Consulting at the highest level — how do you do it? How do you keep doing it over time? And if you are doing it, what do you need to be aware of?

Sam Bevans from Apella Advisors, and Vivienne Hsu, a partner at JBI (Just Build It) join Phil for two seperate conversations, discussing what it’s like to operate and thrive at the top level of consulting.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Phil Lewis: Consulting at the highest levels. How do you do it? And what are some of the things that those of us who are interested in doing it need to be aware of? Welcome to the consultancy business podcast with me, Phil Lewis. We are here to champion ethics and excellence in independent consulting. And excellence is very much our focus. This month, we’re talking to two independent consultants who are working at the very top of their game. The first is Sam Bevans from the corporate advisory practice, Apella Advisors. They work around the country, and indeed around the world, with boards and leadership teams to advise them on how to build and manage their reputation. Sam has some absolutely fascinating things to say about what that kind of work involves and also what some of the watchouts are when you’re consulting at that sort of level. We then move to a long standing friend of this podcast, Viv Hsu, who is a partner at JBI. Viv is doing some really fascinating work not only around marketing, but also AI. And has some very, very valuable insights, not only about where consulting is today, but also where it might be going. And again, what those of us who are interested in staying at the top of our games need to be paying attention to. But before we get into those conversations, there’s something I want to tell you about. Over the last 12 months or so, I’ve been working hard with a consultative business team to create a course called Advance. Think of it really as the street fighting skills, the things that you actually need to know about in order to be able to run a consultancy business that will survive and thrive no matter what the world has to throw at it. That course is now available. There’s films, there’s course notes and some downloadable tools and techniques that you can put to work in your practice straight away. And it’s available via an organisation called TBD+, we will put a link to TBD+ in the show notes. It’s a great resource for consultants as well. So well worth having a look at what else is on offer there. But if you sign up to TBD+, you will also see Advance on there and you can get going with the first few modules straight away. So we hope that’s of real interest and value to all of you as you look to continue to build your consulting practices. So without further ado, let’s get into this month’s conversations. And as I said earlier, the first of these is with Sam Bevans from Apella. Sam, welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:35] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: Thank you. Nice to be here. So we’re a strategic advisory firm. We help firms build and protect their reputations. And we do that by advising them on how they need to behave and also how they don’t need to behave. And the, uh, the starting point is always; do good things as a business, and as an individual leader or whoever you’re consulting to, and then tell the world about them. We can’t create a good reputation for our clients unless they are doing the right things within their organisation. So it has to be inside out.

[00:03:10] Phil Lewis: So let’s talk about that reputation point, because it seems to me anyway that if we’re talking about reputation we’re talking about something which is… it has extremely tangible consequences, but it’s a very intangible thing. We talk about reputation as a kind of intangible thing, it’s got to be driven by tangible action and presumably therefore a lot of your work is grounded in trying to help a business understand what that action needs to be and then take it.

[00:03:38] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: This appreciation of reputation and the need to protect it, to nurture it, to try and favourably influence it has only grown among businesses, and not just the largest businesses, but small ones too. So we often think about reputation as an intangible asset of a business, a trustworthy organisation is much more likely to find it easier to navigate their operating environment. They’ll find it easier to open the doors they want to. Whether it’s strategically, operationally, whether it’s in terms of hiring and those with bad reputations find all of those things harder. So I think that’s pretty much well understood, if not commonly agreed, in terms of exactly how you go about doing that. I think it still surprises me how different the levels of sophistication, even in large organisations, are in terms of how you go about thinking about… and to your point Phil, kind of responding and acting around how best to protect and promote your reputation. That’s the first thing. It’s certainly something that… when things are going wrong, businesses are often, and individuals within businesses, are often much more receptive to the kind of conversations we have. It’s trying to persuade people to put all the good things in place when things are going very well that’s often more difficult. Now I said that it… I mentioned that this is an intangible asset for businesses. You know, goodwill is on the balance sheet. Reputation is not, but we do work really, really hard — and this is something that’s absolutely become more sophisticated in the time I’ve been doing what I do — we’re much more evidence-based than we were 10 years ago, and certainly 20 years ago. So that, you know, the advice that we are giving has to be rooted in objective fact where possible. And we have to measure the impact of what we do so that you can see it before, during, and after. The other truism I think of all of this is… and this is probably true of all consultants which is very relevant to hopefully all your listeners… we only ever lead the horse to water. So as much as you would like to climb in your client’s shoes sometimes and have the conversations that you believe that they should have with their internal stakeholders or their, you know, public stakeholders. We can’t do that. We are just there to give the right advice, the best advice. You know, be that objective, critical friend and and we have to just say, based on what we know and what we see and what you told us, this is what we are recommending. But ultimately, we can’t we can’t take those actions for the business. And I think one of the most frustrating things about the business sometimes in the work that we do is that you can’t go and completely operationalise all of your advice for every client. And so sometimes they don’t take the advice that you’re giving and don’t implement the actions that you’re recommending and that can be frustrating but you become more and more sanguine over time, you know. You can’t you can’t win every battle.

