I was having lunch with a client last month and she asked me “What does being a consultant mean?” I thought she was busting my chops until I looked at her face and realized that she really wanted to know. (And as I found out – she wants to become one – thus her interest…)

Here was my indirect answer to her:

First question should have been – Who can be a consultant? Who qualifies? If you know something and there is a market need for what you know, then you can be a consultant.

If you know something, but there’s no market for what you know, then you cannot be a consultant.

However, if you know of a market need, and you know people who have the expertise to satisfy that market (and these people don’t know how to see a market, or are unwilling to see…), then you can own a consulting company.

There are two key phrases in all of this – knowing something (or knowing somebody who knows something), and a market need for what you know. Then, and only then, can you be a (successful) consultant.

Since everybody knows something then owning, and growing, a consulting company comes down to a market need for services. The “If I Build It, They Will Come” strategy doesn’t work (trust me!) unless you are a very proficient marketer.

<To be Continued…>

The term ‘Business to Business’ is misleading; businesses buy nothing. Only people buy. And the CEO in the boardroom buys for the exact same motivations and in the same ‘style’ as he does when he is at home in his kitchen; he buys a one million dollar software system the same way he buys a $30,000 car, a $3,000 home entertainment system or a $300 membership at the gym. He buys as much or more by personal self-interest (than corporate interest); driven by emotions, not logic. One of the best things the B2B’ers can do is understand the specific human who he is selling to, and what his ‘emotional life in his business role’ is all about – for example: internal competition with peers for recognition and advancement? Resentment of bigger, better financed competitors on the street? Fear – of being too late, too slow, left behind, too dumb, embarrassed, missing yet another big opportunity, making a costly or even career-ending mistake?

Strategy: Always make it personal.

This is for the quiet people.

I’ll come right out and say it. I’m an introvert – have been since as long as I remember. Not bashful or shy or anti-social or a snob…As the book “Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength” by Laurie Helgoe describes it – you are an introvert if you re-energize by being alone rather than being with people.

That would be me. Generally speaking, I’d much rather read a book than go to a party. Prefer one-on-one lunches to a banquet. A few very solid friends to a large number of lesser acquaintances. Quiet to loud.

Guilty.

It has taken me a long time to embrace being an introvert, and to stop trying to be something I’m not. Many of my clients are surprised when I tell them that I lean this way. I have had my client friends tell me that I have to be extroverted because I am so ‘up’ and energetic when I am meeting or consulting with them. Well – that’s because consulting is what I do. It’s how I earn my living. Who in the heck wants a low energy consultant? It doesn’t mean that we introverts cannot be energetic and funny and sing karaoke. It just means that we will most probably run out of energy before our extroverted friends do. I know I do. One of my consultants has asked me a few times why I never work on the plane…he always sees me reading a ‘book’ on my Sony reader. The answer is that I am re-energizing. It’s something I know about myself and I no longer fight it. Tried the working on the plane thing…just stare at the screen. Drool forms.

This introversion ‘affliction’ affects how I sell consulting services and how I run my company. Oh how I envy those who go to networking functions and meet 100 people in a night. Get tons of business cards, and make 100 new friends. Or those who can pick up the phone and just start calling people…shot gunning for prospects. I interview a lot of people for jobs – most of them introverts as Lupine Partners is a wonderful place to work for introverts – and when I ask questions about their comfort level in selling they usually go into a fear-based rant on how they don’t want to cold call or be perceived as fuller brush salesman.

Me either. And I would submit to you that we introverts can be as successful in sales and marketing as our louder and more socially extroverted friends. I know because I have done it – Lupine is finishing up its 17^th year as a consulting company. Can’t do that without satisfied customers – most of them garnered by me.

If you are an ‘intro’ like me, the first thing you have to do is determine who you are and what you are willing to do – and comfortable doing. Cold calling – no. Large networking and convention events – maybe. Professional intimacy – you bet. Face to face and one on one – always. Don’t try and be something you are not (just to fit the stereotype in your head of how you need to act to be persuasive) – you will just fight yourself and never win. This also applies if you are ‘selling’ within your organization. Whether you realize it or not – everybody is in sales. And there are many ways to skin the proverbial cat.

Give yourself permission to be introverted (if you are), and realize that you have many things in your toolbox that can be used to your advantage when trying to persuade and to solve problems for your (internal or external) customer base. It’s a little more work, I think, than being an extrovert. I plod along having many one on one conversation…because that is what works for me. Building professional intimacy by having many sustentative discussions with a few people at a time. There isn’t much difference from my personal and professional life in this regard – it took me a long time to realize this and embrace the ‘tactic’. I have flown to both coasts just to have a short face to face conversation with a customer or prospect – because I know this works for me. Has proven out time after time after time. Some would say that it is not the best use of my time. And there is probably some wisdom in that sentiment – but the proof is in the pudding. Seventeen years old and going stronger than ever.

