The business of broken promises

“The promises we make have the advantage of being true.”

Persuasion is a core skill in business. In a career of some twenty-five years, this was one of the better lines I’d heard. It was part of the reason that I agreed my consultancy business would take on a new client.

A case study in irony

Despite their leadership team talking with charisma about their values, their care for others, and their commitment to doing the right thing, this client broke every promise it made to us.

Having defaulted on a huge sum of money that we were owed for our work, its leaders lied about the quality and volume of what we did for them; blanked our calls and emails; agreed a settlement with our lawyers then didn’t pay it; and finally abused the legal system to grind us down.

We had worked hard. Our client was delighted with what we’d done (I have the correspondence to prove it). We had a tight contract. But the organisation’s leaders decided, retrospectively, that they didn’t want to pay. They were better resourced than us: richer, more ruthless, more willing to play dirty.

They got what they wanted: an improved bottom line. We didn’t. We had to cut our substantial losses.

One damn thing after another

All of this happened to us just last year. And it served to remind me that there is no room for complacency in business, and especially in consulting. Even with a happy client and a sound contract, unexpected stuff can happen.

Complacency compromises resilience. And resilience matters for two reasons. Firstly, building anything of value isn’t easy, and requires significant time, energy and (usually) capital over a prolonged period. Secondly, the world will do its thing while remaining wholly indifferent to your prosperity. Even the best-tuned BS-detector or ‘risk management protocol’ can fail.

To prove this, investigate the history of any business. It will be, to quote Arnold Toynbee, “just one damn thing after another”. Whatever you think the future holds, you can be confident that the world will have different ideas in mind.

When businesses fail, people suffer

Expect the unexpected: easy to say, hard to do. Last week I talked about the failure rate of consultancies. Some 30,000 consultancies were set up in the UK in 2022 alone; data suggests that up to four in five of those won’t make it. That’s many thousands of businesses that will not last their first two years.

This is not abstract stuff. People who talk about ‘creative destruction’ being good for economies have never stared down the barrel of its brutal financial, emotional and psychological consequences. Between now and next year, thousands of human beings will end up facing the significant disruption, worry and disappointment of their consultancy businesses not working out.

And that’s before we even consider the myriad knock-on impacts that such failures have on other businesses, on economies, on the families of those concerned, on society. This just isn’t good enough. There is a moral, economic and social imperative to help more independent consultancies stay the course.

Solving the resilience problem

‘How to build resilience?’ is a complex question. Resilience isn’t something you can just switch on and experience instantly. It’s a practice that has to be carefully built up over time.

Part of the answer lies in mindset. One of the five values that inform all my professional pursuits, including The Consultancy Business, is ‘grit’.

Grit speaks to the commitment to push on regardless of how tough it sometimes gets; to a belief that there is always a way out, no matter how narrow the path; and to the fact that anything worth doing is going to be hard at some points. Demonstrating grit is made possible by the simple truth that spring always follows winter.

A value like grit is helpful because it primes us to stay the course no matter what the world chucks our way. It creates a psychological, emotional, intellectual and spiritual foundation for high-quality commercial navigation and decision-making.

For independent consultancies, like any small business, another part of the answer is bound up in matters of money management. But some of it is unique to our industry. It goes to competitive differentiation, and the ways in which branding and marketing functions (and doesn’t) in B2B engagements. It goes to sales. It goes to the art of navigating difficult conversations and situations.

Supporting consultants through the knocks

Answering the question of how to build resilience in all its dimensions is another reason why we’re launching The Consultancy Business. Our first course, Advance, is effectively a twelve-step self-help survival programme. We developed it partly as a response to the poor-quality support available on the market (something I also mentioned last time).

I am confident that any independent consultant who takes it will be better positioned to stay the course than they otherwise would be.

Equally, I can’t promise any consultant that they will never get sweet-talked by a bad actor or blindsided in myriad other ways. The promises the world makes are seductive, but rarely have the advantage of being true. But that’s reality and we might as well face it — together.

If you’d like to build your resilience, check out The Consultancy Business Podcast.

What to take from this article

The unexpected can, and will, happen. Your choice is whether to plan for it or get panned by it.

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