The Odyssey Arrow Integration Phases ◾ 65
that the first project that they had identified might cost $250,000. It was the
highest number I’d ever thrown out in front of a client. There was a two- or
three-second hesitation, then the CEO said, “When can you get started?”
What happened next is revealing. When I did put pencil to paper and
came back to them, I told them that the first element of the project wasn’t
going to cost $250,000 after all. It was only going to cost $155,000. Obviously,
they were pleasantly surprised. I had just dropped my price by almost
$100,000. Ultimately, however, that first intervention lead to a wide-ranging
project that touched on many aspects of their business, and when all was said
and done, they wrote us a check for 1 million dollars.
Odyssey in Action II
Tim Maloney, Newport Group, Ontario, Canada
The Smartest Person in the Room
This particular client came to an Executive Briefing of mine, and afterwards,
he indicated that he was interested in what I was doing. He was a very busy
prospect, with a net worth of maybe $60 million. So it took a little while to
set up the M1. Accomplishing an initial meeting in this situation is all about
walking the line between not appearing to be too available and accommodat-
ing, but facilitating the setup so that it can actually occur. Don’t look up to or
down upon any man is a thought I refer to often. My time is valuable, and
I choose what I do with it. It’s not available to others without me con-
sciously or subconsciously projecting that it is. Say something like “When
can we find a time that works for both of us?” Always let prospects volun-
teer a suggestion first. Value positioning starts early.
For me, it’s important to establish a time window for the M1 upfront. A
good M1 isn’t a half-hour conversation, it’s around ninety minutes to two
hours but shouldn’t be much more than that. It helps keep the focus on the
prospect and off of yourself. While 90% of M1s are within that timeframe, if
I see that a prospect is really engaged and that we are running out of time,
I stop the conversation and say something like “It sounds like we have more
to discuss than the time we originally allocated. This is important to you I
think. I can take more time if you would feel that would be helpful.” You
gain agreement, then return to the conversation: “What were you saying
about …?”
66 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
If you always take longer than two hours, before congratulating yourself
on your conversational prowess, you may want to question your own pre-
paredness and the questioning sequence that you are using. If your ques-
tions aren’t general to specific, if they don’t help your prospect move from
fact, to logic and then emotional perspectives, you must rethink them.
Here’s a suggestion to those of us who feel we have made it through life
as reasonably bright human beings: It’s not about you or how smart you are,
or about how you have seen it all and have all the answers. Stop that, right
now!
Don’t sit forward on the seat, minimalize your body language; no dra-
matic nods or gestures are necessary. Ask questions, listen to answers, write
notes, but only if you have asked permission to take notes, and don’t ask
until after you and the prospect have put the niceties behind you and they’re
settled into the conversation.
As indicated earlier, stick to generalities at first, but what you really want
to do is to get to the point where the prospect’s answers are moving away
from his head and into his gut. You want a client to feel comfortable as
they’re talking; you want to hear why they got into their business, what the
challenges are, what the company’s got going for it … It’s a very easy pro-
cess if you do it right and a very hard process if you do it wrong. A person
can’t fake genuine interest; never do that. Be genuinely interested in people
andtheir ideas. As Zig Ziglar says, “Listening is not waiting for your turn to
talk.”
We met in Toronto. After an hour of going through all of the issues, he
tells me, “My brother-in-law works for me and I had to fire him. I was pay-
ing him $200,000. Now I’ve got to pay severance of twice that, before tax …
And my sister’s mad at me …”
Believe it or not, things like this can have a huge impact on a business.
It’s those strange little things that cause people to take their eye off the ball.
He’s too busy worrying about how his sister is going to react to the fact that
he canned her husband to deal with really significant business problems
developing under his nose.
Of course, the other point here is that once a person has told you some-
thing like that, they’ll pretty much tell you anything.
I’m really interested in three areas when I talk to a potential client. Firstly,
what their revenue is and how it’s trending. Second, what their payroll is
and how that’s trending. Third, what’s their gross margin and how is that
trending.
The Odyssey Arrow Integration Phases ◾ 67
The reason I ask about these three things is that a lot of times, people
say, “Well, we’re doing more volume than we’ve ever done in the past. Sales
are up!” what you tend to find however is OK, sales are trending up, but
usually in that scenario, payroll is going to trend up because you’re paying
out more commissions, you’re paying out more salaries. That’s why I need to
know gross margin. If sales are rising but gross margin is falling, you have a
problem.
So this prospect was in that situation. Sales and payroll were up, but
gross margin was down, and what’s more, it was trending down. It had gone
from 32% to 28% over the previous three years. If that trend continues in
that exact same way, that prospect is going out of business.
At this point, I also ask some specific questions: What are revenues? What
is payroll? What is margin today, and where do you feel it should be? How
do you compensate your executive team? How much? What percentage of
your overall payroll is tied up in executive salaries? Do you realize that is
X% of your overall spend? Do you feel you get full value on the expenditure
every year? Do you use gain share, profit sharing, or year-end bonus? How
is that decided on? How is it measured? Has it shown measurable differences
in the effectiveness of your payroll spend?
