Professor Joe O’Mahoney of Cardiff University: Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Consulting Business

An Interview With Doug Brown

Listen to experts. You don’t, can’t and shouldn’t know everything. There’s a lot of free advice on growing consulting firms and a huge amount of literature. Listening also means to your clients. Most founders I coach rarely have a systematic way of listening to the clients’ needs. I don’t mean project feedback. I mean ‘what else are you struggling with that we can help you with? What keep you awake at night?

As a part of my series called “Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Consulting Business ”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Prof. Joe O’Mahoney.

Joe is a Professor of Consulting at Cardiff University and an advisor to consulting firms that want to grow. His book, Growth: Building a consultancy in the digital age, has just been published by Routledge. For more information about growing a consulting firm, visit www.joeomahoney.com.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Thanks for the opportunity. I spent years as a corporate, internal and independent management consultant before jumping to academia. To be frank, I was exhausted and was happy to sacrifice a large chunk of income for an easier life. But after fifteen years researching and helping consultancies I realized that there’s a huge amount of bad advice out there so….. decided to start my own consultancy again — but this time focused on helping other consultants.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

Nothing interesting has happened at my company. We’re really quite boring. However, I was once offered $30,000 in cash to pass an overseas MBA student by their dad. It was nice to see them pass (joking, joking).

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My Dad, Kevin, had a huge amount of faith in me and encouraged me to achieve things I didn’t think possible. When I told him I’d got into Oxford University, from a pretty awful comprehensive school, he was the happiest man on the planet.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

You know, I find a lot of these quotes unrealistic or bland. Life is hard and there’s a huge amount of luck and airbrushing involved in ‘success’. For my book, I interviewed founders who had grown and sold their own consultancies. One, a guy worth around £500m, told me that he wished he could have his time over again so he wouldn’t ruin his marriage and his kids would still talk to him.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

I help small consultancies grow successfully. Lots of people in industry deliver great projects so they think they’ll make a success of starting their own consultancy. The trouble is that delivering work is the easiest bit of growing a great firm, the rest of it — finding and keeping good people, learning to mentor and delegate, finding and marketing a great nice, measuring the right things….. is what makes it difficult. I help people who have no experience in running a consultancy do it better.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

My primary job is a Professor. This means I am not dependent on my consulting revenue and thus have no incentive to upsell or give advice that I don’t 100% believe in. I have too little boys that I love to spend time with so I’m more than happy to lose business if it’s something I don’t believe in.

Last year, I told a founder that the problem with his business was not his people but himself (he refused to delegate and micromanaged everyone). I said this was going to cripple his firm when he tried to grow. He wanted me to tell him it was okay to make everyone work harder, so I said goodbye. Last month, he rang me and said ‘can you teach me how to delegate?’.

When you first started the business, what drove you, what was your primary motivation?

There’s a huge amount of bad advice on small consultancies which is based on zero-evidence. It’s usually touted by suspiciously young men in cheap suits promising to “SCALE YOUR BUSINESS TO TEN FIGURES!!!!”. As someone who is driven by the evidence of what works, I find this awful and so decided to do the research and tell the truth, which is often more complicated than people realize.

What drives you now? Is it the same? Did it change? Can you explain what you mean?

I’ve two little boys, Alex and Felix. I’d like to be more present in their lives, so I am doing more ‘passive income’ work now: online courses, books and software. I still work with clients, but typically a maximum of six, and generally only one day a week.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I’ve recently launched an online course to help independent consultants and small firms become more successful. This is at www.consultingmastered.com and seems to be pretty popular. In addition, I’m building an app to put consulting students together with companies that need interns, and a consulting simulation which I can use for my students to learn the basics without ruining real clients!

In your specific industry what methods have you found to be most effective in order to find and attract the right customers? Can you share any stories or examples?

Deliver value immediately. There’s a great book by a guy called Lencioni, called Getting Naked. He shows the importance of selling by doing: start solving client problems immediately. For someone that hates selling (i.e., me) it’s a perfect way to attract clients without being pushy.

Based on your experience, can you share a few strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

I’m a big fan of CX (client experience) methodologies: a walkthrough of every ‘touch’ you have with a client to ensure it is of high quality, consistent and that the messaging is spot on. When I work with clients, I do a deep dive on their value proposition and messaging to ensure that it is entirely focused on identifying and solving important client issues in a unique way. Otherwise, you’re just a commodity.

Thank you for all that. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Consulting Business”. Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Niche down: Don’t assume that because you did X in the past that you have to do it in the future. You can double your day rate by doing the same thing in the finance sector rather than the public sector; You can treble your day rate if your buyer is board-level instead of senior management. You don’t have to start in the perfect niche, but you should seek to move there.
2. Pipeline is everything: In the first two years you can probably get away with selling to old clients, ex-colleagues or friends. When this dries up, it can be a HUGE shock and kill the business if you haven’t prepared. Becoming a ‘visible expert’ in your marketing efforts is crucial.
3. Embrace digital in three areas. Digital marketing has transformed ‘top of funnel’ work by consultants with my more targeted and automated ways of finding and reaching out to ‘cold ‘prospects and moving them to ‘warm’. In operations, Professional Service Automation is now incredibly cheap and can drastically improve efficiency in small firms. In our services there are huge opportunities to cheaply build platforms, apps, online courses and other ‘recurring revenue’ options.
4. Improve. The only sustainable way to consistently improve your pricing is to improve the value that you offer. This might mean automating or outsourcing in order to cut costs, but it also means being committed to learning what can be done better.
5. Listen to experts. You don’t, can’t and shouldn’t know everything. There’s a lot of free advice on growing consulting firms and a huge amount of literature. Listening also means to your clients. Most founders I coach rarely have a systematic way of listening to the clients’ needs. I don’t mean project feedback. I mean ‘what else are you struggling with that we can help you with? What keep you awake at night?

Wonderful. We are nearly done. Here are the final “meaty” questions of our discussion. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Swapping beef or prawns for chicken in our meals. The biggest challenge we’re going to have in the next 50 years is, by far, global warming. We’re just at the beginning of it now and it’s going to get much worse. A lot of people can’t face going full-on vegetarian, so cutting down on beef and prawns is the next best thing we can do as individuals, aside from flying less and buying less new stuff. Sorry to be so boring!

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I miss David Bowie very much, but he’s not here anymore, so Donald Trump would be next on the list. Only so I could tell him what I thought of him……

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!