Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Are consultants worth their price tag? Or have all the bad players out there ruined it for everyone?
As former consultants themselves, Raul and Toni debate if consultants are a con or a cure, and give us tips on what to look out for when you want to hire one for your project.
As former consultants themselves, Raul and Toni debate if consultants are a con or a cure, and give us tips on what to look out for when you want to hire one for your project.
Creators & Guests
What is Revenue Brothers?
What happens when a VC and a CEO come together?
– They nerd out about all things revenue. And they don’t always agree.
Raul Porojan of Project A Ventures and Toni Hohlbein of Growblocks are the Super Revenue Brothers. In every episode they dissect and debate current issues in B2B SaaS, and offer solutions on how to solve them
No matter if you’re an early-stage startup or a scaling unicorn – you’ll always learn something new.
RevBros - Con or Cure: Consultants May 17
===
Introduction
---
[00:00:00]
Toni: Ooh, wow, that needs to change drastically. , now give me 50, 000 because I told you so. Then they leave, you change it like they said, everything goes to shit.
Toni: And now what? You can't get the money back from the consultant. You can't claim damages. Hey, any damages we cause. It's your fault. You had the choice. We gave you A and B and you chose B and it's your fault.
Toni: So, Raul, some people might not know this, but what are actually the things that you and I have in common?
Raul: we are extremely good looking, very
Toni: Yes. Yes.
Raul: and, uh, we actually have both been, or still are to some extent, uh, connected to a very, very dark group of people who, um, you should really stay away from and, and especially as a startup, never work with, uh, the consultants. Right. And so and me, we both have been consultants or are to some extent could be described as that.
Raul: And I think we should talk about that.
Consultants: Con or Cure?
---
Toni: Yeah. So I think [00:01:00] what we're going to. Name this thing is probably Con or Cure? Consultants question mark, right? Maybe you start with this Raul. What's your thinking on Con or Cure Consultants?
Raul: Consultants, to me very clearly as a class, absolute cure. , now on an individual basis. A lot of consultants, absolute cons. So you have to sort of differentiate this as a, as a concept, the idea of getting someone in to help with a specific problem. And maybe I can dissect a little bit what these could be and how you should approach that to get the maximum out for you.
Raul: Um, this is a good idea, right? And there's a reason why these people exist. Now, problem is it can be a very attractive business for a lot of people. And it can be something that if you're. unscrupulous, , enough to get into it and maybe have one or two things going for you. You could sell yourself as someone who can do things for you that they can't do at all.
Raul: And I would say that's probably the majority of people. So 80, 90 percent of people out there are probably [00:02:00] not worth your time and, are really not someone that you should work with. And that's maybe where the class of people has their bad, rep from.
Toni: I think being a consultant is, I think the good thing actually that comes with it, you can literally say yes to any feature request. You know what I mean? So in the early days of Growblocks, , we were basically building the product but it wasn't there yet. I mean, it took us like a year, year and a half to kind of get something that, basically kind of was fulfilling, the core idea that we had, right.
Toni: Because building this engine was so difficult. So what we also decided from day one was we're going to, we're going to test this out. We're going to learn by, also using customers data and customer cases and so forth and selling the stuff to see are people having that problem, but the delivery would be.
Toni: through consulting, basically. And the thing is with this consultant stuff, it's like when you're then on a sales call, , and they ask you something, you can say, yep, we can do that. And yeah, we can also do this. We can do that. and I think [00:03:00] this trap both for the consultant and for the prospect is actually what's leading to what you just said there, which someone probably is fairly good in a specific area, like maybe an expert, but because you then kind of widen the scope.
Toni: And the consultant wants to sell the hours, they drift more and more into an area where they maybe don't know that much about. And then you probably kind of come to this point where. Hey, you know, over here is my forte, I'm good, but I'm also going to say yes to this other thing because otherwise I can't close the account.
Toni: And then probably the value of the advice you get, is kind of dropping a lot, right? Do you think that's the root cause? Because I don't think people are mean or bad or malicious or something like this. I don't think that's what's driving most of it. I think it's greed, probably, coupled with,, you know, trying to make this thing work out and then going into areas where they're maybe not as strong.