Once we have that kind of information, the questions change. You’re mov-
ing a person from emotion back to logic, you’re going back to the head from
the gut. You start asking questions like: How much is this situation costing
you? What are the ramifications if that continues? You’re now beginning to
monetize the situation with the client.
It turns out that this prospect has a $1 million per year problem. If he
doesn’t arrest the decline in his gross margin, he’ll lose $1 million this year,
$2 million next year, and so on.
At the end of the M1, I always say, “Thank you. It would be best for you
if I go away and think about what you’ve told me. I have seen things like
this before—not exactly your situation but certainly similar scenarios. I want
to think about it. I’m going to get my thoughts down on paper, and I will
send you back a letter.”
That’s the M1r, and in the response letter, you basically lay out some key
quotes, just to show you were listening.
I hardly ever have an M2, unless the client wants to ask me a specific
question. I’m going to suggest a BMR in the letter. Once the BMR is agreed,
an appropriate fee is set, just for that initial stage. Resist any daydreaming
with the client around what the actual fix will look like. Keep your powder
68 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
dry. The fix will be discovered by the BMR participants. You don’t have to
do anything, but set them up to win and enjoy the process.
Any businessperson on the planet usually has about five or six people
that they really count on to get things done. No one surrounds themselves
with sixteen direct reports. These are the forward thinkers, and these are
the people who are going to create the solution. I don’t create the solution.
I can provide a platform of competencies, processes, resources, and systems
within which they create a solution, but the BMR group will create the solu-
tion itself.
I give each of these forward thinkers homework ahead of the BMR.
They have to answer a list of questions about the business. These are
very similar to the questions I’ve asked the owner by the way, but they
do this as an individual exercise. They don’t get together as a group; they
actually write out their answers in advance of the BMR. That means they
can’t get togetherand fudge it. And it also creates what I call a collective
vulnerability.
I pretty much know what I’m going to see every time. They will say
we don’t have enough communication, they will say there isn’t enough
role clarity, they’ll say we’re not getting enough performance feedback.
These factors determine the level of trust in any organization. If you get
these three right, you’ll have a very trusting environment. If you don’t,
you won’t.
At the BMR, I’ve got six or seven people in the room. They’re senior
people, they’re well paid, they’re all, as I say, collectively vulnerable.
They’vekicked themselves collectively in the ass for eight hours straight,
and they’re now in a zone where they’re thinking, “We’ve got to fix this …
We’ve got to move beyond where we’re at. What are our priorities?”
At the end of the BMR, I always ask, “What does ‘good’ look like to
you?” Once I know that, I can effectively ghostwrite the solution for my
clients.
Intentionally, I don’t spend much time thinking about what’s going to
happen—the Recommendation—until I have the right dynamic in place with
the people who are going to benefit from whatever the solution is going to
be. If you can save somebody a million dollars a year, you’re worth a lot, so
getting them to own the project that creates the solution is very important.
Being the smartest person in the room and acting like you’re the smartest
person in the room in a consulting role is absolutely wrong. You’ve got to
pull the solution from them. You’ve to encourage them to move forward.
The Odyssey Arrow Integration Phases ◾ 69
Odyssey in Action III
Padraig Berry, ONEFocus, Dublin, Ireland
Slowing Down to Speed Up
I had actually started an engagement with this particular client before com-
pleting the Odyssey program in Ottawa. What it revealed to me is that I
didn’t really understand what I was doing.
Before participating in Odyssey, I had completed the equivalent of aBMR.
I had thought that would tease out all of the issues, but it didn’t. Why? Because I
had missed out a couple of critical steps, particularly in relation to building the
relationship with the CEO. I needed absolute clarity with him on what we were
trying to do, and I didn’t have that. I just didn’t have it.
When I got back from Ottawa, I called up the CEO and told him that I
wanted to stop the process. I explained that I didn’t feel I fully understood the
issues. I told him that I wanted to take a step back, that I wanted to “slow down
to speed up,” which is the expression that we use on Odyssey. I felt that the CEO
and I were guessing our way forward, and I was very uncomfortable with that.
The CEO accepted all of this. So I began again, with the M1. I met him
for a four-hour meeting and went through a comprehensive mind map of the
M1 questions. I then went away and wrote a twenty-five page report—the
M1r. All of this, I should say, was done pro bono. From an integrity perspec-
tive, it was vital that reinvigorating the process was not seen simply as an
attempt to inflate the fees.
Ten days later, at the M2, we walked through the report line by line and
agreed these were the critical areas, these were the real issues.
Before I restarted the process, I had never really addressed the CEO’s
personal vision. I had no clear idea of what he was trying to accomplish. I
had no conception of the real issues because I had never asked the ques-
tions. Now, I was having that conversation.
We continued with the Odyssey Arrow and had the BMR. I compiled all
of the information into a summary document then met the CEO again to go
through it all.
The intervention we eventually decided upon was no longer a cost. It had
become an investment. That too was really important to me from an integ-
rity perspective. I felt certain that I was on the right track, that I could say
things to him and recommend things to him with the utmost integrity. There
was no issue of me trying to sell him anything.
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