Be Prepared for Your Consultants!

If you have a job where you regularly interact with clients to help get something done, you likely know the pain that is working with an unprepared client. While helping the client understand get organized can be a part of the work that you do for them, it is often not the most value adding activity. These inefficiencies can be avoided by the client if they are prepared and responsive to the consultant working with them. Being prepared and responsive can mean many different things depending on the types of services being provided: it could mean reaching out in advance to see if anything needs to be gathered before the consultants starts their work, setting aside time to promptly respond to requests, or coordinating other people’s time to ensure priority items are taken care of. Today, we're going to talk about three important reasons how being prepared as a client is a benefit, even if it takes additional time.

Being charged by the hour? Save that time!

It is very common for smaller businesses to have arrangements where they charge by the hour. For each additional hour the consultant puts into the engagement, the more money is charged to the client. If the client takes the time to get prepared for everything, it could turn a 10-hour engagement into an 8-hour engagement. Inversely, I've seen clients that are simply not prepared that turned what should be 10-hour engagements into 15-hour engagements. In many cases, the efforts spent internally to prepare are cheaper than letting the external party come and figure everything out for themselves and charge for it.

What about fixed fees?

For arrangements where the client is being charged a fixed fee, the situation is slightly different than the hourly arrangements. While the client doesn't run the immediate risk of being charged for the extra time, there may be clauses in a contract that allow a business to charge for out-of-scope work or work that was done in excess of the original planned time commitment. Additionally, fixed fee engagements typically have two other pressure points: fee pressure and retention pressure.

Fee pressure: businesses provide services based on their anticipated workload and ability to service a given client. If a fee is quoted and it turns out that the business had to put more work into the engagement than expected, then the business will be looking to raise the fee next time it works with the same client to cover the costs it takes to complete the engagement. Clients typically don't like having these conversations because it means they will have to pay more money for the services than originally anticipated. By being prepared as a client and ensuring that the consultant you are working with has the appropriate resources and feedback from you to complete their engagement, you will not have to worry about increasing fees as often.

Retention pressure: is much more common with smaller businesses. Business owners only have so much time and resources to deal with their clients. If there's a client working on a fixed fee that is taking up way too much time and resources from the business, it could be in the business's interest to drop the client entirely. While the business might lose out on the fee that the original client was paying, it can replace that one client with multiple better clients, which could end up with more money for less hassle. This isn’t always an easy decision for the business to make, but it is certainly difficult for the client when it happens because it means searching for a new service provider.

Getting more bang for your bucks

Both of the previous two points were more focused on not paying more for the same level of service, but when working with businesses that service many clients, there is a much larger benefit to being a great client: gaining additional insights from the consultant. In my experience, the clients that save my time and effort by being prepared and ready to go up front get the added benefit of learning tips and tricks from the service provider that would not normally be offered within the scope of the engagement. For example, if I am auditing a company and they have everything prepared and ready to go, I can spend more time talking to them about their business and how a lesson I learned from another client might apply to them. When working with a professional it is likely that they have tons of experience taken from their other clients that can benefit the client both inside and outside the scope of the engagement. The clients that are prepared are the ones who get that additional value because the time saved on catching up and performing administrative tasks can be put towards more focused and tailored insights from the experienced professional. 

Whether you are a business providing services to clients, or the client receiving those benefits, it's important to understand the benefits that good clients get by being prepared. The next time you find yourself working with a consultant, try to go out of your way to be the best client that you can be and see the benefits that it brings. Finally, remember that these concepts do not only apply to financial services, other areas like personal coaching and mentorship see these same benefits.