The misconceptions of consultants
---
Raul: Okay. Lots of ideas behind that. And, and here's the point where I think it, it may become useful for you as a listener to maybe figure out who, [00:04:00] how to find the good ones, but also how to get actual value out of working with a consultant. And so number one, biggest misconception that everyone has about this is especially people who get into consulting or want to get into it, but also people who use consultants is expertise does not equal a good consultant.
Raul: There is, so being a good consultant. At the end of the day is a skill on its own. And it's just like, maybe you were a good football player that doesn't make you a good coach, but it could be that you're a good coach, even though you were maybe just a mediocre football player, so being a good consultant does not mean you have the maximum knowledge or the maximum experience or the best CV.
Raul: It simply means you're the person. Who's best able to help someone overcome their problems. And there's much more to that than just sort of the experience that you have in your mind. There's a skillset of applying that and making sure that someone actually gets value out of that. And I think people misunderstand how big of a part that plays in.
Raul: Being a good [00:05:00] consultant in, in, in understanding where people are, what they need right now at the time, where maybe you should push, where you should pull, where you should leave them alone, how to make sure that they actually execute on things to actually get better and not just talk about things. And, cause this is the difficult work of sort of becoming a consultant, right?
Raul: That's number one. Number two, and again, I'm not saying that these people are demons because they try to make money. I, we all try to make money. That's not the problem there. The problem is that There's easy ways to make money as a consultant that are actually not good for people.
Raul: So you have diverging interests, for the actors out there, right? So a lot of the advice that people go, that people give, and especially some of the bigger names out there that, that are maybe even building brands on they're becoming very famous is overly simplified, things that sound like they're true, so sort of these truisms, and they might be helping you, and they're sort of, they make you feel, they make you, they scratch your itch of feeling like you have solved something, but actually [00:06:00] you haven't, and not just, that you haven't solved actually your problem, but maybe you've even bought into something that is not actually relevant for you.
Raul: So a lot of benchmarking, a lot of frameworks, people throw out there because they're easy to digest. They make you happy as a customer of sort of like knowledge, but then they don't actually help you produce a better company, but they're very easy to mass market. They're very easy to put into a PDF and then on a landing page.
Raul: Uh, So people sort of like book these standardized products with you. And that's the skill there because as a consultancy or as a consultant, you want to maximize output per hour. And that's best done by producing standardized things, which almost never can guarantee that you get the best value out of it.
Toni: Yeah. No, I I think you're right because, uh, uh, in the end, uh, a service organization wants to become a product organization without building the product. I mean, it's like, yes, the people are the product, get it. But the idea should be that, you can have like an expensive partner figure stuff out, and then you have [00:07:00] interns that can roll it out again and again and again across the board.
Toni: And then the partner just hops, you know, two hours here, two hours there. And basic kind of fine tunes, right? That's the way the big guys are really making money that they're doing those strategy projects, but they're using the same template again and again, and again, and again, , that's kind of what gets them there.
Toni: I'm not sure if there's something wrong with it, actually. Kind of, if, if you're, you know, you and I had this conversation about benchmarks, we're like, you know, is it a con, is it a cure? , we had the same thing about those frameworks and those rules of thumb. , I think there is some, there's some value in teaching people something complex in a simple way, and that might not always hit the mark.
Toni: I totally get that. I think there's also, you know, that comes with it. There's a bit. Let's just say it's not actually benchmarking, but it's industry expertise, right? If you have seen many of those,, outlets from the inside, if you have seen many SaaS businesses from the inside, , you don't only bring like number benchmarks of like, oh, [00:08:00] that number should be three and that number should be 0.
Toni: 4, uh, you also bring, hey, that's how they usually run it. Uh, you know, it's, it's this best practice thing, actually, now, now that I'm thinking through it, that's actually kind of what people bring with them. Right. And I think these things can be super helpful, right? Because, um, How else are you going to be doing that?
Toni: You're going to be hiring a seasoned professional that has, you know, done this many, many times, but how many of those are there, right? Kind of that can actually kind of hop and help you with a specific problem. So I think, I think if you have a very clear issue and you have a very clear, okay, these guys are the best in that issue, I think this consultancy thing can totally work for you.
