The plan that changed nothing

You don't need a consultant. You need someone who'll still be there in six months.

I want to tell you about a business I walked into a few years ago.

The owners had invested significantly in external support before I arrived. A consulting firm had spent several months with them. They had redesigned the meeting structure. Introduced new terminology. Produced a detailed report with clear recommendations. The engagement had looked thorough and professional throughout.

When I arrived, the owners were still doing everything. The managers they had recruited were capable people, but nobody was leading them. The meetings were happening on the new schedule with the new language and producing nothing of substance. And underneath all of it, there was no strategy. Not a weak one. Not an incomplete one. None.

Nobody in that business, including the owners, knew what they were working towards. They were working hard, in a new structure, towards nothing in particular.

The consultants had changed the appearance of the business. Everything that needed to actually change had not moved.

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What consultants sell and what businesses need

I want to be precise here, because this is not a criticism of consulting as a discipline. There are excellent consultants doing excellent work. But there is a structural problem with how most consulting engagements are designed, and it affects the outcomes almost every time.

A consulting engagement is typically sold and delivered as a product. The product is the diagnosis, the report, the recommendations, the plan. The consultant's job is to produce the product to a high standard and present it convincingly. When the product is delivered, the engagement ends. The consultant leaves. The invoice is paid.

What the business actually needs is not the product. It is the outcome the product was supposed to produce. And the gap between the two is where most of the investment disappears.

The plan sits in a folder. The recommendations get partially implemented, then stalled, then quietly shelved. The owners return to the day job because the day job never stopped demanding their attention. And six months later the business is largely where it was, except lighter in the bank account and carrying a faint residue of cynicism about external support.

We did not see enough change. It became too costly. We could not implement everything.

I have heard versions of those three sentences from almost every owner-manager who had worked with a consultant before they called me.

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The implementation problem nobody talks about honestly

Here is the part of this conversation that rarely gets had before an engagement starts.

Most consulting recommendations are written for a business with a strong second tier of management. People who can take a strategy, understand it, own a piece of it, and drive it forward without the owner needing to hold their hand through every step.

Most owner-managed businesses do not have that second tier. Not really.

They have managers. Good people, often. Loyal, experienced, capable within their function. But managers who are managers because they have been there longest, or because there was nobody else, or because the business grew around them before anyone thought carefully about what the leadership layer actually needed to look like.

When a consultant hands over a plan that requires a capable, aligned, self-directing management team to implement, and the business has a well-intentioned but under structured group of functional managers instead, the plan does not fail because it was wrong. It fails because it was written for a different business.

The owner ends up holding the plan in one hand and the day job in the other, with nobody in the middle strong enough to carry either. The lifting is too heavy. The change stalls. And the consultant is long gone.

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What staying actually changes

When I take a board-level role with a business, the engagement does not end when the plan is written. In most cases, the plan is written fairly early. What follows is the harder and more important work.

Understanding the real capability of the management team, not the capability they are supposed to have, but the capability they actually have, and building around what is genuinely there.

Staying in the room when implementation gets difficult, when the owners run out of energy for change on top of everything else, they are carrying, when the managers push back or stall or simply do not know how to do what is being asked of them.

Holding the strategy as a living thing rather than a document. Revisiting it, adjusting it, making sure it remains connected to the decisions being made week to week rather than sitting in a folder as a record of good intentions.

And being there, consistently, over months and years rather than weeks, so that when something goes wrong, as it always does, there is someone already in the business who understands the context, knows the people, and can help navigate it without starting from scratch.

This is not a more expensive version of consulting. It is a fundamentally different thing. The measure is not the quality of the product delivered. It is whether the business is in a materially better position than it was, and whether the changes made have actually taken root rather than being cosmetic.

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The question worth asking before you bring anyone in

If you are considering external support for your business, there is one question worth asking before you agree to anything.

Not what will you deliver. Not how long will it take. Not what does it cost.

What will still be different in twelve months?

The answer to that question tells you everything about whether you are buying a product or buying an outcome. And it tells you whether the person sitting across the table from you is planning to be around long enough to find out.

The businesses I work with know the answer to that question before we start. They know it because I am still there to be held to it.

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If you have been through an engagement that produced a plan but not a change, and you are wondering what a different kind of support might look like, we should talk.

Mike Collett
mike@exalta.co.uk
www.exalta.co.uk