A business owner called me to automate her company. She knew what she wanted. She had the budget for it. All I had to do was say yes and start building.
An hour into the first call, I told her not to hire me for it.
Not because the technology would not work. It would have worked exactly the way I designed it. The problem was what it would have been sitting on top of. She had five people in five seats that were wrong, and no system fixes a people problem. It only makes the problem run faster.
So I told her the truth. You could pay me ten million dollars to build this. We would spend six months on it. And at the end of those six months you would be furious with me, because the system would be doing exactly what I promised and your business still would not work.
We fixed the people first. Then we built.
There is a principle behind that decision that has almost nothing to do with technology.
When a farmer plants a seed, everything that seed needs is already inside of it. It sustains itself until it breaks open. You cannot feed it. You cannot water it into growing faster. While it is still closed, there is nothing useful you can do to it at all. There are only two things you can do to a seed, and both of them kill it. You can drown it, and you can burn it up with too much fertilizer.
It is only after the seed breaks open and puts down roots that it can take anything from the outside. And even then, a farmer can kill a crop just as dead by giving it too much as by giving it nothing.
Most consulting does not fail on strategy. It does not fail on tools. It fails on timing.
A business that is not ready to root cannot absorb what you give it, no matter how good the thing is that you are handing over. Pour more into it and you do not accelerate anything. You drown it. I have watched companies buy the right solution at the wrong moment and blame the solution.
So my first call is not a sales call. It is a diagnosis. I am trying to find out what is actually broken, and whether this business is at a point where it can take what I would build. Sometimes the answer is a full system. Sometimes the answer is five conversations you have been avoiding for two years. I have told people to spend nothing with me and go handle those first.
The most valuable thing I sell is the willingness to tell you that the thing you asked for is not the thing you need.
Anybody will take your money and build what you ordered. That is not consulting. That is order taking. The difference between the two shows up about six months later, and by then it is expensive.