Toni: That's, that's actually kind of how I'm thinking about the, the broader you go, the more unclear you are about the actual problem you have. I think the less value you will get from just then hiring someone to try and help you with this thing.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
---
Raul: Interesting. That's [00:09:00] exactly where I, uh, I disagree because I think, uh, actually, no, I disagree only with the second part. So I think with highly specific things, there are some people out there who do that specific thing quite well and can help you with that. Yes. I would disagree with the fact that as your problems become more fuzzy, um, Well, maybe that's where 95 percent of accounts consultants will stop being helpful, but that's where the actual ones that are actually maybe good at what they're doing and able to help you with complex problems, that's where those come in, because those do exist.
Raul: And the difference
Toni: example actually, kind of, because we're, we're very theoretically, do you have like an example
Raul: I was going to go right into this, right? And so, so the difference is, why am I, I'm not talking about these bad actors as in like morally bad, but like, my problem is that there's a bunch of people out there who have something that they know, hopefully. I mean, unless they're absolute liars and charlatans, that's a different class of people, but I'm assuming people who actually know something.
Raul: So for example, someone, they've worked as a head of sales somewhere, or as a head of SDR, and they know how to produce a bunch of leads, right? [00:10:00] And that's it, right? Or maybe even someone who did rev ops and they, they know how to build a good Hubspot or whatever. The problem is that 90 percent of consultants have one hammer or two hammers.
Raul: And as the saying goes to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail. And what a lot of founders don't realize is that you come to them with maybe a problem that is quite multifaceted and that should be thought about maybe on Actually, I don't know. For example, oh, why, uh, why is my data screwed? Why are people not using the system as it should, and my sales data is screwed, so I actually have no visibility over my funnel.
Raul: Well, a good consultant might be looking at this from different angles and say, well, Okay, let's figure it out. Like, let's sit together with them. Let's find out why they're not doing it. Oh, is it because they're dumb? Did you hire the wrong people? No, maybe you incentivized them wrong. Maybe you gave them the wrong processes.
Raul: But maybe you also built your system in such a way that the processes are basically unable to follow. Or your expectations of them are wrong. So there is a lot of things that can be understood to holistically [00:11:00] solve this problem. Because typically, a problem such as my data sucks is almost never solved.
Raul: A very simple problem to solve. It needs, it means that there's something wrong with the process. It means there's something wrong with data, maybe with your setup, maybe with people. And so you do that after a couple of weeks, maybe you solve the problem. Now, a lot of bad actors, they have one hammer. They will come into your company and say, Oh yeah, yeah.
Raul: We've seen this 90 times. And there'll be very consistent with convincing with their argument. And they will propose to you exactly the one solution that they know, or one of the two that they know, and do always that. It will always be some sort of audit on HubSpot and do that. Or it will always be some, the same project that they've done 10 times in a row, which is maybe not exactly what you need.
Raul: Or maybe even different, right? Maybe let's say you come with a much more strategic project. You're like, Hey, we're not performing well. We don't know what to do anymore. And then there are some people who will always tell you, you need more leads. That's what you need. Cause that's what I know. So that's what I'm going to sell to you.
Raul: Then there's others who are very going, [00:12:00] Coaching and training. And they will always sell you a sales training. Doesn't matter if maybe you have a process problem. Or maybe you have actually a setup problem. They will think, and they will convince you that a sales training is going to, going to be what solves everything.
Raul: And that's what I have an issue with, right? These people with one hammer or two hammers that think that they can solve everything with this one hammer or with this one framework or with this one training or that exact tool.
Strategies-only consultants
---
Toni: What about this whole, consultants come in, you give them a lot of money and then they give you a PowerPoint back and then they leave kind of basically the, okay, cool, someone did the thinking that that is valuable. Don't get me wrong. But as a founder, as a CEO, I'm always like, well, but my problem isn't solved yet.
Toni: You know, I have like a first idea how it might have been, you know, what the right solution might be, but it's still there I sometimes hate the It's kind of a besa visa kind of thing, right? It's like, ah, you know, this is how you should be doing it. Bye. But then actually when the execution happens and you run [00:13:00] into new issues, then like they're already gone.
Toni: Right. And so that's why I'm sometimes like, you know what I think it would be better, we would be better off by doing the full thing ourselves. We would learn a lot, you know, it will be iterations and so forth. What do you think about this kind of the whole strategy only consultancies, basically.
Raul: Yes, this is exactly also adding to my point. So why do you hire a consultant or a consultancy? Cause there's big difference, right? A random freelancer running around in Berlin trying to help you is different from like hiring one of the big three consultancies, not the same universe. , why do you do that at the end of the day?
