Professional Consulting Services

When considering the value of your WEB site you need to consider your market, the communications channels your potential clients use and how they approach those channels.  Senior citizens and young teens have differing behaviors, beliefs and experiences that influence how they approach information.  Each will have varying experience with the internet and what they appreciate in art, music and layout.  Soft sophistication may be the rule for seniors and hot bright and active may be the style of the teens.  It is similar for other markets as well whether you are focusing on men, women, sports enthusiasts or foodies.  What is needed is a marketing campaign that targets your specific audience and a series of images, animations or text that attracts their attention and develops the problem, solution and sale.

The marketing plan must adapt to the interent.  You need to know the compeition, page ranks, links, back links key words, semantics and how to attract your audience.  Search Engine Optimization is one more step in the marketing process that completes the circle.  It is not a action that happens once, but an activity that must be taken on and maintained.  It is an on-going process of research, analysis, evalutation, modification, updates, communication and possible investments.  Yes you may need to invest to earn a return.

It is not something that happens overnight.  Your WEB site will not jump from 131,224,312 on the page rank to 1 overnight, it may never hit number 1, but traffic from the right clientele could be rising daily as information and interest is shared around the internet.  Most important may be the design of your WEB site and the information within so that when clients arrive they stick around and return.  Next is the number of visits not the Google or Yahoo page rank.  You can have lots of visits without thier support if your WEB site is being activitly marketed on popular sites your clients visit.  And then Ranking may be of value, but which key words will a prospective client select to search, you cannot be ranked number one in all potential variables of words and word orders.

The interent is a great place to market, but it is not the only place.  It is also a good place to offer presentations, support training and offer support servcies, but by itself even with Search Engine Optimization it may not be enough.  Search Engine Optimization is something we do and do well, but it is only one aspect of marketing, like sales calls, glossy stock and trade shows you do not forego one for the other.

If you need Search Engine Optimization we are here to help, but before we invest your hard earned money we want to make sure you are on track and have a solid footing.  You do want what is best don’t you?

The first thing many employees are told when being hired straight out of college is either “that is not the way we do it here” or believe it or not “forget what you have learned we will show you how it is done.”  Yes, college is about the theories and concepts the basics to business, but from the start these employees are told to do as we do.  Years ago I was told, “if you follow the corporate rules and screw up your good as gold, if you take your own path and foul up your are gone!”

I am afraid I am one of those folks that when something was wrong I have to straighten it out.  I saved the corporation millions of dollars and was later brought into groups that could not think out of the box.  Their first comment was “that’s the way it has always been done.”

I have seen Vice Presidents that took a risk and lost huge bonuses, never again would they take a risk.  I have also talked to lawyers that would rather do nothing that commit to a decision. ”If I make a decision and make a mistake, I am at fault, if I do nothing at all how can I be blamed,” they would say.

With actions like that it is no wonder consultants are needed.  The credo for consultants is make a difference and make it big,   Doing big things will get us re-hired again.”

Sadly, not all consulting efforts payoff.  Millions of dollars can be lost to poorly defined and implemented projects.  Consulting companies can get in over their heads losing big money for the contracting company.

To appropriately manage a project companies need internal experts to watch after investments.  Consultants are looking for revenue and without oversight you may pay more than you should.  Training your team and building internal consultants insures most of your hard earned money stays with your company.

When employees understand they can make and difference and are expected to speak up the flood gates open and ideas flow about underperforming machines, lack of inventory, poor vendor parts or weak processes in need of improvement.  Your employees are the eyes and ears of the company and often know what is wrong more than anyone else.  That is where consultants find all the problems from your employees.

What you need is people that know how to follow the rules and when to break them.  That is one of the best ways to out maneuver your competition. 

Many companies out there are looking for Top 5 and Top 4 consulting professionals for their projects.  What the do not realize is that these elite companies are not made up of exclusive standalone consulting professionals  They are a team of experts.  They all have their proprietary consulting methodology and are experts at mentoring and coaching new young talent.  When contracts are completed it is for the project, not for specific talent from the pool.

A project lead is a mature individual, sometimes a partner or at least a partner is responsible for the project along with others.  The project lead coordinates one or more projects depending on thier size and pulls in experts.  Often projects make use of internal talent even if it means some minor mentoring since it lowers the overhead of the consulting firm and is not seen as an overst financial burden to the client.

As the project starts a proposal is usually developed the is several inches thick that defines the project and its scope.  It is a boiler plate, a print out of pages from their tool along with information gained from the client project sponsor.  No mistakes here they make sure they are talking to the person with the purse strings.  It only makes sense.  In the proposal is the overall scope of the project with intended outcomes.  Initial investigation of the project may entail cash up front for the analysis and clearer definition of the project.

However, as the project gets going, the project lead will pull in experts from the team.  Experts that have a charge rate of hundreds of dollars per hour.  They are experts in production, inventory control, finance, marketing and about anything else you might imagine.  Most of the project team is made up of your employees and newbees straight out of college.  The newbees after setting in on a process several times are expected to follow the performance on the next project.  As the continue working with the firm they move through more more phases of the methodology and with success earn more and in turn provide a greater return for the consulting company.

As impressed as you may feel you are with the work of these firms remember they are a production center.  A very good production center.  There job is to efficiently and cost effectively make the best possible use of thier talent and use the least expensive talent when ever possible.

What you want is not a Top 4 or Top 5 consulatant, what you are looking for is the composite of the team and it rarely exists in one person.

In my consulting experiences findin the root cause of a problem was one thing, but they determing how the root cause evolved is a whole different issue.  As an example your car suddenly stops working.  You have gas, the battary is good, but it is hot and the engine appears to be frozen.  The root cause for it not working you find is it is out of oil and has frozen up.  You replace the engine and after several thousand dollars and 3,000 miles you take it in for an oil change where the same inexperience high school kid more focused on the lastest computer game changes your oil while chatting with his girl friend.

I think you get the idea.  Some consultants stop when the find the problem and fix it.  Managers often lacking sufficent skills need mentoring, coaching or flat out training in business concepts so that they can make the best decisions.  With few exceptions when consulting I look to the organization leadership to see how the management process could be strengthened.  Consultants can be expensive and if they are mentoring and coaching your team they will be back before you know it.

Consultants that are looking out for you push training, mentoring and coaching.  They consider success with you as a story that runs quickly through the community.  They provide more for less making them cost effective.