Dear business world,
I am sorry for the current state of consulting.
For those of you who are unaware, consulting firms don’t have the best reputation right now. What once felt like a respected profession has become a frustrating mixture of billable hours, PowerPoints, unearned confidence, long work days, and people who continuously name drop the ivy league college they went to.
So, kind of like law firms, but less “practicing law” and more “thought leadership”.
Again, I’m so sorry.
I could list the problematic things consulting firms have done lately (there are many) but I’ll just cut to the chase: People have lost trust. Simple as that. This is not a surprise because, if you’re like me, you know the stories — overpromised outcomes, endless presentations with no execution, poor results from the real work being pushed off on overworked college grads or offshore sub-contractors, seven to eight figure bills, and projects that drag on forever.
You deserve better.
You deserve to seek outside help on important problems and — as a result of doing that — have those problems be solved. You deserve to have clear & simple pricing when doing this. You deserve to have the work you paid for be done by the expert who said they’d do it. You deserve to get the outcomes you were promised. And you deserve to not have someone continuously tell you they went to Harvard undergrad as they give you a vague PowerPoint about an industry they’ve never worked in.
You deserve, what is apparently, the opposite of what consulting has become.
I do want to be clear, I am not saying all consulting firms are bad. In fact, I want you to have a good experience when using one. I say this in part because I run a consulting firm and want people to consider me substantially more likeable than a lawyer. But I also say this because in a time when business technology is extremely complicated it shouldn’t suck for you to get help when you need it!
My consulting firm started by helping friends' businesses with their software problems and grew to having Fortune 100 clients. It wasn’t until afterwards I realized we did everything the opposite of the industry and had apparently started an anti-consulting firm by mistake. I hope the big firms – the Deloitte’s, EY’s, and Accenture’s of the world – will figure out how to be anti-consultants too. If not, well, you know where to find me.
Sincerely,
Ferris Ellis
CEO & Founder
Urban Dynamics
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