Raul: Cause you want to get better at something or you want to solve something or solve some problems. So your measure, and I think a lot of people forget that because they forget themselves in like beautiful slides and references and all that, your measure of who you should be working with and how you should be evaluating that after the fact is the solving of that problem.
Raul: Or a lot of times also, honestly, is maybe identification of new [00:14:00] problems, or maybe a lot of times it's that they tell you, well, wait, wait, this is actually not your problem, but it should be a new one, right? It should be something else that you should be focusing, but it should be that you're better off than before.
Raul: And being better of them before, almost never, as you said, consists of just listening to someone and paying them like 10k for like a session. But it, there should be something coming out of that, that either enables you to also execute on that, or it should also include the execution. And so that's again, why to me, when you're trying to work with someone, is The skill of executing change is one of the skill sets of being a good consultant, right?
Raul: Or the skill of maybe not executing, but helping someone execute on their own is a different skill. Not everyone, just because they know how it should be done, because maybe they're the expert on things, it does not mean that they're an expert on how to help you get there.
Toni: yeah.
Raul: And this is what I was talking about earlier, right?
Raul: So if you want a good consultant, 95 percent of people make the [00:15:00] mistake of asking around like, who's a guy who knows about this or that, or look at her CV and she saw a lot of different things. That has very little connotation or connection to being a consultant. You know, a consultant means that you're able to help someone get better.
Raul: And I've seen a lot of people, very underappreciated people, who maybe did not have the stellar CV or did not have that one or two big name brand thing on their CV, but they're actually. properly motivated and they actually have developed skill sets to help you be better in a month and even better in three and even better 12 months later, rather than the person who comes in with a shiny CV.
Skin in the game
---
Toni: What about the, and I think you mentioned this earlier, kind of basically the agency problem, right? The principal agency problem. What about skin in the game? I'm just reading, kind of finally getting to around to kind of reading the Nassim Taleb book, Skin in the Game. Not sure if you know this, but like, yeah, yeah.
Toni: Read the other stuff. It's the last one still open. Um, so what about skin in the game for consultants, right? Because they come [00:16:00] in And there's like, Ooh, wow, this thing, that needs to change drastically. , and now give me 50, 000 because I told you so. Then they leave, you change it like they said, everything goes to shit.
Toni: And now what? You can't get the money back from the consultant. You can't claim damages. There's nothing there, right? Kind of they've write it big into their contract, like, Hey, any damages we cause. It's your fault. You had the choice. We gave you A and B and you chose B and it's your fault.
Toni: What about this skin in the game issue that we're having with consultants that are, you know, telling you to do things on like, a very, very, you know, sometimes very, very important decisions. And then actually don't really care how the decision turns out.
Raul: You know, I just discovered a new connection. We have a really, really big fan of Nassim Taleb, by the way, in Turtle
Toni: There you go.
Raul: can do everything.
Toni: Yeah. Hmm.
Raul: Swan and then uh, uh, Anti Fragile is something I really, really try to live a lot by. So that's funny to me. You bring up a good point and I think from sort of the, [00:17:00] the understanding of a customer sort of for a consultant, you would wish that maybe you could have some sort of skin in the game thing.
Raul: But it's really not that easy to implement. And even if you wanted to, there's some, like the logistics of it are not that easy because, , the, Connection to, so I think we talked about this yesterday at the meetup, finally enough, a lot of people had trouble sort of implementing some sort of measure for how well RevOps was doing in their companies and then, basing salary off of that.
Raul: Right now. Take that and make it 10 times as difficult because the person is an outsider, hasn't even been in your company, and has basically no influence over it, unless they really stay there for two years in an interim role or so. So that's one of the aspects of that, right? It is really difficult to link these things.
Raul: However, still incentivize, incentivizations around this still do exist, right? So I have seen this, and I have seen, , companies of ours also work with consultancies in that way, and sort of have a lagging, factor behind. But typically, I wouldn't call these [00:18:00] consultancies, that they work with.
Raul: It's more like companies who promise them something, and then they deliver it on that. For example, there's some companies in Berlin who do that, who promise you, oh, we're going to come in and we're going to help you produce 200 leads within two months. And then they're very bullish on the fact that they can do that.
