Practice or Business: What’s the Difference?

I have met many business consultants who are either working on a book or at least thinking about writing a book. I have known several who actually have a manuscript they tote with them from client site to client site. These consultants have two problems in common: having manuscripts does not necessarily make them writers and books do not sell themselves. The mental exercise of putting experience into words can be its own reward, but what it reveals is a personality trait that says those consultants would prefer a consulting practice to a consulting business.

There are two kinds of consultants: financial oriented people and management oriented people. Financial folks love spread sheets and can write love letters in Excel. They tend to have finance and accounting backgrounds; many are CPAs, others have MBAs, some have both. Management folks love organizational charts and can write sonnets as PowerPoint presentations. They tend to have corporate backgrounds; many have business degrees, some have MBAs. Others have been business owners and are former entrepreneurs. All are familiar with the relationships between finance and management.

Regardless of their orientations, consultants share one common trait – they dislike, or at least distrust, sales people as a group of slick-talking, promise-anything-to-get-the-deal, glad-handing, tap-dancing liars and thieves. What sales people think about consultants is similar, but that is not my point. The use of professional sales people to acquire clients characterizes the difference between consulting practices, which do not, and consulting businesses, which do. Neither approach is better than the other. The significance is the difference in overhead.

Other differences in overhead include advertising, depth and size of support staff, and location. They may have large corporate structures to serve corporate customers, such as publicly traded companies, that employ hundreds to thousands of people, generating many millions of dollars in annual revenue. Consulting businesses have greater resources than many consulting practices and may offer layers of specialty in the services they offer, such as proprietary software, IT, tax consulting and financing.

Consulting practices are more entrepreneurial in nature and structure. They may be highly specialized themselves, depending upon the orientation of the consulting staff they employ. They may also be general practitioners whose services range from QuickBooks to websites. Because of their nature, consulting practices serve entrepreneurial clientele, most often privately held firms, who employ less than a hundred people and generate less than twenty-million dollars in annual revenue.

From a consultant’s point of view it is not about the money. It is all about the work. As I have previously written, when I worked for consulting companies my clients ranged from restaurants to general building contractors, from convenience stores to slaughter houses, from liquor stores to RV dealerships. For anyone who wants to become a professional consultant, I recommend the experience with the caveat that the travel can be torture.

From a client’s point of view it usually is about the money, what they think they need and they think about the work that is performed. So what is the difference between a consulting practice and a consulting business? The difference is in the overhead and in the specialties. Change is the product that the client buys or is sold.