[00:06:39] Phil Lewis: Something I spend a lot of time contemplating in my own practice is that kind of division of responsibility. If you’re talking about, um, helping a client to make good decisions about its reputation, it’s absolutely right on one level to say, well, I can give you really clear advice. I can tell you what needs to be done. I can do my absolute best to kind of rationalise why that’s the case. And ultimately then it is on you to take the action. And that feels true. It feels true to the consultant and the nature of consultancy, right? We are in effect paid to offer that perspective, and hopefully a perspective that’s grounded in data and experience and all the rest of it. And then the client’s side of the deal is that they then are hopefully going to take action on the back of that. And I think at one level, that’s pretty clear, but it gets a little bit more interesting in my head, I suppose, when you start to think about, well, actually if a client’s not taking action on the back of advice that we’re giving, is that something to do with how well I am offering that advice? How well I’m connecting into the organisation? Am I building the right quality of relationships within the organisation? Have I got the right frequency and tonality of conversations and meetings going on? Am I creating space and time for people to work with me in a collaborative way such that they can feel a sense of ownership and agency over what ultimately is the recommended course of action and so on. And I think it’s a really interesting line, isn’t it? Around what do we ultimately take responsibility for, and what actually can and should sit with clients from a responsibility perspective. And it seems to me around something like a reputation you really can’t do anything for somebody’s reputation other than tell them what they can do for themselves, because the reputation is ultimately only grounded in the action an individual or a group of people takes. But nevertheless, you know, you’re working at a very, very high level with your clients. And I would imagine Sam have had to become very, very good at influencing across the pace and paying attention to some of that quote unquote softer stuff that I was just talking about there, because without it, there’s always the danger that advice falls on stony ground more often than it should. And then, of course, that affects our reputation as consultants as well.
[00:09:16] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: There are some best practices you draw upon in terms of trying to build relationships and trying to share the right information and trying to understand how to navigate an organisation. All of those things are important in every relationship but it really does differ in my experience between every client that you work with, and in every business you work with, and also dependent on the context of how about businesses facing into its reputation whether it’s under a huge amount of scrutiny or challenge, or whether things are incredibly favourable. But I suppose experience, I think, plays a big part in this. And one of the things that I’ve appreciated learning from more experienced colleagues here at Apella is what they pay attention to and what they deliberately don’t pay attention to. So I need to, I need to caveat that by making sure it doesn’t sound like they’re ignoring really important things from clients. But look, there’s a lot that comes across all of our desks these days, but knowing what to respond to and what to pay attention to amidst all of that is something I think comes from experience. And I think helping clients do that is also important. Reputation is a funny thing because you could be worried about absolutely every newspaper article, every comment from a regulatory meeting, everything a politician might say, that the chattering of your internal colleagues, in theory, you have to be alive to all of those things. But knowing what to action or what to escalate or what to make a recommendation around I think is the trick, and I think that only comes with experience. You mentioned also about when our advice isn’t either landing with a client and that need to be actually very self critical and sort of constructively challenging of our own work because sometimes we get it wrong, and actually having colleagues who are able to point that out or just to be able to come back to base here and just say, look, I’m struggling to get this bit of advice or this bit of information through to the right people, that’s one of the best things i think of working in consultancy. We can have those conversations and other people will share their perspectives on how you help do that. But it’s also true that client relationships run their course and sometimes as a natural end to relationships and sometimes there’s also the need to walk away and say, look, we continue to give what we feel is our best advice. You continue not to take it. Perhaps it’s best to have a conversation about whether you, you know, we are the right support for you going forward. I think, I think all of that comes… is made easier with experience.

