Clients pay $ millions for recommendations

Management consultants are not cheap. Yes, consulting bill rates are high, AND a lot of client energy goes into rallying the client organization for kick-off meetings, focus groups, interviews, working sessions, status reports, and the hard work of consulting projects. Basically, it’s all-hands-on-deck for the client and the advisor.

Why don’t clients implement

Perhaps this a child-like question, but it’s also super-relevant. Why go to the business doctor if you are not interested, or not planning to take their advice?  Maybe you should have chosen someone else? Maybe you should have saved your money, effort, and concern. From my personal experience, believe that clients implemented our recommendations about 50% of the time. Unsurprisingly, it varies a LOT by industry, project type (strategy, operations, IT), and relationship between the partner and client. So the next question of course is. . . 

Roughly, what % of clients Implement?

I asked this question to readers of this blog and this histogram is what I got. It shows that consultant’s experiences vary dramatically, and 100% of clients DO NOT implement, all the time. Appreciate the thoughtful survey responses below. 

Does this surprise you?

Implementation sometimes does not happen.  In fact, 10 of the 39 people said that their clients implement less than 40% of the time. For anyone new to consulting; you are probably surprised.  I was when my first client said “thank you” for a functional pricing organizational design, only to later find out that they DID implement, but 5-6 years later.

For those who do this for a living, nothing surprises you.  This is almost to be expected.  After all, clients want choices of what, when, how much to implement. Principal / agent problem.  Clients have numerous reasons to pause, reconsider, delay, or partially implement recommendations.

Clients might 100% agree with the logic of your storyboard, AND 100% not implement what you suggest. We are all people, so the reasons can be intellectual, emotional, and practical. See responses from readers, quotes in blue italics

It’s about choices, not “right” or “wrong”

• They need my analysis not the solution to choose the right way of doing. (SK) 
• Clients have some information that we don’t have, they make final call based on a more comprehensive perspective.
• Finally, most of my clients are senior corporate people who value my input, and they value the fact that they DON’T have to listen to or act on anything I say. They value what I hear and see far higher than they value what I say (but I do have to say something.) They have plenty of other people around them who have mountains of advice, all with their own agendas. (WSW)
• When one of my clients needs to make a decision and request my insight – I provide a list of options for a client to choose from, the considerations for each and include a notation regarding my recommended choice. In most cases, there is no ‘wrong’ decision. Merely a business decision. (LI)
  

Market Changes / Timing

• Dynamic business and market situation, implementation challenges, budget cutting
• They postpone the implementation of your recommendation simply because it’s not good timing.
• Often these strategic changes are not perceived as delivering immediate ROI (CW) 
• Not enough time: too much dedicated to obsolete things (JS)

Risk-aversion / inertia

• Lack of true motivation to make a change (TI)
• Cultural issues. Afraid of moving forward.
• Easier to do it the ‘old way’ and not causing enough pain often enough for for real change (ABB)
• Humans do not like change. It is easier and more comfortable to do what you know.
• Lack of ownership, lack of resources, reluctance towards bigger changes, inertia
• Most of the time it happens to be the fear of venturing into something new. Our clients are very risk-averse.(VV)
• Usually because they’re too far gone in their own way of thinking, and their systems are set up to support their perspective. Changing that would be a painful, maybe expensive. (DB) 

Politics / Leadership 

• Multiple Stakeholders and also union issue in my case
• Lack of internal alignment and willingness to take bold action
  
• Client themselves want to implement but for various political reasons they don’t follow through on all of the advises given. 

Time / Resources / Money

• Client’s long term business goals, vision may not suitable our ideas. Some time clients need to change entire business process to implement our ideas and he need to talk lot of stakeholders.
• Depends on the engagement, a lot of the time we’re brought in to sell a preconceived idea. If a finding goes counter to that, then were asked to change the narrative, remove certain recommendations, etc. (VR)
• Don’t have the money/budget/resource/time (GW)
• Available resources (money, time, capability) and required time for returns (even 2 years for yield is too long in uncertain markets) (CT)

Change management

• Implementation of strategy is always about people. 
• Lack of change management efforts; Insufficient follow through of initiatives from ideation to finalisation of strategy; People mindset & reluctance to change way of doing work at working level as they feels they know the problem & solutions better.
• Inability to manage change or fear of change, and/or lack of internal skillset to implement required changes needed to meet their stated objectives. (LA)
• Overestimating client team’s ability to take on additional responsibilities AND maintain current responsibilities; not implementing or managing change management (RAS)

Executing poorly, taking short-cuts 

• Skip steps in the advice and move to action before being aligned 
• They don’t free up enough of their time to do things properly or see a process through to completion.
• Short term issues derail the long term drive. (CT)
• Lack of agility in the implementation (MAR)

Large corporate vs. smaller company 

Recommendations which deviate too far from existing client thoughts/plans are often a challenge to get implemented due to a mixture of funding/resourcing, risk tolerance, and internal politics. More disruptive or unexpected recommendations like these are often worth proposing if they have a strong business case behind them, but we can’t always count on them to be implemented or implemented well in large, corporate environments. Smaller companies often will have less barriers to overcome in implementing recommendations given higher risk tolerance, less stakeholders to convince, and higher relative, potential impact (changing the trajectory of the company instead of a business unit). (DCK)

Rarely a binary yes or no

In many cases our recommendations are partially implemented, but rarely 100%. This is generally due to lack of alignment between the C-suite and the ‘boots on the ground’. Corporate leadership will make a decision (to adopt our recommendations) but doesn’t have the change management follow through to ensure it is tracked and managed down through the field locations. In some engagements with experienced clients, we stay on for a few months post-implementation to ensure compliance and drive the change management. Otherwise, left to their own devices, the organizational inertia will typically be too much for them to overcome on their own. (KP) 

Focused on quick wins

Complex problems require multi-faceted solutions (people + process + technology). These are often expressed as final deliverable roadmaps. Clients are neither willing to fund nor maintain momentum around the full scope of the roadmap. Instead, leaders only organize around the initial low hanging-fruit as ‘quick wins’ that all can boast about. The balance of the work moves to shelf-ware displaced by the newest fire drill. (RP)

8 potential reasons, rarely just one

1. cost: sign off thresholds, not able to justify in business case to justify the executable. The need to ensure there is executive sponsor with the right authority to cut through and to champion how the activities align to the over organisation strategic objectives and goals. 2. risk: compliance, being able to leverage with the right interpretation of the organisations enterprise risk management framework to secure all round buy in 3. effort: what was estimated at the time of the recommendation (based on best effort) is about 4-5x more due to the drag and toil of the customer processes and policies that are needed to be infused. Lack of internal expertise and fear of losing control to justify the remediation. 4. internal politics: Overlap, funding, poor program management, blocking, lack of strategic stakeholder coverage, other competing projects hidden from view that are not visible, no board or CxO level backing. 5. Resources: Lack of capability, ability and coverage to cover BAU, Strategic projects and Problem Management. Clients try to implement themselves 6. Pivoting priorities: other urgent/critical matters arise without surprise and funding is pulled or paused to solve other organisational problems 7. Stakeholder mapping and management: not selling wide and deep enough into right stakeholders to gain the true value and impact for them. (AL)