How Can You Possibly Know My Business Well Enough To Give Recommendations?

As a consultant, it’s our job to get to know our clients and to learn their business inside-and-out, to ensure that we understand their goals and objectives, as well as their brand identity and social image. As you may well know, many consultants are young and fairly fresh-faced but seem to know what they’re doing. They can even assimilate with the business you’ve been running for several decades, and see solutions that you couldn’t find for your own issues. It often leaves a simple question in the mind of clients: how does this person just “get it?” 

Knowing The Tricks

Look, it doesn’t matter who you are or what kind of organization you run, there’s a good chance that a consultant has already come across another company within your industry. By nature, consultants can repeatedly take one set of experiences before extracting and absorbing every ounce of knowledge from them. They can then compare and contrast a new clients’ issue with their repository of historical cases, allowing them to create a formalized view that is both resolute and relevant. They have the right level of observation skills, emotional intelligence, and the ability to communicate their thoughts clearly. 

You might think, but my business is unique, so they couldn’t do that. Trust me; I’ve been involved with hundreds of clients and organizations across the past couple of decades. And while they all had their unique selling points, and believed themselves to be apart from the rest of their competition, they mostly are not from a consultancy point of view. Fundamentally, a consultant can look through the layers and structure of a business and boil everything down to a subset akin to a master process—a blueprint that lies at the heart of every single business, regardless of the product or service that is being sold.

Turning Insider Knowledge Into Resonance 

It’s not as hard as you’d think. It can seem—to the client—impossible for a consultant to simply know the answer to an organization’s problems without being immersed in its day-to-day running for several years or even decades. Most consultants deal with this by crafting resonance and recycling insider knowledge to gain the seal of approval while harvesting all of the new information available. 

Ever heard of Clever Hans, the horse known to tap his hoof when the correct answer to a mathematical equation was told? He was a magical horse, clearly. But he couldn’t actually do mathematics—he’s a horse. What Hans could do, however, was look for cues from his trainer, that would reveal when he should tap his hoof. 

Now, I’m not saying that consultants are horses, but a good one does the same thing as Hans—they will pay attention to clients’ body language so that they know exactly what to say to get approved. At the same time, they’ll share insights that they’ve picked up from other members of staff within the organization or alternative sources, analyze, scrutinize, and make them their own, showing that they are “in the know.” 

The Fact of The Matter

The key thing to remember is that all people are unique. If I give ten people the keys to the same car, they will all drive it differently, and they’ll all have a different level of appreciation and understanding of the machine. But ultimately, whatever their unique affiliation to the car is, it is still just a car; it has a steering wheel, four tires, and an engine. The same line of thought applies in the business world. 

There are fundamental differences between business A, B, and C. But the overarching narrative is the goal for each one to generate sales, make money, and be profitable, as you’d expect. That’s what we see on the surface—the cover of the book, as it were. But underneath that surface-level analysis, there are some core abilities that all companies need to feature to ensure that they hit the milestones that will elevate them above their competition—and they are almost identical, regardless of the industry. If a consultant has seen it before and has enough experience finding solutions for clients, they will realize the fix is usually the same. Rather, the journey to implementing it is always unique because it’s the personality and operational differences that they have to navigate around.