Reading the Helgoe book noted in the beginning was a real eye opener for me. Permission to be yourself is a good thing…and a profitable one too.

This past December, in the span of 3 days I received 4 different phone calls from software sales professionals that went something like this: “David, I have prospect and they are ready to buy but they don’t want to spend a lot of money on the implementation – can you create a proposal on the cheap?”

Not music to any professional consultant’s ears. I did craft the proposals…and they were crappy as I knew in more heart that I was not serving this prospect well. I was just quoting services for a fee up to their threshold level. Nothing about outcomes. Nothing about success. Nothing about strategy. Nothing.

As a result of the December proposals, Lupine decided to open up our tactics and methodology to the market in order to allow our clients and prospects the opportunity to become The Wizard. We have created and are currently selling the “Do it Yourself Guide to Implementing Yardi Voyager”. It’s for those prospects who don’t want to spend/invest the money for outside consulting – i.e. unsuspecting Wizards. And it’s for those Wizard wannabes who have been itching to ‘look behind the curtain.’ For those who want to go it alone, but desire to be educated and to have us looking over their shoulder. Everything we know about software implementation has been included in this Guide.

I’ve been told by several in the industry that I am crazy for doing this – signing a death warrant for Lupine Partners. Who opens up their intellectual vault and shows their secrets to the world? Us, I guess…And this is one of the reasons why I went ahead with this effort. I look around and see what others are doing, and then do the opposite. To stand out, to differentiate, and to serve my employees and customers. This is no death warrant. In a changing economy, CHANGE!

Change. Just to be clear Lupine Partners is a consulting firm. We still consult with clients on a daily basis. We are also in the product solution business. We consult with our clients through our products on a daily basis as well.

We created our Guide with our team of 5 each having a separate responsibility and function while we carried our full consulting load. Amy served as the project manager using the exact methodology that I teach in the guide. In other words, we practiced what we preached. We had an issues list, held weekly status meetings, had a kickoff meeting, and a lessons learned process at the end of the ‘engagement’. Maggie was responsible for the packaging and shipping. Brian, Angela, and I created the content – each handling about a third. I also had (have!) the responsibility of marketing and selling the series.

Not many consulting firms or companies can match our speed to market. Our 27 DVD series was completed in about 2 months – from soup to nuts. Our agility is a by-product of working together for a very long time, working overtime as necessary, and having a trust in the relative strengths of the individual team members. In our company, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

While the Guide was built for new customers, an interesting phenomenon has occurred. Existing Yardi clients have been buying it…Reasons given to us include:

• · not wanting to be held hostage by key employees
• · having to add more properties to their portfolio and wanting to ‘do it themselves’
• · using the Guide as an internal training document

As a marketer, I have been trained to enter the conversation going on in my customer’s and prospect’s head. For prospective software buyers, one of the questions is always: Why does an implementation have to cost so much? It’s a good question – really good. The honest answer is that doing it poorly can be devastating and expensive in ways that most people don’t think of. A few being:

• · An increased amount of time on their old, inefficient system
• · Loss of organizational confidence
• · Loss of time spent on meetings and tactics that did not take them to their goals
• · Employee firings resulting in increased training costs and ramp-up time (on their regular job)
• · Organizational recriminations
• · Money spent on software license fees for a product they were not using
• · Money spent on outside consultants – with no implementation to show for their consulting investment
• · Competitors had pronounced operating advantages due to being on a more current software platform

When should you be the Wizard and when should you beware the Wizard? My answer is that you be and do both all the time – as much as you can. Independence is a good thing – except when it isn’t. For example, if the independence takes you away from your core earning potential or your core business…then you need to be marginally dependent. If you are in a dependent mode, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket and don’t trust one Wizard absolutely. Hate to say this…even if that wizard is me.

The following is framed on my office wall.  It keeps me focused when things don’t go according to my desires.  As I read it here again, I realize that it also very much applies to software implementation:

1. Things will not always go exactly as you have planned.

2. Things might take longer than you have planned.

3. You might encounter some heavy bumps while following your plan.

4. The bumps may frighten you.

5. You may have to change direction to get where you want to go.

6. You might have to temporarily ‘park’ in a place you don’t want to be and this might trigger anger, fear, worry, impatience, and resentment.  And while all this is going on you may think and act as ifyou are the ‘only one’ going through this.

7. You can, however, go through all of these seemingly negative situations with a smile, if you have trained yourself to do so.

