About Us : Business Model

It is widely accepted that consulting is a non-scalable business i.e., relationship between revenues and efforts can only be linear. This is because most consulting firms work on model of selling man- hours. Pricing strategy is based on scope and manpower required to deliver the scope. Revenues are directly linked to efforts. It is not surprising that most consulting firms represent their size and growth in terms of manpower. More growth is only by adding more manpower; hence the linearity cannot be broken.

The challenge of lack of scalability exists because consulting companies are trapped in paradigm of imposing their value perception on customer. Consultants equate value of their proposal with efforts deployed, whereas customer equates value with the benefits reaped. We figured that our pricing strategy should be based on client benefits. Moreover, our selection of clients should be those with significant wastages. This approach will not only fetch us good money, but also make the profession scalable (Benefits can continue accruing after tapering of consulting efforts).

Thus, a new engagement model was born – wherein significant portion of our professional fees is linked to client getting the targeted benefits. Consequently, this lead us to challenge the next paradigm of consulting industry.

Most consulting firms do not risk sticking their neck out for results. Many of them limit their engagement to providing recommendations. It is far easy and less risky to collect fees for recommendation efforts than to collect it from the accrued benefits to the clients. With clients controlling the decision making process, it appears as if implementation is outside the locus of control of the external consultants. Besides, resistance to change is a natural phenomenon adding on to the risks of implementation.

We realized that no person ever resists a change, particularly when he is able to associate the change with significant benefits, at a minimum risk. So any change, which has positive impact on people is always welcome.

We knew if we could bring about significant improvement, while implementing our solution components in a risk-free way, we can not only crumble the so called resistance to change, but also go a step ahead and link our fees to the results.

However, establishing the fact that the wealth creation was actually due to our consulting, remains a challenge.

Results, (particularly organization wide business parameters) are debatable and cannot be easily attributed to an initiative This is true if the results are either within the noise of the system or it takes too long to materialize. In both cases, establishing a direct link is difficult and, at times, even erroneous. With longer elapsed time, many other business variables undergo a change, making results of all long term improvement initiatives debatable. The best way to establish direct causality is when the company gets significant results, surpassing all expectations, within a month or two of implementing a solution step. One solution component at a time and each resulting in significant results in a short time (short enough for all other business parameters to be the same, before and after the implementation.)

The question is - Is it really possible to get substantial results within 2-3 months of clients engaging us?

Can an improvement project in a single department provide significant results for the entire organization? Or does it take multiple projects in multiple departments? With multiple initiatives, management bandwidth is stretched, which in turn delays all initiatives. Many long term initiatives fizzle out as the initial enthusiasm is hard to sustain without significant and undebatable results. At the same time, getting fast yet minor benefits from so called "low hanging fruits" does not help. We need substantial results on key operational and/or financial parameters in very short time. That is exactly achieved by Theory of Constraints approach, which provides us with the framework to get more from less.

TOC approach's tenet lies in identifying and exploiting the single constraint that limits the company from making more money

This way of working not only leads to significant delays but also conflicts. We want to prevent this conflict for our clients and provide single point accountability for results.

We have built our own tools, as it is very difficult and at times nearly impossible to configure the "uncommon sense paradigms" of theory of constraints in the standard available software products in the enterprise space. Our products are part of the holistic implementation offering. They are simple to understand and easy to use. The tools can be deployed in the shortest possible time, so that the focus remains on managing the transition to new culture and processes rather than IT issues.