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MicroConsulting as a MegaCareer
The key to efficient, targeted advice and support
It’s not a new idea to deliver consulting support in bite-sized pieces, at exactly the time that advice and guidance is most needed by the client firm. Brain brokers like GLG and BTG have built empires on the basis of a deep bench of talent, marshalled for pin point precision of delivery, a sort of just-in-time process for expertise transfer. But what is the career path for the people on that bench? Are these ad hoc conversations with desperate people in distant places destined always to be a side hustle, or could they become the mainstay of a full-time consulting career? I have very good reasons for wanting to find out.
Maybe it’s no more than a sign of advancing years, but I’ve finally and absolutely lost my tolerance for commuting. Dedicating three hours of the day to making myself more irritable and working in a place with fewer home comforts than, well… my home, and sometimes poorer technology too, seems a bad deal, compared to being at my laptop-and-phone-based office, coffee in hand by 8am. And, if I’m honest, there aren’t too many occasions when physical presence in front of clients or colleagues is really necessary, when email, phone, Slack channels and Hangouts are so readily available. Perhaps pitching for new business needs that suit to be worn one more time. But continuing to support clients who have known me for years can be done much more efficiently, as experience has shown.
I have worked in some of the larger consultancies, Price Waterhouse (before the Coopers addition) and Grant Thornton, and know both their sweet spots and Achilles’ heels. I don’t need to reheat them here, as I haven’t met any senior manager in UK financial services who doesn’t hold essentially the same view on the value for money provided by these firms. If you need to bodyshop in an army of qualified staff for a remediation project, or you need a formal report to present to the regulator, going Big 5 is often your only option. But if you have a specific knotty problem to solve, and a tight deadline in which to solve it, the larger firms might not be able to mobilise the required expertise in time at reasonable cost.
Which was what led to my first venture into one-man-band consulting. Transaction Reporting Limited was set up…
