What is done in counseling

Today I begin by talking about my first counseling. Then in the last two paragraphs I get to the main speech. I was working for a small brokerage agency in Trieste, it was 2023. The goal here was not to optimize or innovate. It was a matter of finding the right operating setup so as not to stall more and not to close the firm. This is exactly the situation I was talking about in an earlier 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 about ten operational changes and measure the micro-results, so as to optimize the running shot. Definitely unorthodox method but the situation called for it.

Fortunately for me, I found myself working with a person who, if aligned perfectly with the goals, was able to change and evolve. What he was doing was having a considerable amount of experience but nevertheless continuing to learn and challenge himself in new situations. Sometimes counseling works because two people work together. There were actually three of us this time, because being my first counseling I had decided to keep a tier 2 counselor within chat range in case I was unable to interface with a problem.

Here we carried out typical rearrangement tasks. Rebranding, analysis of local competitors and repositioning accordingly, plus a number 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. Training 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 counseling 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 time when you take everything you have built and put it under the scrutiny of outside people. We do not devalue, we do not throw away. Experience is leverage; it is what makes you valuable in a market that is difficult to live in. But experience must be channeled, it must be maintained but surrounded by a set of superstructures that-those yes-must be constantly evolved and kept in line with the market. Change management, that’s another thing we do. It means integrating old processes to necessary changes. The phrase “eh but we have 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 critical 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 yet competitiveness, but it is the baseline from which to send your system-company on a market trajectory.