The C Word

I was told last week that my blogs are getting a little bit lengthy. What I find amazing is that they take less than four minutes to read. Now if you genuinely don't have a spare four minutes in your working week to be gently entertained and educated, you really need to hire some more people. Screw the credit crunch - if you're too busy to enjoy yourself then that's just plain wrong.

This week I want to talk about the C word. A dirty word that's being used in more and more offices around the world. A word that makes most people wince and some others angry. A word that has been inflicted upon us in times of strife. A word so evil in it's inception that to utter it is surely to open the gates of hell itself (mwa ha ha ha ha evil laugh....)

The word is.....CONSULTANT.

You know the sort, the well suited, big smiled, slick haired bloke who spends weeks in your office interviewing all the staff to try and work out where your business is going wrong, charges you a ridiculous fee and then proceeds to tell you all the stuff that you already know.

One of my clients recently had a report from a consultant advising them that if they got their products to market faster, that they could sell them sooner and then make more money quickly - GENIUS! My son is 7 months old and even he could have put that report together - obviously I would have had to have typed it up for him, his hands are too small to do any serious keyboard work, but you get the idea.

More and more people are changing their title to consultant. Recruitment Consultants, Travel Consultants, pretty soon it won't be long before we're all being served by Burger Consultants, charging us a fee for recommending the use of fries and a milkshake.

It's all out of control and what is worse, we're missing the obvious trick. We are, in fact, ALL consultants. If someone comes to you with a question or a problem, then they are consulting with you. Surely there are still some people in the world who are happy to dispense their advice for free?

My business card has me down as an Account Manager. I prefer to think of myself as a marketing consultant, but that title brings up some negative feeling. I know that I have created campaigns and slogans that certain marketing consultants will have charged tens of thousands of pounds for, and I did it all for free. Why? Because good advice yields its own rewards. Those clients did buy merchandise from me and a great relationship was formed - everybody won and I was happy to provide a consultation to my clients.

This is the thing I cannot get my head around. Week on week my company offers free marketing consultations to companies around the world, and yet many of them are simply not interested. Did I mention it was free? We're talking about a company who advise the number one Superbrand in the world and we're offering you the same level of advice for free and you don't want it?

By all means, call up some marketing consultant firm with a swanky website and ask them to come in. If you're lucky, maybe they won't charge you ten grand to tell you that the best way to make more money is to sell more stuff.

My name is Paul, and I am a consultant. It's not always a dirty word.