Are you spending your working life doing sh*# for idiots?

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In a world where the quality of your consulting can be determined by the quality of questions you ask, David Maister charges $17k USD for his time. His questions are excellent.

For those of us who have created activity lists, analysed workloads, and created master schedules and resource requirements plans, David Maister's key questions are deceptively simple. Have a go yourself at 3 of his favourites:

• What percentage of your time is spent doing something which it doesn't take your years of experience or expertise to do?
• What percentage of your work life / time is spent doing work you
  • love
  • tolerate
  • really don't want to do?
• What percentage of your working life is spent working with people
  • you love in a sector you love
  • who are OK in OK sectors
  • who are idiots?

Armed with just these three questions, I have restructured a small training consultancy (virtually) painlessly, and saved them a significant percentage of their wages bill. There were no workloads, no measurements, only their answers to these three questions, and a little persuasion.

Maister is an ex-Harvard Business School Professor. (He jokingly says there are more ex-HBS professors than there are ex-McKinsey people). He has written a book a year for the past 6 years or so. His best being his first - Managing the Professional Services Firm, originally written for lawyers, and adapted to meet the needs of all types of professional services, including accountants and of course consultants.

If you're over qualified - pass it on

Maister is much better and more informative in person than his books, especially since he snorts and laughs and swears, much like a real consultant, with an interesting English / American accent which keeps you guessing. He recently ran an AIM sponsored seminar in Sydney. Around 300 professional service providers were there.

Maister's audience responded that on average 60% of their time was spent doing something they were far too over-qualified to do. His next question was "Why are you depriving a junior person of the opportunity to learn from doing it, and saving your client some money?" Those of us working in small independent firms, were not let off the hook either - why aren't we leveraging the client's time, and charging them for the expensive work, he wanted to know?

So apply that to your own business. What parts of your business are a waste of your client's time (if not yours?). What things do you do which would be more cheaply, more quickly, and ultimately better done by someone else? It's leveraging. It's delegating. But how long has it been since you analysed how your own business works, and made a change based on what you found?

Are you doing shit for idiots?

The next 2 questions, about who you spend your time with, and how much you enjoy what you do, came down to a simple equation - the majority of consultants, lawyers and accountants in this world are doing "shit for idiots". Maister's thesis is that too few people are saying no to the work they hate, and too many doing it with people they can't stand. His contention is that there is an untapped niche market - for consultants who will only work with people they love, and do work they love.

While the audience smiled, I went back and talked to my client about it.

Changes in the real world

Based on the answer to the first question alone, we held a company meeting for the 40 consultants, administrators and trainers working in the consultancy. We agreed in fact that at least half of their time was spent doing stuff they should be delegating. Within 3 weeks we had chosen to not recruit another project manager, but absorb the project management time and recruit instead 3 "lesser spotted moppets". These lesser spotted moppets earn less than $12 an hour, and are pleased to photocopy, run errands, format documents, call to make sure training venues are available, answer emails and field phone calls. Indeed, they've been happy to have the job, responsive, and responsible.

While it may take longer for the major monolith insurance companies, banks and other "elephants" to respond, it certainly has made a short term, bottom line difference for one organisation.

Maister's most recent book is about how you manage professional services staff. It's all the things we should be doing but haven't yet. Try www.davidmaister.com. My most recent book, Consulting Mastery is also a good read - all about what consultants who are mega-successful do in their businesses and their client relationships. You can buy it at www.consultantsconsultant.com.au

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