and it seems like we should be promoted every six months. Well, there's a lot of old school people out there and they want to see that you can do work reliably well and consistently. Putting the time in this quote that Maya Angelou has here, "All great achievements require time."
