I’m not sure. As one consultant pointed out, it’s like choosing doctors. You can be good at choosing one without necessarily knowing brain surgery.
I was a borderline case. I still might have bought a Kaypro without Michael Canyes’s approval, since I knew another writer familiar with the glories of the Osborne who appreciated the greater glories of the Kaypro. On the other hand, with my consultant friend’s guidance, I could shop for the lowest price rather than the most technical help from the dealer. And Michael steered me away from the dot-matrix printer, which, with their inferior print quality at the time, would have been bad news for me. I was lucky. I had befriended Michael through an Osborne user group at a time when he himself was looking for advice on writing, so he didn’t even charge me. You may be similarly lucky if you have a skill a computer consultant needs. But don’t count on it. So often, free consultants are worth their charges.
Had I not been as fortunate and had I experienced difficulties, I would have been willing to pay for advice. And mind you, my whole system costs less than $3,000. “You don’t want to spend $10,000 on a computer system,” Michael warns, “and find it doesn’t do what you want. You’d be better off spending several hundred dollars or more to learn exactly what you want and get some help installing it. Think of the business you’ll lose if you install your computer and it doesn’t work as planned. It depends. You could also spend a lot of time shopping and talking to people and not pay a consultant. It depends what your time is worth. The average guy has one or two uses for his computer in mind, and he doesn’t want to piddle around with the complexities of the thing. He just wants to cut right down to the core of it and get this job moving. If a consultant spends two or three hours with someone discussing a micro, it may cost perhaps $75 or $100. But the client might master in a day what might normally take a week or even several.” The wrong consultant, however, may actually cost you more—in money and time.
When shopping around for the right one, you’ll first want to consider a what—what work you need him for. Forget about computers. Does the task make sense commercially? Are you realistic about its costs? A former New England consultant tells of a baseball enthusiast who wanted to recreate some board games on the computer screen. It might have worked. But the man didn’t just want a computerized arcade game here—rather, a replication of ball parks, with their actual proportions. “He had a statistical background,” recalled the ex-consultant, “and had done some statistical consulting for a professional sports organization.” But there was a problem. The man believed that the consultant could perform this miracle on an Apple for less than $5,000. Actually, the program would have cost $50,000 to write—probably more than the man could quickly recoup through sales of the program. The consultant turned down this mission impossible. But the client let his enthusiasm for the project blot out his business sense and in fact squandered $55,000 on another consultant, who, incidentally, botched the job.
Now move on to the details of the work you want done. Do as with software; get as clear an idea as you can of the paperwork you’re computerizing. You may want your electronic files organized entirely differently from your paper ones. Whatever the case, plan ahead. You don’t want to—as somebody once put it—automate your confusion. And there’s another reason for knowing your precise needs before calling a consultant. Trying to jack up the bill, some experts can be brilliant at inventing new problems to fit their prepackaged solutions. Or they may downplay your real needs because the answers are not in their tool kits.
You’ll also want to decide if the consultant is just to give advice or more. Don’t pay simply for advice, then expect him to haggle with equipment suppliers and install the software.
And what about other services besides advice? Take the task of keying paper records into your computer system; some consulting firms will line up temporaries for the job. That way your normal people must worry only about their regular work and learning the new computerized routine. Of course, this data-entry work may itself be part of the training, and at least if your people enter the material, they’ll more easily find it later on.
As you define the what, you also get into a when—your deadline for computerization and how long the consultant or the firm is to remain on the job. There is a happy medium. You want him around long enough, full time or part time, to get the system up and running. But don’t count on making him in effect an employee. Hire permanent people if that’s going to happen. Joseph Auer, a $1,500-a-day computer-negotiations expert with blue-chip clients like New York Life, tells what can happen when consultants stay too long. A bank used a consulting firm for years. The outsiders became the main people familiar with the electronic links between the automatic teller machines and the big computer. Then the bank woke up. It realized that the outsiders could cripple its operation. The consultants didn’t blackmail the bank, but it was worried enough not to risk incurring their displeasure. Rather than farming out the work to a facilities management firm as planned, it extended the existing consultants’ contract, with the understanding that the outsiders would make the bank’s own people self-sufficient.
Next go on to the who question. A generalist who’s a good, quick learner might be a better deal for you than an overpriced guru who limits himself to one area. It’s like medicine. I’d much rather be cut up by a smart general surgeon with a steady hand than by a mediocre cancer specialist. Of course, for a complex job, you want the equivalent of a top cancer surgeon. At Stewart, anyway, the right specialist might have “programmed” the company to succeed.
Intertwined with the who are two how muches—the size of your company and the task for which you need the consultant. Are you a small businessman or a Fortune 500 executive? The consulting needs of the two categories may overlap. The general rule, however, is that a large company will feel more comfortable with a large consulting firm (GM, say, with Arthur D. Little) and a small company will be better off with a small one. A small businessman may enjoy more personal attention from a small consultant. He knows the people he’s dealing with, and it’s harder for the firm to pass the work on to a green employee—while charging the full price. The smallness of the firm, of course, makes it that much more important to check out references. Of course, sometimes the small guy may fit the large company’s bill; Michael Canyes, for instance, has tutored WordStar classes for the Federal Trade Commission—a good buy for the taxpayers, considering his skill and low overhead. “The smaller consulting firms,” he wisely says, “are likely to save a large business money when the consultants are working within their limitations.”