Raul: And if they can do that, you give them another extra 10 K or there's, I've seen Salesforce agencies who's done that. They go out there to differentiate themselves and they tell you, , We are very bullish. We can build this thing in two months. , if we do so we'll get another extra 5k and a lot of customers are very happy to do that.
Raul: Right. And you build it in two months and people are, it's being rolled out. You write it down. You have a definition of done and you know exactly what that is. Right. I think the more concrete the problem becomes, the easier that is for something like overall business performance, it's basically impossible.
Raul: And that's also to some extent, which is one thing that I really want to get into. And I think it's really important as well. This is not a one way road. So having been on the other side, having worked as a consultant. And I hope a good one, as good as I could possibly do and [00:19:00] follow these principles that I was talking about. A lot of customers stand in their own way when making it, when working with a consultant. And sometimes it's not your fault as a consultant when things don't work out. And so I think a lot of times it's really also important to give them a chance in the first place, right? To understand like how to get the most out of that.
Raul: That's also a little bit of a
Toni: I just think kind of, and I haven't bought that much consultancy services, by the way. Um, I've, you know, I've seen BCG working with us. I've seen Bain working with us. I've seen kind of some of those and they're like, it all looks very impressive, by the way. ,
Toni: but I've also caught them doing extremely stupid shit.
Toni: like completely wrong stuff, basically, which they still gobbled up, which the executive team from our side still gobbled up and it's like, Oh, let's totally do that. But it was completely, it was kind of BS. I think one of the, one of the [00:20:00] issues I sometimes feel with any kind of consultancy, and I'm not talking big three here.
Toni: I'm talking like any, anyone is for me as a founder, for me as someone like a budget holder, with like skin in the game is. I always have my, you know, my BS scan detector like pop up. It's always right. It's always like, ah, you know, I'm not quite sure. Can you actually do this is really going to help. Do I really want to pay 200, 000 for this?
Toni: I think this is what consultancies are kind of fighting against for better and for worse. I'm not quite sure where I'm landing there, but you know, for me personally, I'm always skeptical. I'm always skeptical across the board. Right. And, and I think this is, you know, too bad, but it's, it's also, um, and I think it comes from the intrinsic motivation from the other side to actually make this work out.
Toni: You know what I mean? It's like when you hire an employee. [00:21:00] They don't want to get fired. Like, Oh, sure. I can join another company and stuff. I think there's a lot of personal pride in not wanting to get fired and wanting to do well, you know, wanting to get the pat on the shoulder, you're going to have the, you know, being part of the tribe, seeing this whole thing succeed, right.
That is skin in the game, basically. Kind of you spending your lifetime on this company, that's skin in the game. But for a consultant, you really don't have that actually. And then it's really the Okay, how else am I going to judge? How else am I going to get to the point where I'm convinced that no, this is going to work out if you don't have this overarching, Hey, you know, they're doing it for their own good.
Toni: Me successful means they're successful. They're doing it for their own good. If you don't have that, I think, a lot of additional questions usually arise, right? So it would be great if you could solve that real world, if you could just solve the skin in the game issues of consultants. And by the way, totally right.
Toni: And this is what I've seen being a consultant, by the way, I didn't enjoy it, but what I've seen being [00:22:00] a consultant is like, yeah, sometimes it's also the client that. It's the one screwing this whole thing up, right? And kind of you, you cannot deliver the results because maybe you're not being prioritized.
Toni: Maybe they're not doing their part of the bargain and so forth, me as a person buying that stuff, I'm always worried about like, Hey, is our interest actually aligned here? It's a little bit like when you get a lawyer, it's like, do we pay them by the hour? Do they pay him by, you know, winning a case?
Toni: How do you align those incentives really in order to get the best out of it? And if you can't, you need to be ultra careful. That's kind of how I sometimes think about it.
How to weed out bad actors
---
Raul: Yes, I think you should be careful, but I think there are some things and I can give you a couple, if you're maybe in the, I think almost every founder will at some point either consider or work with a consultant or come into contact with that. So I think it's, it's a helpful list of things to look out for.
