Consultancies exist to make money. They need to sell their services for survival. Whether they have dedicated sales departments or not, the entire organisation is sales focused aiming to make more money from your organisation at every opportunity. Every developer placed by a consultancy into your organisation has a role to play in the sales cycle. Do you really want them working with you?
A well known global consultancy once ran an internal campaign entitled ‘We All Sell’ highlighting exactly this point. Across the screens of thousands of developers across hundreds of clients, those words were emblazoned on screens for any client walking by to see. The premise was simple: Everyone has a role to play in identifying the next opportunity.
Part of the overhead in taking on a consultancy is that despite charging you a day rate, management consultancies expect their client-facing staff to take part in these activities when they should be fully focused on delivery. You are literally paying them to monitor your organisation and sell to you. Lunch and learn sessions, branded mugs, a large on-site presence, dinners or other corporate entertainment with directors, highly polished status reports, the list goes on.
By running your own team, you take control over their activities. Even if they do precisely the same tasks, without optimisation, they won’t be joining internal calls for their business unit or other team calls. They won’t be undertaking mandatory internal training courses which benefit the consultancy more than you.
A consultancy is always looking for that next sale and their primary reason to deliver is to unlock that. You need an organisation where every team is focused on your success ahead of their own. Consultancies have their place, but not at your organisation.
At Forwd, we have a simple commercial model where we charge a small fixed fee and then 2% of projected cost savings in year 1 and 1% of projected cost savings in year 2, with nothing further to pay for a team that is right for your organisation.
We look forwd to working with you.
