I start today by talking about my first counseling. Then in the last two paragraphs I get to the main talk. I was working for a small brokerage agency in Trieste, it was 2023. The goal here was not to optimize or innovate. It was about finding the right operating set-up so as not to stall more and close the firm. This is exactly the situation I was talking about in a previous article, we were too close to the critical point to allow ourselves to set up a process change and give it time. What we decided to do is to set up a dozen or so operational changes and measure the micro-results so that we could optimize the running shot. Definitely unorthodox method but the situation called for it.
Fortunately for me, I found myself working with a person who, when aligned perfectly with the goals, was able to change and evolve. What she did was have a considerable amount of experience but nevertheless continue to learn and challenge herself in new situations. Sometimes consulting works because two people work together. Actually this time there were three of us, because being my first consultancy I had decided to keep a tier 2 consultant on hand to chat, in case I was unable to interface with a problem.
Here we carried out typical rebranding tasks. Rebranding, analysis of local competitors and repositioning accordingly, plus a series of procedures that as usual I do not report because they are part of the intellectual property of my company or the client company. The point is this: these techniques are heard and resented, but they are heard and resented because they work. Coaching the customer approach, for example, is one of the basic things that needs to be done. All firms, old and new, stalled or not, find themselves selling their product/service. It always goes through an interaction with the customer. So necessarily consulting almost always goes through there as well.
What can we-we as a consulting firm-do for an Italian SME. Many things, starting with auditing. Yes it is always a delicate moment when you take everything you have built and put it under the scrutiny of outside people. We don’t devalue, we don’t throw away. Experience is leverage, it is what makes you valuable in a market where it is difficult to live in. But experience has to be channeled, it has to be maintained but surrounded by a set of superstructures that-those yes-have to be constantly evolved and kept aligned with the market. Change management, that’s another thing we do. It means integrating the old processes to the necessary changes. The phrase “eh but we’ve always done it this way” cannot be uttered.
So auditing, change management. These are words that encapsulate a lot of work behind them. Auditing means talking to each of the managers and employees, understanding how you work, how you organize, how you can reorganize as needed, what are the pain points in your workflow, what are the bottlenecks and how you manage them, how resilient you actually are. We are chaos engineering applied to business processes, we think of all the ways things can go wrong, and then we start putting patches where the system is leaking water. Resilience is not competitiveness yet, but it is the baseline from which to send your system-business on a market trajectory.