Consulting on the cusp of Disruption

Small or large, private or public; organisations at some point in their lifecycle will need to go outside their own walls for specific supplemental expertise. That search for the right consulting partner can be where the ‘fun’ begins.

When we think of consulting more often than not the large ‘elite’ firms come to mind. If you have experienced the services of these more traditional firms, you may wince, remembering initial meetings in showy offices, scores of admin staff, fancy boardrooms and lots of ‘consulting’ speak. That may seem like an unfair synopsis. However, when you speak with a business who came away from a project feeling there was a definite disconnect between what they needed and what they actually received, it seems apt. Often wooed by a senior partner with experience, they find themselves dealing with junior staff as the project progresses. Without doubt these junior staff will be smart, very hard-working and well-trained, but they know absolutely nothing about your industry. Indeed, the senior partner you initially met will most likely not be a subject matter expert either. Most partners in these larger firms are career consultants. Their value is pattern recognition, without specific expertise in your industry. There is a significant gap between client needs and what traditional consultancy offers.

Clients no longer want to pay fat fees for a bit of strategic advice from a senior partner and a lot of humdrum work from neophytes. – The Economist.

Clients are already beginning to question what they are paying for. If a firm needs some help with a particular project, why should they pay huge fees and enter into an open-ended contract with a firm when all they need is a number of days help from a subject expert? Lack of hands-on subject matter expertise and knowledge transfer back to the company are often the greatest sources of dissatisfaction for clients. With a premium placed on these requirements where does this leave the consulting world? This is a sector which has remained remarkably untouched by disruptors so far. In fact, the sector has profited greatly from advising clients in other sectors on how to respond to disruption. But the new wave of consulting has arrived bringing disruption with it.

Firms can now retain expert consultants for short-term, fixed price assignments across an ever-widening spectrum of areas including data protection and compliance, finance, IT strategy, technology implementation, marketing, process improvement, manufacturing, quality management, supply chain management etc. and the list goes on and on.

In any industry, when the basis of competition becomes efficiency rather than innovation and new solutions, disruption lies on the horizon. ReganStein, a bespoke, innovative management consulting firm founded by Joe Aherne of the Leading Edge Group, is delivering instant business expertise that is more convenient and cost-effective than engaging a large unwieldy consultancy firm, thereby disrupting the traditional consulting model. Joe Aherne states “Our intention is to disrupt the consulting market especially at the competitive levels of consulting. Festering underneath these firms’ myriad consulting offerings, methodologies and business models lies vulnerabilities that I feel will eventually unravel the global consulting business model”.

It was with these bug-bears in mind that ReganStein was set up with a vision to do things differently. Their panel of 50+ hand-picked consultants come from all walks of life and are vastly experienced. With 20, 30 and even 40+ years’ experience in mid-level and senior level management roles, there is very little that they haven’t come across in business.
What does that leave you with? Someone who can come into your organisation, hitting the ground running and providing immediate benefit. What’s not to like!