How to build a true management & engineering consulting company that empowers real estate & infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia – Part 2

In the first part of the article, industry expert & advisor Alex Steinberg already highlighted the shortcomings of traditional consulting companies in Saudi Arabia. We discussed a series of differentiators to build a true management & engineering consulting company that empowers real estate & infrastructure projects.

Review those differentiators and READ: ?How to build a truly local management & engineering consulting company that empowers real estate & infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia – Part 1 | LinkedIn

Truly win-win

• Short-term P&L mandates often incline consulting companies to maximize outcomes for short-term gains. Some consulting companies play tough. They may win individual arguments with clients (“without change order we cannot proceed”), but often miss maximum possible project outcomes and hurt their client relationships.

TO DO: (Re)train leadership and consultants to avoid confrontation (even if logically right) and seek ways to develop consensus with the different understanding and (conflicting) interests of the clients. Allocate budgets to cover extra client work to successfully finish the project. Charge some unpaid extra work as business development expense. Agree with client to offer the extra work for future paid project commitments.

Holistic Solutions

• Many consulting companies like to provide a “cooky cutter” service delivery to a clearly defined question/ issue. However, the complexity of topics, especially in real estate and infrastructure projects, rarely allows to narrow efforts to a few bullet points. There are often overlaps with other functional areas, which require additional examination. Often consulting companies do not want to enter those “issues” as their consultants lack the necessary functional expertise, as they do not know how to contain scope and as they shun the additional complexity and related risks.
• But this is exactly where a true consulting company would be needed! All issues need to be addressed. If key issues from even tangent areas are not considered they may derail the client project/ operations.
• Ultimately, the value of a consulting company is measured by their ability to develop holistic solutions and proof-test all possible scenarios to assure needed/ desired client outcome.

TO DO: Hire experts with a comprehensive understanding across business functions, processes, and value chains. Allocate those experts to the project teams to advise the consultants, guide solutioning, and proof-check plans.

Data driven

• Real estate, infrastructure, construction and related projects require a vast number of inputs and outputs across different stakeholders. The data & information required and exchanged is enormous.
• Gathering data, maintaining its accuracy, and sharing data & information across all parties is a very challenging task.
• Incomplete, outdated, inaccurate data often leads to notable rework, time delays, waste of resources, disputes, frustration and project struggles & failures.
• Data mastery can help better exchange & collaboration across all stakeholders, better solutions, faster decision making & execution, higher project performance, and ROI.

TO DO: Design and invest in a solid data infrastructure. Start by leveraging pay-per-use cloud solutions to experiment, learn and determine requirements for possibly an own system. Make data collection and sharing a companywide requirement for each consultant and leader. Train all consultants in data-driven planning, decision making, and execution.

READ: Managing the complexities of customer data across the organization | LinkedIn

READ: Customer Context and Digital Insights drive the future of successful Customer Engagement | LinkedIn

READ: How Dynamic Tag Management enables powerful, omni-channel customer engagement (for example in automotive industry) | LinkedIn

READ: Solving your Data & platform to fully empower your customer engagement | LinkedIn

Advanced Analytics & AI

• A wealth of data is generated across any real estate & infrastructure project, which can help generate deep insights for performance management, learning and improvements. Data can feed valuable simulations and scenario plannings.
• Advanced Analytics & AI technology is available across all steps of a project. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to apply available tools due to a lack of expertise, qualified resources, “busyness”, and notorious risk aversion. Here, consulting companies can and should help!

TO DO: Build a digital savvy consultant workforce. Identify and provide all necessary Advanced Analytics & AI tools and applications for daily use. Hire experts to drive AI and advanced technology solutions across the organization. Collaborate with vendors and other parties across the industry.

Latest methods and technologies

• The construction industry is ripe for innovation and productivity increases.
• Many tools, applications, and technologies are available, but most be properly introduced.

TO DO: Work step-by-step through the process of real estate and infrastructure projects. Identify what methods, technologies, applications and other solutions can be applied specifically for each stage and key task. Create close partnerships and hire subject matter/ technology tool & application experts.

Thought leadership

• This should be a self-evident skillset of consulting companies. Sadly, most consulting companies have few people that can provide true thought leadership. Many consultants have pieces of functional subject matter expertise without understanding the big picture.
• Some consulting companies offer good publications, but those are more the result of editors who pull expertise together from different subject matter experts across regions. Unfortunately, many consulting companies lack good industry publications covering key real estate & infrastructure topics specific to Saudi Arabia

TO DO: Invest money, resources and leadership support into experts that can guide consultants and help them to put their functional pieces of expertise into proper context and structure their thoughts & solutions in a systematic, end-to-end process-driven way.

Think tank

• While thought leadership may be expressed by experts through publications, Think Tanks are forums where experts meet and discuss trends, problems, opportunities and develop solutions & action plans to help the respective industry to improve.
• Experts from different domains, business, technology, engineering, science, sustainability and other domains should regularly gather and exchange thoughts. The greater the range and depths of expertise covered, the higher the impact.
• Focus is on collaboration to bring value to the industry and to provide better outcomes for client companies, people, communities and growth of the country.
• The world economic forum and other platforms provide positive examples where different experts from competing consulting companies work together for greater good.