When we are leading software evaluation efforts we normally ask the software vendors for two customer lists from the software vendor: one of its large, major customers and one of its customers that are a similar size to you. You really need to think through your strategy with regard to reference checks. They can be a colossal waste of time or excellent feedback. The strength of the reference calls is going to come down to the questions that you ask. And you need to determine what it is you really want to know.

Who makes these calls? Is it the whole team, a handful of people, or just the project manager? There is no reason for a whole team of people to sit through a phone conference with the poor person who agreed to give a reference. Invariably, all discipline will break down and the reference giver will be barraged with questions from the third row. Go with a two- to three-person reference team: one to ask the questions and two to transcribe the answers and to listen for things not asked or answered.

What is the strategy for determining who to call? Ideally, it is not necessarily a company that made the vendor’s “A” list. All of us put our best customers on reference lists, the ones we feel certain will say good things about us. With a bit of research (go to the vendor’s web site) you can probably find some “off-list” customers. Having said all of this, be thankful for whoever you can get. Getting customers to take the time to give you the information you want is not an easy proposition. Take what you can get.

The results of these vendor reference calls should be summarized in a grid or a narrative. You do not have to wait until the product demonstrations to make these calls. Oftentimes after the last vendor demonstration you will want to go right into the final evaluation process. Making these calls—which often take a while to coordinate—can be a real momentum stopper. Ideally, you should make these calls prior to the vendor demonstrations. There is no reason to wait until after the vendor shows you his products. Don’t pass out the reference call information until you get to the final deliberations; it may prematurely bias an evaluator against a vendor that has not yet had a chance to give a demonstration.

Immediately following The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland went into production on the Mickey Rooney movie Babes in Arms. In this movie, Rooney plays Mickey Moran, a talented singer and musician, son of a veteran from show business. Garland plays a pretty girl who is also a very talented singer. One day, a big opportunity arrives for Mickey, a big contract to set up his own show. However, things don’t go well, and to avoid being sent to a work farm, he decides to improvise a show in the country, despite the awful weather conditions. And then comes one of my all-time favorite exchanges:

“Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” Mickey says.

“We can use my Dad’s barn!” Judy says.

This same “gee-whiz, let’s just rush ahead with this project” attitude is something I have seen on numerous occasions with my clients.

A not untypical scenario would entail the IT manager being summoned by the president of the organization and told to find a new software package for the company. And that’s what he does; he goes out and finds a package on his own. He puts on a show and uses his dad’s barn. It’s a hasty, quick, impromptu activity that does nothing to move the organization forward. It’s probably not the right vendor or the right functionality—but it is a package. And it is one that most people in his firm have heard of. Low risk for him, and it didn’t take much time or effort to sign the contract with the software vendor.

The problems occur once you start planning the implementation and conversion from your existing systems. Functional items that the IT manager assumed would be in the new package aren’t there because he didn’t ask and he didn’t plan.

Remember the Fram oil filter commercials from the 1970s, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later”? That logic is the same for software evaluation and implementation. If you don’t do the proper planning, then you may hit a point where you may have to abandon the implementation and revisit the entire software selection effort.

Years ago, a large retail operation in the Southwest hired my consulting firm to lead it through the implementation of a just-purchased software product. We started the planning process and by the second day of discovery, I began asking very pointed questions about their newly purchased software, things that would ordinarily be part of a retail package. I received the answer “I don’t know” quite a few times. At the end of the session, it was obvious that they really had not contemplated all of the operational needs in their organization.

The project was kicked off, but in my head and heart I knew it had a small chance of succeeding because the client was not ready for the change that a new software package was going to bring. They had not defined their requirements and accordingly had no idea if the package would be up to the task.

As the project went on and I exhibited some “tough love” to my clients, they became increasingly agitated about where things were going. It culminated with me telling the business owner (where was he during the “selection” process?) that he just wasted a bunch of money and needed to create a team with representation from every area in the organization to aid in a new software selection effort. I told him he needed to go slower so he could finish faster.

If you scrimp here and try to pick the software vendor in an organizational vacuum, you most likely will get backed into a corner at some point. The chance of getting a software solution match is directly proportional to the amount of effort an organization spends in planning the evaluation and in seeing that every functional area within the organization is represented in the process.

Thanksgiving was a big deal when I was a kid. Relatives gathered. But mostly what I was waiting for was the Friday after Thanksgiving.

I vividly recall the day and weekend immediately after Thanksgiving as something really big and special, when I was a kid. That was the official start of the Christmas season. That’s when you drove into the city, to the big department store near downtown Houston, and saw Santa Claus, and shopped..

The death of the downtown department store as mecca has destroyed a lot of ‘specialness.’ Now the holiday shopping experience surrounds you and bombards you. Worse, now Christmas season starts before Halloween. I’m sick of it before Thanksgiving even gets here. I don’t think we’ve done the kids, ourselves or even retail commerce any favors by stretching the season into a calendar quarter.