Raul: There are some things that if you look out for them and if you pay attention, you already. weed out a lot of the bad actors and Not bad people but bad actors and maybe people that wouldn't be a good fit for your agency. So whatever number one, these [00:23:00] consultancies in general almost I'm not talking about the big big ones as you did but like sort of these let's say 50 people 30 people 20 people agencies a lot of times survive and thrive solely on the reputation of the founders, because maybe it's one guy who did something a lot, or it's like one guy who's an influencer or wrote a book or has a podcast or whatever and you really respect that person, or maybe that person is respected by others and they give you good references about that person, understand and realize that when you have a consulting project, You're probably not working with that person, right?
Raul: The person who's pitching you that thing, the person who's meeting you for coffee is not the junior analyst who's going to have to sort of, , overhaul your marketing strategy. And, this is really important. So figure out who you're working with and talk to these people, right? And. Sort of the brilliance and genius of individuals is not so easily scalable across especially big consultancies.
Raul: So look for more than just one person's reputation, which I think a lot of people already get wrong, right? they watch one channel by one guy, they listen to one podcast, [00:24:00] immediately associate that person's consultancy with that person's knowledge and think that's what they're gonna get. But again, Someone's being a lot of knowledge out there doesn't mean that they're able to actually build us a group of people able to help you So that's number one.
Raul: Number two is look for especially that look maybe even for people who don't have the flashiest names But who are able to build consultants That actually can help you that are able to do the things that I talked about earlier before and maybe More than just like a couple juniors and then one big fish at the top So that's sort of like one area another one would be To weed out a lot of the bad actors really look for the hammers that they have so if you understand that a lot of people out there and I would really assume 80 90 percent of Consultancies and consultants have really only just one or two hammers You will very quickly understand what those are, right?
Raul: And you will really quickly understand, , if you listen carefully that almost for every problem, they will want to pitch you, , sales training, even though they're not sales training [00:25:00] related, or for almost every problem, they will want to pitch you, ,SEO overhauling or whatever the, the topic is that you're, that you're working on, right?
Raul: So, and especially the faster they will give you for Very complex problems. The faster they will give you a very simplified answer, the more it's probably BS, right? So if you're sitting down with someone and, , I'm saying, Hey, Toni, we have a very complicated problem. I have no idea where to begin. People are not entering data.
Raul: This is going wrong. We can't hire people. And, , we don't have no forecast. It's always wrong. And we are also lacking behind in numbers. And you talk to me for a minute and a minute later, you tell me you need to, you know, I don't know. This is your solution. Dude, you're probably bullshitting me because in actuality, but the funny thing is that a lot of people want to hear exactly that.
Raul: They want to have an easy solution. We're like, yes, great. Let's do that. How much? 30k. Let's do it in a month. We're done. No, the solution is the truth. And to me as a consultant, that was always difficult to sell. And I managed to a lot of times though, the actual solution is, okay, this is complicated. We probably, we need to do something like an [00:26:00] audit and sit down and look at eight or nine or 10 different things for two, three weeks, and then figure out a complex solution that maybe includes processes, but also people, but also your tech and sort of goes into the different things to make you actually better.
Raul: And that's not what people want to hear. So the faster you get a very simplified answer, the more that person is probably not able to actually help you.
Toni: And it's tricky. It's so tricky, , because people don't want to hear that the solution is complicated. They want to hear that it's simple , and especially simple solutions sell the best. That's the thing, right? It's like, Oh, Hey, you did this thing wrong.
Toni: I can fix this. No problem. , it's a much easier sell than to be like, Oh, wow. Yeah. This thing here. And I'm going to do those 20, 000 things. And then it's maybe going to work. I can't guarantee, but maybe it's going to, it's much harder to sell the other thing. So sometimes I would even say like, well, maybe Maybe simplifying it down in order to close the deal, but then actually executing.
Toni: what's necessary to get it done, that can also work, [00:27:00] right? So it's so difficult. , and it also again, , to our benchmarking framework conversation that we had kind of on another show here, , it's, You, as an expert, you don't want to teach everything, you know, to the other person so they can do it.
Toni: That's actually not what you want to do. You want to tell them easily in simple ways that's what I'm going to do. And then you do your expert shit, right? , so I think it's even hard to say like, well, you know, that sounds like a simple solution. It came up pretty quickly. You must be full of shit.
Toni: I think that's potentially even also kind of. Not a, not a really great signal actually kind of to, to follow necessarily. I think what I buy completely is the, who was on the call, other partner, who's going to show up in the office or the intern. I think that is the main thing is kind of, it's not the firm you're buying, it's the person you're fucking buying.
