A short look at life as a consultant
One of the neat things you can do being a part of the Claremont Consortium is take classes from other colleges such as Drucker Business School. A few of us take their finance or operations course in lieu or supplement of our own curriculum, just to round things out. I had the pleasure of sitting in on an Management Consulting class all semester and gained quite a few inside tips from a former partner of KPMG. As you might know, I’ve accepted a full-time offer from a consultancy out on the East coast, so here are just a few of his insights that I found particularly interesting
- Your only job is to make your boss look good. Your boss’s job is to make the partner look good. Your partner’s job is to make the client look good to his boss. Nothing else.
- The primary reason people hire consultants is for competitive intelligence on your other clients
- Implementing “best practices” usually starts with someone else’s good work
- Consultants regularly eat profit for large engagements
- A client complaining to you is the best thing that can happen to you
- Consultants sell confidence first
- Successful consultants are 70% relationships, 20% content, and10% price
And the list goes on… More to come later.
“Your only job is to make your boss look good.” LOL, that’s probably the most accurate description of the job I’ve come across in quite a while. They should be handing that one out to all new employees as they enter the building.