[00:11:58] Phil Lewis: Yeah, I mean, we don’t talk about the ending of client relationships enough, actually. And I think it’s a topic that we should, and I’d like to come back to it momentarily, but I was just really struck by that point about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to, you know. That makes complete sense.
I mean, if you’re in the world of reputation management, I guess, and you’re a high profile organisation, it must become easy to develop a real hair-trigger response to everything, because you might be in the press a lot, you’ve got a press office function or some sort of media management function, presumably, which is conditioned to be looking out for, you know, conditioned to be looking out for mentions and reacting and responding to all of that and working out what is signal and what is noise is a tremendously specialist discipline, it seems to me, but one that I think any of us in consulting in our own domains can hopefully also find a way to relate to, because certainly in my world, which is organisational change, I sit with clients and in some sense, I think my job is to be as present as possible with those clients in whatever they want to share. And I can’t tell you the number of times over the years where I’ve been in conversation with somebody and there’s been a tiny little thing said, or indeed sometimes even a tiny little thing not said and actually, you kind of go; that’s it, that’s the meeting. That’s the thing that we really need to pay attention to here. That’s the thing that’s going to actually trip you or trip this process up. And yeah, I think experience is a huge part of that, but I also think it’s about kind of really cultivating a curiosity and awareness and a good level of knowledge of both your client and its decision making patterns and the organisation in question and its context and all that other kind of stuff. And I’m not sure it’s ever something we can ever master as consultants, because there’s just fundamentally too much ambiguity in the environments in which we’re in, but, goodness me, as a discipline like working out what to pay attention to, it seems like a really, really important element of our skill set.

[00:14:18] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: The more senior the people we talk to within our clients and their businesses, one of the consistent things you hear is we really need help bringing the outside in. And by that people within their business heading into, I don’t know, whether it’s a big glass tower in in the City of London or a large manufacturing plant in the middle of whatever, the business is… it’s really easy to drink the Kool-Aid and go native really really quickly, and to fall in with the way things have always been done and really lose sight of the wider environment in which you operate, the context in which you operate. And the corporate affairs directors in particular, but also boards and other enlightened people in the businesses, really want help understanding what’s happening in the wider world and what it means for their businesses. Both in terms of the opportunities that they’re both aware of, and not yet aware of, and the challenges that they’re both aware of and not yet aware of. So at its best the work we do should really help the business move closer towards achieving its commercial objectives. Like everything… it’s probably something I should have said much earlier on… there is no point in doing any of what we do unless it is aligned to the commercial agenda of business, otherwise you’re just doing reputation work, consultancy, comms for comms sake, and there is by the way a tonne of that happening in every business today already. Um, so that’s, that’s a really fundamental thing, but we should really be helping the business see round corners and take advantage of things that are happening in the wider world that they’re already thinking about or that they’re not yet thinking about.

[00:15:57] Phil Lewis: Many, many years ago, about sort of 1845, I used to work in advertising and marketing, and the hardest stuff to market, notoriously, was virus checkers, right. And the reason why virus checkers are so incredibly difficult to take to market is because actually what is being sold is the absence of a negative, right? So fundamentally the healthy Mac or PC or whatever is one that you don’t really notice, it’s just helping you to kind of do your work day in, day out. And it’s only when a virus actually hits, of course, that you kind of become alive to the consequences of not having protected something. So when you’re selling virus checkers, what actually happens is you’re selling the absence of a negative, which is a very, very difficult thing to motivate behaviour change around. And I was wondering if there’s something similar going on in terms of consulting around reputation, because ultimately any number of us, I think could point to businesses that have been tripped up or blown up by some sort of hideous reputational issue that has just come crawling out of the woodwork at whatever stage in the business life cycle, you know. And you see them, they play out in the press fairly constantly. And those are big existential events sometimes for those businesses, that I wonder about the extent to which businesses are actually motivated to deal with them in advance because they actually kind of don’t know they’ve got those problems or are in denial about how serious those problems could be before they hit them. And there’s also the kind of correlation to that, which is a good reputation is maybe a really hard thing to quantify from a business benefit point of view. So I just found myself sort of reflecting as you were talking, Sam, on the challenges of selling this kind of consultancy and actually getting clients to pay attention to it, because there is the absence of a negative problem back to my virus checkers analogy, but also even the positive end of reputation management must, I am sure, be quite hard to quantify the tangible business benefit the results from that. So I guess my two questions to you would be, do you agree with that analysis and please challenge it if you don’t, but also secondly, then if it holds water in any way, shape or form, like how, how do you navigate through that?

