Dr. Russell F. Henke -- Business Consultant
Case #11 -- Can Consulting Drive Products?
An privately-held engineering software company is growing rapidly in several fields, including geoengineering, building/plant engineering and a new thrust in mechanical engineering. Revenues are nearing $200 million annually. This diversity and obvious current success have been developed by following a comprehensive engineering IT strategy comprising software products, classical software maintenance, and strategic affiliations of thriving small enterprises.
However, this emerging company is encountering more and more potential customers who require a fully-integrated and packaged project scenario, wherein clients want a sole source for all products and implementation services associated with total responsibility.
To help, the company has already purchased a small band of practicing consultants (a dozen principals), but this team is woefully inadequate to quench the appetite of even local company prospects, let alone an emerging national and international demand. As a result, consulting revenues for the company are only a single digit percentage of total revenues and worse, many large projects and concomitant software product sales are being lost or delayed due to the inadequacy of available consulting personpower.
The head of the small band of consultants sees the dilemma clearly, but he has been unable to gain a receptive audience with top management, who not only are already consumed with other growth issues but also nurse biases against growing consulting services in general (based on previous lives). Resistance to expanding consulting power goes on.
Thanks to the influential foresight of a sympathetic new corporate R&D addition, an experienced outside consultant is brought in to assist the head of the frustrated but intrepid band of consultants.
Armed with personal experience in successfully leveraging consulting services to drive millions of dollars in software product sales in past corporate assignments, together with the numerous examples of dozens of other companies doing similarly well, the outside consultant reviews the recent history and the approaches previously made to top management by the small band of advocates.
The head of the small band finally captures the attention and empathy of corporate headquarters. Management is convinced and authorizes the needed resources released and names an experienced internal corporate executive to drive the consulting component aggressively.
The implementation phase is now underway.