But the bigger point is how much of “the special” has been taken away, spoiled, diminished and diluted. There’s real opportunity there for the business person who finds a way to give his customers (internal and external) a truly special event, something to look forward to with anticipation, to experience with awe and wonder and fun.

In any case, I hope your Thanksgiving holiday this year is somehow special.

When I say ‘thanksgiving’, you’ll be included in the thought.

Here’s a big tip for you project managers and marketers out there. Lean close…”plastics”. Ok, only funny to a handful of you.

One of the things I talk to my fellow consultants about is communicating on a steady, recurring basis to our customers – both when on an engagement and when we are not. Here’s how it goes:

Probably the smartest thing we do on our engagements is the creation and issuance of weekly project status report. It helps lowers the anxiety of our clients, fosters communication, and is a consistent tool that all parties involved can count on to track progress and to communicate issues.

The key is having the mechanism in place as part of the project infrastructure. The timing of it must never change, once set – it then becomes an accepted part of the project ‘tools’. It can be used to deliver less-than-thrilling news about the project, particularly when there are under-performers involved.

The key phrases, with regard to project communication, that I continue to hammer home to the consultants at Lupine are the words ‘recurring’ and ‘inviolate’.

The same argument and concept can be made about marketing your business. (See page 1 of this newsletter.) Contacting your customers only after they have jumped ship does not help you more quickly achieve your goals. The contact with them should be recurring, expected, and intentional.

From time to time, I am asked how I went into business for myself…how it got started for me.

It started back in 1990…I was in desperate situation at the time – I did not have a job, I was 2 more bad breaks away from being homeless and had custody of two young children. I really needed the job I had applied for with First Gibraltar Bank.

I got the job and began my recovery. I learned a lot working in an Information Systems department (was called MIS back then) and added it to my other wanderings in real estate, publishing, and the CPA world. I found that I had a natural gift for working on systems – both as a business analyst, project manager, and in solving the actual technical problems.

One of the last things I did for First Gibraltar was to lead a team that was assembled to select a software management system for the real estate group. We ended up choosing the most well-known package at the time. This was March, 1991.

After First Gibraltar made the selection, I started (covertly) dabbling with the software, but because I was ‘management’, I didn’t really get the opportunity to dive into the details like I wanted. My bosses always reined me in. My first use of the software while still employed at FGB was on a government-backed real estate portfolio project with very strict reporting deadlines. The deadlines came and went because the software did not work as warranted. I spent a lot of time with the President of the software organization trying to work through the problems and trying to keep First Gibraltar from losing the large government contract. What really struck me at the time was how poor and apathetic the support from the software company was. They treated me as if the problem was of my creation and that I was an idiot. I remember thinking – I could do this for a living and certainly do a much better job of it.

Shortly thereafter, Bank of America purchased First Gibraltar Bank. I was offered a job with BofA and a job with the remaining bank – First Madison Bank. Instead I finagled a consulting contract with First Madison as they viewed me as irreplaceable. I sold myself as a software expert.

I started Lupine Partners on February 1, 1993, as an independent consultant performing software consulting services.

I had one client – my former employer.

My contract with First Madison ended 9 months later in October. I will never forget the night in October – about 2 weeks before the engagement ended. It was a Friday night and I was sitting in the bedroom watching a basketball game on TV. And it hit me – I did not have any jobs lined up. And furthermore, I did not have any prospects in the work, because I had not done marketing or selling during the previous 9 months. I had felt, and I am not making this up, that it would be disloyal and dishonest to look for other jobs while engaged by a client. This horrible feeling of stupidity is one I will never forget….

I had a rough 6 weeks…but finally, I caught a break when I received a referral from MRI to perform a 2-day training for a client in Denver, Colorado. (Thank you again Chris.) The training went very well – and they called me back 2 weeks later to see if I would be interested in leading a nationwide conversion of all 100 of their remote locations. I told them I would have to check my schedule, which of course was completely empty, and would call the next day.

I landed the engagement and never looked back. I never again put myself in the position again of not having substantial work either sold or in the works.

I can clearly remember in May 1995, sitting at my desk when it hit me. I had a client base of about 15 by that time, was busy every day, was marketing very little, and the phone rang frequently for more work. What hit me was that I had made it. I had actually created a little small business for myself that was based on some very simple principles. I think of them as the 5 customer service truths:

1. Say please, thank you, and your welcome.

2. Over-manage expectations. Or said another way, do what you say you are going to do.

3. Don’t make your problems your client’s problems.

4. Return all client communications (written, verbal, voice, e-mail) promptly. Thank you again Governor.

5. Show your appreciation for their business. Say it.