[00:18:20] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: Yeah, I fundamentally agree with both points, I think, but let me just try and unpack how I think about them in a bit more detail. So on the first one, the absence of negative thing. So if you step back from a client relationship and you think about how you engage with them. If you pop up a monthly meeting where you speak to them every week or you go and see a chair or a board or a NED every six months, if you’ve got no frameworks and there’s no there’s no sort of long term view of reputation that you’re referring to, reputation is all about credibility I think. It’s all about the credibility of your actions in alliance to that brand promise, and this is why you see businesses with fantastic brands and high performance advertising and you know, the high public awareness but in practice dealing with them whether it’s being on the phone to them to their customer service centres whether it’s trying to get a response to them on something — as a, as a consumer this is — if that’s crap and the brand experience is flawless, you’ve got a complete mismatch there that the best businesses understand that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two. And so if… if I’m right, and if, if reputation is all about credibility and action, then I actually think everyone within an organisation has a responsibility around the reputation of the business. So I’ll give you an example. One of the conversations we’ve been having with a large client at the moment is; if you want the business to be doing things differently or more quickly, that’s a cultural and people challenge as much as it is a reputational one. So we can advise you around the reputation that you want and the actions that we think you need to take to achieve that. But ultimately, if you’re a business of hundreds or thousands of people, it’s all gonna be contingent on their actions. So that’s another big challenge. So our advice often spills out beyond the communications functions and into other areas of the business in terms of; look, this is gonna require your people to do things differently. Because what you really need to be doing — and we will come back to the client endings piece in a minute — is really give them the tools that they need to do this well on their own, ultimately. And I still think often our job is to make ourselves redundant over the long term, because that would be genuinely valuable consultancy to leave a team in a much better state — at the client end, I mean — then that in terms of the way that they’re working, how they’re positioned in the business, the, the structures and process that they’ve got to map to help businesses manage reputation, that should be much stronger at the end of a client relationship that we have with them then it, then it might be at the beginning.

[00:21:14] Phil Lewis: I’m really interested in the idea of endings from a couple of perspectives. My sense has been for a long time that many consulting relationships don’t really, uh, end, they stop. You know, in other words, there’s some sort of severing in the relationship that occurs, which actually means that you know, the relationship itself has not really been drawn to a close. It’s just stopped. The work hasn’t been drawn to a close. It just stopped. So in both of my practices, we actually work quite hard to make sure we have a proper ending with clients. And even in a situation where that ending may not represent, from our perspective, a situation where the client has made the progress that perhaps we were hoping they would have made, nevertheless, to be able to say, we’re going to reflect on the work we have done together and reflect on the progress we have made together and hopefully be in a position of being thankful to one another for what we’ve been able to achieve, is a wholly healthy thing in my point of view. And I think the ending… conversation, you were referencing this earlier, can be driven by whether you’re a couple of years in, and I think probably two, three years in any consulting relationship sees the expiry of the value that you can add just because it becomes harder to pull new shapes out of each other. There’s something about client not being in a position or being willing to be able to listen to our advice. There can also be practical considerations like budget and so on as well, and organisational changes and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t think we talk about endings as consultants, so it’s quite refreshing to hear you talk about endings before, and it sounds like something that you’ve managed quite proactively in your consulting career and continue to manage pretty proactively in your work at Apella.

[00:23:06] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: Sometimes clients can completely blindside you with a change of direction or a, I dunno, a change of attitude even, sometimes. But yeah, I think it’s important, you know, even as you are, I dunno, onboarding a client or even when you… as soon as you’ve got that first phone call to say; we wanna work with you, which is always a great moment. That’s, I mean, the hard work really starts then. And thinking about the sort of last stage of that relationship even briefly at that point I think is really, really important. Because it’s naive to assume… yes, there are some client relationships that really endure and some clients if you’re fortunate enough who will follow you around in different roles and work with you again and again which is wonderful. But most of them don’t don’t last that long and it’s, sort of, it’s naive or to ignore reality not to think about that, we’re consultants. We’re in the service game. Everything we do should be about anticipating the needs of our clients, even ideally long before they even know that they need them. And just as you know a welcome or an initial impression, you know, in a hotel weekend or a restaurant… we can all think about a time when you walked in the door of a fancy establishment expecting a great meal, great evening, great occasion where you’ve been ignored or overlooked or… it undermines the rest of the evening, even a small way. And I think we do need to think about the beginning, middle and end of things and be prepared to refresh things. Refresh teams for example that are working on clients, refresh our approaches if they aren’t landing in the way we want to, becoming a bit stale. And all the way through to being prepared to have a conversation to say, you know, we would love to carry on working with you, but it feels to us and let’s have this, let’s have an open discussion about it, it feels to us like our views are slightly diverging or your needs are changing. Let’s, let’s have that conversation rather than just hoping. It will go away or last another three months, six months, nine months. I don’t think that’s good for anyone. I think it’s far better if we manage those conversations proactively and do right on behalf of our clients. That’s fundamentally what we’re there to do.