TO DO: (Co) form a think tank and assign/ contribute experts & consultants. Fund and support think tank efforts. Seek proactive expert collaboration & exchange across different organizations including competitors.

Gain-share models

• Gain share models demonstrate the confidence of a consulting company in its own abilities to deliver excellent results. Many consulting companies shy away from such models as they lack necessary delivery capabilities.
• Gain share models demonstrate that a consulting company is willing to assume risk and do the necessary to deliver above average results.

TO DO: Challenge the entire consulting organization to focus on delivering results, “rather than just services”. Instill a Consulting firm culture where people cannot hide behind “I did my job” and where each consultant is required to take responsibility for the overall and final outcome.

Investment projects

• Most consulting companies want to be paid for their time and effort in a simple, predictable way, exchanging a service for money. (“Willing to do anything for money” – sadly sometimes without caring whether it truly helps the client or not).
• True consulting companies recognize the value of their work and are willing to invest into projects without immediate direct pay. Example: The consulting company may develop a software solution for a construction company without fee but agree to monetize the effort throughout the use of the tool in the following months and years.

TO DO: Go beyond the typical pay for time & service. Adopt an investor mind set in addition to consulting. Identify where the consulting company in earn money in more and better ways. Sometimes clients may not have the money to pay for consulting services. The traditional consulting company may then refuse work and try to sell to other potential clients. The true consulting company will identify ways to gain a return on investment for their consultants’ time & value contribution.

Equity Share

• Traditional consulting companies typically avoid taking equity in other companies as it does not align with their business and operating models.
• However, not every company in need of consulting services has the money to pay for such services. The consulting company of the future evaluates the opportunities within the potential client company and then trades services for ownership shares in that organization. Often such deals can be much more lucrative for the consulting company than working for a traditional fee.

TO DO: Expand the scope and definition of the consulting company. Start by offering consulting services to potential clients. If a client does not have the financial resources or does not want to pay for consulting services, offer to trade help for an ownership share in the client company. This may lead not only to a long-term consulting arrangement, but a highly profitable investment with a notably higher ROI than through traditional consulting service fees. Hire and add investment experts to the consulting core team. Alternatively, from an additional business unit that drives investment opportunities.

Payment in kind

• This takes the idea of non-monetary payment options to the next level.
• The consulting company may offer its advice to a supermarket or factory and agree to accept products instead of money as payment

TO DO: Hire people that a traders to sell off received products as payment. Add a business unit that trades products in a lucrative way while offering more opportunities to the consulting team to get non-traditional consulting work.

Cross-culture stakeholder facilitation

• Many clients struggle with dealing with international counterparts. In theory, global consulting companies have multi-national/ cultural experience latent across their many country locations. However, working across regions proves difficult for many global consulting companies (given the often-painful internal negotiation required of how to split the project revenue later).
• Chinese companies and investors are entering Saudi Arabia at increasing numbers. Few Arabs understand the Chinese culture, mentality and way of doing business.

TO DO: Build the necessary expertise through hiring and collaboration to guide companies in Saudi Arabia to effectively negotiate and work with Chinese suppliers, investors and other parties.

READ: How experience from China enables me to build Saudi Arabia as a country | LinkedIn

READ: How to successfully negotiate with Chinese counterparts (learnings from the trenches in China and around the world) | LinkedIn

READ: 5 Reasons why a Saudi organization needs an experienced advisor when engaging with Chinese companies | LinkedIn?

Let us discuss?

If you work in Real Estate, Infrastructure or Construction as leader, engineer, program manager, functional expert, consultant, government advisor and/ or supplier, reach out to Alex Steinberg through WhatsApp at +966531824178 or email at [email protected]

About the author & industry expert Alex Steinberg

Alex Steinberg has worked on projects with 30+ multi-national companies and government organizations in Saudi Arabia, Europe, China, India, Asia, USA, Africa and other regions. Alex has an in-depth understanding of real estate and infrastructure projects from ideation, design, construction, property management and investment. Alex has worked with most key stakeholders adding his expertise in business, technology, data, and scientific disciplines.

Alex leverages his deep experience of famous projects across healthcare, life science, telecom, automotive, manufacturing to guide his colleagues on all relevant aspects to design better facilities & infrastructure that achieves maximum client, customer and investor value.

Alex’s international work and fluency in seven world languages guides clients through multi-cultural/ lingual/ stakeholder complexities.

Clients typically contract Alex for full-time projects and/ or create a mid/ long-term role in their organizations. Executives, leaders and colleagues greatly appreciate Alex’s fact-based, practical expertise, combined with strong character values, leading by example.

Legal Disclaimer

This article reflects the opinion of Alex Steinberg only. It does not claim to represent the viewpoints of any present/ former client, employer, or partner. The author acknowledges that there are often different viewpoints on a topic, which are equally valid. Constructive discussion rather than criticism can lead to better ideas and positive outcome & value to business and society.

Communicate/ collaborate with the Author & expert Alex Steinberg

If you work in Real Estate, Infrastructure or Construction as leader, engineer, program manager, functional expert, consultant, government advisor and/ or supplier, reach out to Alex Steinberg through WhatsApp at +966531824178 or email at [email protected]