Our customer development interviews provide insights into how advisers with expertise in a given industry segment can succeed in the era of automation, AI, and cross-border cloud collaboration across borders.
In sharp contrast to legacy models on the market, imagine a firm with full internal freedom designed to connect specialist advisers with businesses needing just their niche services.
In today’s economy, a scalable workforce goes to the heart of the key success factor to the industry – people. There is simply no point implementing punitive and restrictive employment contracts that prevent star performers from fulfilling their true potential. As life circumstances change and work-life balance becomes a priority, why can highly talented advisers not be afforded the flexibility to perform to their optimum happiness levels?
There are countless studies on burnout and on the other hand, so many organisational psychologists could not stress enough about the importance of being in a happy place for peak operational efficiency, lateral thinking and development of sustainable ethical solutions for clients.
Whether a large corporation is looking for specialist services in-house, or looking for consultants who would rather work on their own, or even large advisory firms who are looking for open talent to meet any new engagements they won, this is the perfect solution that ticks all the following boxes:
Controlling fixed labour costs.
Fixed labour costs can be a killer for most businesses whether you are a listed corporation or a small consulting firm. Until now, the classic means to control fixed labour costs meant reducing headcount and drive existing employees to the point of burnout. This is almost always a band-aid solution that can come undone like dominos as soon as a key performer leaves.
And trying to hire the cheapest permanent staff is almost always more costly by the time we factor rework and stakeholder dissatisfaction.
Relying on a scalable, flexible workforce of highly qualified advisers with a proven track record can amount to significant savings for any company and its stakeholders, when it is required and how it is required. Specialisation is the key to success here.
Reduce risk.
Although hiring talent on a per-project basis is not new, for many companies, working with an unknown entity is simply not worth the risk. Traditional recruitment agencies can be costly, but they often justify the cost by qualifying and filtering candidates. How can we blur the lines between a large services firm and serve the same vetting function as a temp agency, while at the same time taking the cost of an intermediary out of the equation? It is simple, we take the best of the large firms and create a dream team of only the most experienced, from the best firms on the market. These are the same people who worked on the other side of the table as engagement leads and key service providers in their past life.
Help organisations rapidly scale up (or down).
When you have access to highly qualified candidates at any location, they can hit the ground running and tackle problems without the need for lengthy training periods. A specialized professional (whether as a consultant or an in-house contractor) can help your organisation ramp up productivity by bringing the necessary skill set for the job. A full-time hire on the other hand, may take longer to become fully productive as statistically, HR practices will mandate that they have room to get promoted within the job and room to develop a little further into the role required of them. Hence if workload tapers off unexpectedly through the loss of a key contract, no one wants the dreadful experience of laying off employees let alone new recruits.
Offer the right expertise for each contract.
Making use of a scalable workforce allows companies in all industries the luxury of picking and choosing the skill sets they need for any given project. If there isn’t yet a single place where you can find the experienced advisers you are looking for, there soon will be, given the rate at which new highly talented advisers are joining in to serve specialised needs. If you see the need for a niche service, and have the needed expertise to run with it but do not know whether you can bring in 3x -5x client revenue to justify your position in a large service provider, you could be the first mover in your specialty with us.
The Question?
Do you cater to client organisations before offering contingent workforce to large firms who are also providing the same service , or vice versa?
Not only is this a chicken an egg situation, the hot topic in any of the Big 4 service providers or magic circle firms is whether they have become too large for themselves, and whether partnering to fill in the need of large global engagements can rely solely on recruitment and face losing the client.Some of the Big 4 firms have created open talent network for themselves, in clear recognition of the same crucial issue. However the efficiency and quality of the talent pool is commonly understood to be limited for the same reason that the talent pool is limited by cumbersome recruitment like practices they already have for on-boarding a permanent staff.
While client organisations so far love us, typical some partners of large firms in need of contingent talent often show a misguided by a fear of “cannibalisation” when dealing with us. For other partners that reached clarity, it was really a simple two-step business decision:
Whether it makes commercial sense to obtain the best talent for the short-term specific project(s) at hand?
If so, how much that is worth to them to get the job done?
Some other service provider partners have embraced us even further as they even end up offering full-time positions to interested advisers virtually risk-free to the firm. Quite the contrary this is a new phenomenon where there is a unique ability to “try before you buy” and avoid the costly situation of recruiting the wrong talent from someone who interviewed well but could not deliver.
We are investing in a much needed 21st century alternative and we are aiming to tackle the core issue rather than its symptoms. Hence, we went back to the drawing board scrapping any legacy thinking. From bare bones, we designed our model with two pillars in mind, professional adviser’s needs, and the stakeholders that benefit from each individual adviser’s talents.