[00:25:17] Phil Lewis: And that’s a perfect way to draw this conversation to a close. I mean, the really sort of pertinent point about client relationships stopping rather than ending is that that itself causes reputational damage. You know, if you can draw a relationship to a constructive close, and in some cases, actually a really positive close. I mean, we’ve had situations in our own practice where the ending has been actually really quite joyful, because we’ve helped a client to get to precisely where they wanted to be and to be able to reflect on that, to mark that, to be thankful for that, and then ultimately to shake hands and walk away is probably actually the greatest gift that you can give to your own reputation as well. Because the consultant that can actually stand on his or her track record and say, look, here are clients. We said we would do something with them. We did something with them. And then we got out of Dodge. That’s quite a rare consultancy actually. And certainly in my industry experience anyway. Sam, thank you. We will put some links in the show notes to appellate. Those of us who are independent consultants, very interesting consultancy Apella. Working at an extremely high level with extremely prestigious clients while being a compact independent organisation. So a really, really interesting firm to dig into and understand how they operate and the value that they bring to their clients. And Sam, it’s been really good to have the opportunity to talk about that in some detail with you this morning.

[00:26:51] Sam Bevans – Apella Advisors: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you, Phil. Thanks for having me on.

[00:27:00] Phil Lewis: A big thanks to Sam for a really interesting conversation. Talking of interesting conversations, we’ve got another one for you straight away. So without further ado, here is my discussion with Viv Hsu from JBI Partners. We explored on this podcast before, the… let’s call it the emerging relationship between consulting and AI. And we did a panel episode, you know, several months ago, where we started to talk about that. I’m interested in your perspective as someone who’s working at that intersection on a couple of things. So the first of which would be; how is it in the context of JBI, that kind of consulting offer and technology are being integrated. And secondly, what are the kind of tensions, trade offs, what feels salient to you about the integration of both consultancy and AI?

[00:28:05] Vivienne Hsu – JBI: Yeah, I mean, I think the intersection question is an important one. I think the truth is, for every dollar spent on AI, you need to spend three to four dollars to train human beings to use it and even understand it and be able to leverage it effectively. So i think there is a huge opportunity for people in the consultancy space to understand and create the right frameworks, training, strategies to support that human need. At the moment there’s not going to be a point where — at least I hope not just yet — where you’re not going to need some human intervention in order to really effectively use these new emerging technologies or generative AI. So that is pretty fundamental. So I, you know, and I think Phil, you know me quite well. I’m an eternal optimist. So I see opportunity as opposed to, you know, threats in, in the, in the AI space, and I see that if consultancies and, and really, really sort of forward thinking consultants can see that actually it’s about helping to upskill, helping to train, helping to shift people, and the human… you know the workforce in that area to be able to adapt to using AI in the right way. In the same way that people had to adapt to using the internet when that sort of exploded. That now creates a huge amount of opportunity. So I think that it’s it’s I see it as a very sort of largely positive thing. The second part of your question about sort of what do consultants need to do or how can they, I guess, build more saliency and relevancy. I think it is also not trying to do… I think, I think what happens is, and this is a danger that I’ve seen having, and I’m guilty of this as well, having done this a lot in the past is, really promising that we can do lots of things as consultants. And in a way we can, we’re jack of all trades and we have a very kind of varied skill set, and we tend to be highly adaptable. But there is also an element where that can be a slightly dangerous mindset to be in because you do your suit, you sort of lean into overpromising. And I think really, really sort of effective and skilled consultants understand what they’re good at and what they’re not good at. And I think we are at a point where people need to be quite honest, that we’re in a very early stage with AI and there’s so much we don’t know. And you know, there’s AIs building AI and that’s the next kind of big leap that’s gonna happen, but it’s coming very quickly. So it’s never going to be, I don’t think we’re gonna be in a situation where we’re not going to need, you know, human innovation and expertise. But how quickly can the workforce adapt and how quickly can consultants create the bridges for that adaptation and change is what is really important. And I think that’s where good consultancies are going to win.