Toni: And I think that's kind of what you need to be super clear on actually. And yes, you're right. There's a reputational risk here as well. You almost want to dangle upsell [00:28:00] opportunities that are kind of not necessarily true, you know, not, not completely fake.
Toni: But not completely there. You almost want to dangle some like, Hey, if this works out, I'm going to do this other thing potentially, and create skin in the game through that, because then they're thinking, ah, shit, yes, sure, reputation risk, and, you know, maybe the, you know, he speaks poorly of me at one, but you almost want to create this, like, well, if you clear gate A successfully, and I'm happy about it, and there's an, then there's a gate B over there as well that we could talk about, right.
Toni: I would probably use. Some of those ways to create skin in the game on the other side, right? I don't know, I'm getting hung up on the skin in the game thing, but I think this is, it is fundamental actually to this piece here, right? And then, you know, even though you have skin in the game, even though everything is there, truth is, hey, those are also just people.
Toni: They might also get it wrong. They might not kind of, you know, do the right thing. But I think ultimately those would be ways how you can weed out some of the bad stuff, , and get to the right, [00:29:00] help you need.
Raul: Yeah. And yes, there are people and your judgment of them, I think, I'm not shying away from these things, but I think if you want to not be disappointed and if you want to have sort of a fair conversation about things, , I think a lot of people who use consultants, they choose the wrong approach and evaluating whether it worked out or not.
Raul: So if. Think, look at it as you're going to the doctor. So if you go to the doctor, you're out of shape, you were smoking too much, drinking too much, whatever. You're paying the doctor to help you solve the problem, but you're not helping him to solve it. Like you, you're not going to be like, I don't know where you're at.
Raul: So maybe you don't pay the doctor, depending on maybe in Denmark, but You're not expecting the doctor to do the work for you and work out for you and stop smoking and drinking for you. You're maybe asking him how to do it better or how he's done, how he's seen it with others or how he can maybe be on your ass once a month and call you or whatever, like, but you're not going to be mad at them.
Raul: If the doctor wasn't able to make you stop smoking or, or, or, or. Start running and I think you should look at it like this if [00:30:00] that is what the doctor is promising you But again, there are some agencies who actually want to do the thing as well And then obviously you should be judging them on this.
Raul: So I think Sort of like gauging well on how you should actually, , evaluate the collaboration after is going to save you a lot of pain. If you're, if before you're actually deciding on, wait, wait, wait, we're actually paying them. We can't pay them for results. If what they're doing is trying to tell us what to do and maybe helping us with frameworks and all these things, , then we shouldn't judge them on their ability to execute the thing that, that we have to do.
Toni: I think, and maybe I'm trying to wrap this up here now, I think, , consultants is a trust product. It's exactly the same product that you have with the doctor. The doctor doesn't have an ulterior motive, by the way, he's not getting paid or not paid. Kind of, he gets his money anyway. He doesn't care.
Toni: But you go to a doctor, he prescribes some meds, you take them, but. And you get better. Do you know if those meds actually help? You don't know. You just trust the whole thing, right? , [00:31:00] and I think the same thing is with consultants and you kind of have to trust it and trust in business sometimes hard.
Toni: So it might be kind of a relationship that you have that kind of, that helps you build this. Or you need to find some other ways to create trust. Skin in the game, , dangling some other opportunity in front of them, , making sure that they're really bought in and not kind of seeing you as like a side hustle.
Toni: I think that's the trick actually. and if you can get that done, I think the value of a consultant is, Indisputably really high, right? if you get the right thing, buying that in any other way would be extremely expensive. So it's really a cheap option. If you think about it, you just need to make sure you select the right one for the right problem.
Toni: I think that's actually the issue, but, , Raul, wow. I mean, we talked through this whole consultancy thing. , and, I'm almost landing where you started out. It's like, , generally speaking as a class. I think it's a cure. And then you have lots of bad actors that are maybe more than the majority potentially, , where you're basically kind of a con in there.
Toni: So, yeah, I'm also probably landing in the middle, unfortunately. , but if you [00:32:00] enjoy this, everyone hit subscribe, , tell your friends about this podcast. , and thanks everyone for listening.
Raul: Thanks everyone.
Toni: Bye bye.