The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; what's wrong with yesterday's model for delivering solutions?

Option 1: staffing  |  Option 2: "big" consulting  |  Option 3: Better Consulting

[previous post] It is precisely these ideas that differentiate us from the two ends of the spectrum prevalent in IT services (both of which I've worked extensively with in the past)...

Option 1: Staffing - At the low end of IT services we have staffing companies, which fulfill the need for basic recruiting for lower level roles. However, as skills sets get deeper and demands for specific experience increase, staffing companies aren't able to deliver either the caliber of talent, nor the experience that aligns with a customer's needs.

The staffing industry can be described concisely as taking a job requisition and searching their database of resumes for keywords and providing a "match". Time and time again this results in customers interviewing candidates who don't have the skills, experience or soft skills to get the job done.

Option 2: "Big" Consulting - There are a number of "big" consulting shops that claim to have expertise in everything under the sun, and "coincidentally" it happens to be whatever the customer they are talking to might buy. They have massive advertising campaigns and often engage professional athletes as paid spokespeople. They swarm customers with lavish attention and bring in all of their "experts". Once the initial "wooing" period is over, they drive hard up your organizations ranks to make the sale. They won't hesitate to go over anyone's head to get the answers they want. Their solutions are often "strategic" in nature, which is really code for "open-ended"; they sell you on an sales-concept, and the experience of their experts.

The harsh reality is that they have very few of these experts, and although they will promise that these individuals will be involved in your project, they never are. You are lucky if you even get employees of said consultancy; most often they subcontract the project deliverables to the lowest bidding subcontractor. This results in the same or lower quality than if you'd just tried to execute the project yourself, which really nullifies any value associated with these "consultants".

To add insult to injury, these "big" consultancies charge ridiculous rates for their services. I've seen many occasions where a customer is paying $300+ per hour for people whom the consultancy subcontracts for about $50 per hour. The value they add; nothing but a sales process that takes advantage of customers. Sure, there are lots of tricks that they can utilize to diffuse "savvy" customers, such as getting in the door with a seemingly low budget number, but then issuing change orders under the budget is a distant memory. 

Option 3: Better Consulting - We do consulting, and we do it well, with honestly, expertise and experience. We don't do the "bait-and-switch"; you will always deal with our best people because those are the only individuals we hire. Our prices are lower than the "big" consultancies because we don't have the crushing overhead of huge multi-national organization. We deal in solutions, not trying to outsource your entire IT organization. We deal with our customers honestly and fairly because we aren't there to "close the deal", we're there to form a long-term foundation for doing business together. Our foundation is our customers, so that is where we focus our business. We don't deal in outdated maxims and paradigms, we deal in relevant solutions and flexible engagement.

Relative to staffing the difference is crystal clear; we are extremely involved with our clients in defining their needs because we understand them deeply. When it comes to interviewing and hiring our staff, we don't do keyword searches, we find the best people in our wide network and then interview them with specific roles and delivery in mind. Our interviews are peer interviews, so you know if you talk to one of our newer CCIE consultants, this person has been interviewed by more than one of our existing CCIE consultants. These individuals become salaried Extropy staff members, not hourly help; they are focused on solving our customer's problems, not billing hours.