[00:31:03] Phil Lewis: Well, it sounds like there’s two applications of consulting in the context of AI that you’ve just described really. So if we think about the world of financial services, which is your background and you know way more about than I do, and also the world of marketing, then it sort of seems to me that an application of AI, particularly creative generative AI would be, I don’t know, talk about a large investment bank with presence in multiple markets that just needs to do a huge amount of marketing communication-style throughput and output in order to be able to command the kind of share of voice in those markets and AI could be generating quite a lot of that. But to your earlier point, it needs someone to ssue the right prompts, ensure the parameters are appropriate and ultimately, I guess, actually kind of exert degree of quality control because we all know that AI is capable of hallucinating as well and all that sort of stuff. So if that sort of fairly basic premise is right, and challenge me if it isn’t, then there’s two things that the consultant can do there isn’t there? There’s one, which is what you talked about, which is, well, we need to train people on how to do this. And we need to think very carefully about what we’re actually asking AI to do as a kind of precursor to that training. And then on the other side of it, we can help prepare organisations for the quite significant upheaval that transition will bring with it. I mean, we, you and I, I think were both in the marketing industry in the late nineties, early noughties where everything became about digital, and that felt like a reasonable upheaval at the time, but probably nothing compared to what’s coming down the pipe fairly quickly here. And although there is an argument that says maybe the idea we’re all going to lose our jobs, the robots is slightly overdone in a lot of quarters, there’s certainly an aspect to it, isn’t there, which is we’re going to need to be able to prepare organisations and prepare people in organisations for the kind of emotional, practical, procedural, commercial transitions, if you will, that the AI brings with it. And that’s a huge consulting job because it’s very, very hard for organisations to do that kind of work on themselves as all sorts of change management has already proven over many, many years. Is that an analysis that rings true with you?

[00:33:43] Vivienne Hsu – JBI: Yes. And I think your point about, you know, the change management side and these kind of two areas where you do need that human intervention, you know, both to have the quality control and the right sort of oversight to the use of AI, but then also the ability to obviously help people, companies make that transition to be able to leverage AI effectively and do it in a way that’s safe, compliant are sort of sensible because again, you know, things are changing very quickly and it is slightly overwhelming. But there’s also there’s probably absolutely right ways to do things and wrong ways to do things. And I think really experienced consultants; it’s not as if we haven’t seen these cycles before, they absolutely have happened. What’s different about this one is probably the speed and the proliferation is probably so much greater than anybody else could have anticipated. And that is what makes it different from, you know, the sort of noughties digital revolution that happened then. Even though I think you and I are of that generation, and we probably thought that that was already mega, but I think this is next level. So I think it is absolutely in those areas where transformation, change management, the future of work… but also the practicality of what consultants can do and need to think about in order to help both people and corporations or organisations make that shift. Because it is the number one subject in any company at every board level, this is what people are talking about. So you better believe, of course, like, you know, as I said before, there is huge opportunity to go alongside this and the people who can start to codify and get their arms around it are the people who are going to win.

[00:35:48] Phil Lewis: Well, then the question for the independent consultants, of course, becomes; well, that all sounds good, but what do I do? Because there is a… always when you get these big cycles, what you will see very quickly is probably two things go on in the market. The first is, that the big consultancies, you know, the big four and that ilk, pile into these sorts of spaces, usually very quickly and with pretty sophisticated looking offers that clients like to buy because they like to buy known and trusted brands. I mean, that’s not a new problem, but at times of great upheaval and uncertainty, it’s not one that can be ignored. And then the second thing is that organisations that are actually in AI already start to evolve consultancy wrappers around what they do in a way that actually in the end can make you start to feel like even if the demand for consulting is high, the share of the available wallet that can go to the independent is low because it’s being eaten by, or it’s being commanded by, the big consultancies and effectively new market entrants, people who are building AI and then decide to build consultancy wrappers around it. So there’s an interesting question in all this, isn’t there? Which is kind of who’s eating whose lunch.

[00:37:10] Vivienne Hsu – JBI: What’s been interesting is understanding that actually, we’re in a funny time because what that share of pie is going to look like is also changing, and it’s changing really quickly. I think that where… your point about, sort of are technology companies going to be become consultants… not really. I think there’s a temporary situation happening now where they have no choice. Right? In order for them to sell their technology and software, they need to offer this ability, this wraparound, you know, that helps companies make that transition and creates that bridge. Otherwise, what happens is, like, you can’t actually execute or implement that technology effectively. And we see this so much, you know, there’s a big sort of learning curve that existed with big tech companies in the past where they… it was just about sort of dropping in tech and then nobody actually in an organisation knew how to use it. And therefore we’re spending hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of dollars on technology that they couldn’t actually leverage properly. I think that there are… people have learned from that and they’ve that, you know, and the buyers are more… they’re more sophisticated now and they’re also asking the right questions, which is actually like, how does this work? How will we put this in place? What is the problem we’re trying to solve for? So in financial services, number one thing is data security, privacy, and confidentiality. As in any highly regulated industry, you’re going to have the, that is the going to be the biggest concern across the entire industry and across, across probably any industry, truth be told, you know, whether it’s government, professional services, healthcare, et cetera. So if we are able to create a solution set, and it’s very simple for people to understand how we use that as an anchor and cornerstone for actually being able to leverage and, you know, use AI or, or adjoining technologies alongside that, then people go, Oh, I understand that, that makes sense because that is a fundamental issue I’m going to solve for. It doesn’t really matter what LLM you use, you know, or what technology’s going to give you the output. What matters is actually your point about getting the upfront part right. Getting it structured in the right way, which I suppose is a little bit more consultative and requires you to have real conversations. And you can’t, you know, it’s not, everything is just a sort of workflow process that you can go into. There needs to be some thoughtfulness around every organisation or client problem that needs to be sort of adapted to, and that, and even, even if the fundamental issue you’re solving for is data privacy, security and confidentiality. So that’s what I think we have really tried to understand. And we’ve really worked very hard to create, you know, something very useful, both in the software side and the services side that answers that need.

[00:40:04] Phil Lewis: That brings me back, I guess, to why I always think about when we’re talking about independent consultancy, which is the only reason that any independent consultancy gets to survive and gets to thrive, is because ultimately it’s excellent at what it does. Excellence or a lack of excellence, I should say, kills you very, very quickly in our market. So then I come back to, okay, well, how do we differentiate? And listening to you, Viv, I think, well, how do you differentiate as an independent consultant? There’s probably a kind of blend of the new and the old. So the new is really grounded in what I think you’ve been pointing us to in this conversation, which is to get a very, very good working knowledge of AI, perhaps to look beyond some of the very surface level stuff that’s going on in the press or gets debated on social media to really understand whether it’s a specific sort of area of business management like marketing, or you mentioned cybersecurity and data protection there, or whether it’s in a vertical like financial services or, I don’t know, retail, say, or if it’s in the intersection between those two things, really understanding the impact that AI is going to have, that’s the new stuff. And, if you’re right, which is the speed of change is going to take all of our breaths away while that work becomes urgent as well as important. But then you go to, well, on top of that good working knowledge and specialist working knowledge, depending on where you decide to focus, there are a couple of other things that need to be true. One is what I was saying already, which is, ultimately, you need to be excellent in delivery. There’s got to be an opportunity to harness your skills, your experience, but ultimately not over promise, to your earlier point, and do exactly what the… and support the client organisation in the way that it needs supporting, which brings me to my final other kind of point of traditional differentiation, which is again, you were kind of referencing it earlier on is stick to your knitting, know what you’re good at and do that. So if you’re a fantastic trainer or person who can consult in a way that upskills others, then do that, but do that in the context of AI and understand what the opportunities with AI if you’re somebody who’s in organisational transformation like I am, then need to understand how you can support organisations going through that transformation in the context of this particular wave of the technological revolution. So differentiation for independence my hypothesis would be; the blend of the new and the old while the new is really, really great working knowledge of AI specifically in the context that you’re interested in consulting in, but then stick to your knitting and be excellent in how you deliver, which is a very, very difficult thing to do. There’s all sorts of incentives that work against excellence, as we know.

[00:42:53] Vivienne Hsu – JBI: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve articulated it really well, Phil, and I do think that it would be a terrible loss for all the good consultants of the world, including yourself, to sort of abandon your experience and learning from the however long decades long, you know, you’ve been working in the market and because I think like even if we took marketing as an example, like AI is a hugely powerful tool and technology. We sort of understand that, like, you know, at JBI Metier we do specialise in marketing, comms and sales and how we can adapt these incredible emerging technologies to apply them, but do it in an absolutely safe, secure and compliant way. But the thing that’s interesting about it is you still need people who fundamentally understand marketing because in order for the application to be useful… so maybe AI may be very helpful in terms of saying, okay, we can help you create content very quickly, or we can help you review content very quickly and get something complied.
But you still need someone to say, okay, what channels is this going to go on? And like, who are we targeting, and how are we going to sort of manage that flow of information to make sure that the message that we’re pushing out, or that we’re sending and delivering, is landing where it needs to land. And because there’s so much hyperfragmentation in the marketplace right now, that actually does require a lot of experience and thought and thoughtfulness that I think AI at the moment even though it is a completely dazzling, mind-boggling frontier, still cannot quite do that. And I think it’s also understanding, sort of, in reality, the limitations of AI as well. Like, people seem to think it’s this sort of genie’s bottle and that like, you know, whatever you wish for, it can give you. And I don’t believe that. I think that’s not true. And I think it’s a dangerous thing to sort of get too carried away with that as well. So we see that in the industry, whether it’s around data privacy, security, confidentiality, or around content creation, or around adapting workflows and teams, you know, where can we be more efficient. All of a sudden people are terrified that AI is going to take their jobs and it’s actually, it’s about as as you’re a change management expert, it’s reconfiguration. It’s not sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s really understanding there are going to be many, many things that are going to shift around and areas where AI can will subsume some of that low-level work or some of the sort of heavy lifting, so to speak. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have people that are required to do other things.
And I think that those at the moment have been very, very common examples of the big headaches and the problems that people are often coming to us for and saying, we want to use AI, we want to use it securely, and we have a lot of confidential data. We also want to use AI to help us be more efficient. How can we do that, but also not terrify our entire workforce. And then there’s the other side, which is actually… what does what can I do to help you? Adapt and, and continue to grow your business in the future.

[00:46:10] Phil Lewis: I mean, I think that’s, that’s so clear. You know, what is this going to, how is this going to continue to inform how we do business, how in the short term, then do we maximise our efficiency while keeping our team on side and actually that whole question of security, data, compliance, all that sort of stuff. And again, I found myself sitting here thinking, well, there’s about one and a half of those things that I would do really well in the context of my two consultancy businesses and about one and a half, two of those things that I really wouldn’t go anywhere near without wanting to talk too negatively about myself. If you want a good conversation about data, privacy and security, I am literally the worst human being on the planet to be talking to that about. But I think that’s back to your point earlier on, which is; if we know what we’re good at, and we have a deep expertise in some of these use cases, then really the job is back to the old and new thing. How do we take that experience, that track record, that knowledge, and simply apply it in the context of what we’re talking about now? Because so, for example, AI and some of this technology might be new and its impacts might be unfamiliar, but the way that human beings react to new and unfamiliar things is a tale as old as time. And within that, there becomes an opportunity to take, for people like me anyway, to take that sort of human centreed experience and to inquire into, well, what does that mean in this new world? And what… how does that inform the type of conversations that we need to be having with our clients and that we need to help our clients have with themselves? Viv, one final question before we round this out for you, which is, we’ve wrapped quite a lot of themes into this conversation today, but I’m interested, you mentioned yourself, you’re a buyer of consultancy services. If you had just, say, one piece of take-home advice for any independent consultant listening to this conversation, who is curious about or worried about AI and is wondering what it means for the future of their business. What would be your piece of advice?

[00:48:18] Vivienne Hsu – JBI: My piece of advice would be, see it as an opportunity, but don’t try to jump into it and sort of use it unless you’re applying it in the right way. And that may be that it helps make your own workflow and your own business more efficient. It may be how you determine how you grow your business in terms of hiring or working in terms of looking at different roles or skills or expertise that you may want to bring in, or how you might upskill yourself. And I do also think that just trying to not let it terrify you. It is what we would call like the fourth industrial revolution and it’s happening. So just kind of like come, you know, consultants are, I think one, one of the things that makes consultants so good is that generally they’re highly adaptable and flexible people. And so adapting and flexing and understanding that that’s part of the journey is probably what I would, you know, try to hold close… you know, near and dear as everybody’s starting on this journey together.

[00:49:24] Phil Lewis: Phil, thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:49:26] Vivienne Hsu – JBI: Thank you for having me, Phil.

[00:49:30] Phil Lewis: And a big thanks there to Viv. And once again, thanks too, to Sam. Don’t forget, you can have a look at Advance, our new course that will give you all the tools you need to survive and thrive as an independent consultant available via TBD+. So check the link in the show notes for that. In the meantime, we will be back as always with new episodes on the first Monday of every single month. If you could do us a favour and like, rate, review and share us via your favourite podcast player, that would help us out perhaps more than you know. But in the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s episode, see you soon.

Explore more