How to Engage Your Consultants and Reduce Turnover

In a consulting business, your people are the backbone of the company. Without them, you can’t deliver quality work to clients or run a profitable business. The thing is, good consultants are hard to find, harder to acquire, and expensive to replace. So, it’s imperative that they’re happy working for your company.

But what do consultants care about? What makes them happy? They care about job security. They also care about personal growth and career advancement, so they look for their employers to provide them with new and exciting opportunities to help them achieve their goals.

They also care about things like company culture, healthcare, work-life balance, connecting with peers, etc. But consistently closing deals to provide job security and offering them fulfilling and enriching work is how you’ll differentiate yourself from other employers.

Today’s consultants are savvy, though—at least the ones you want working for you are. Keeping them around will take more than a wink and a handshake. It will take continuously driving out uncertainty with proof that you have a plan for them.

So how do you drive out uncertainty? How do you become the type of company your consultants can trust when there’s already so much uncertainty baked into the consulting business model? After all, you can’t make clients hire you. You can't force them to extend, either. And your operating costs certainly aren't going away any time soon.

The answer is, to be honest, and transparent, and constantly communicate with your people to manage their expectations. But that’s easier said than done.

Let’s look at what makes earning your consultants’ trust hard.

Balancing Consulting Company Tensions

In consulting, the business has three key parts: clients, company, and people. A successful consulting company knows how to strike a balance between managing all three.

When you’re small, it’s easy. Communication happens organically. You know everyone by name. You’ve probably even met their family. You only have a handful of clients, and it doesn’t take as much time and effort to manage their expectations or ensure you’re invoicing correctly and getting paid on time. This is why good consulting companies experience such high growth in their first several years.

But as the business grows, keeping track of it all gets harder. So, owners build systems around each part of the business. They put people in charge to manage things like finances, talent, HR, sales, etc. The owners do all that in hopes that they can delegate to the leaders and free up time to do the things they're good at, or only they can do.

What ends up happening is that consulting companies inadvertently create independent systems and build independent teams that have no visibility into the other parts of the business. Growth becomes stagnant at this point because they basically built a company that lost all the characteristics that helped them grow in the first place.

So, what does all this have to do with keeping your people happy?

Well, your people have their own set of priorities. Meanwhile, you have company and client priorities to deal with. Sometimes all those priorities align quite nicely. Other times they don’t, and this creates tension inside your business.

The difference between keeping your consultants happy and having them bail on you is in how well you manage the places where your people’s priorities brush up against those of the company and the client.

Let’s look at some examples of times when these priorities clash.

Balancing Your Company and People

In a perfect world, your pipeline would be full of slam dunks months in advance so you could easily plan career paths, keep profits high, and your people busy, and never worry about things like bench management and low utilization. You could easily move consultants from client to client to provide them with plenty of opportunities to grow and learn from senior consultants.

Sadly, that’s not the case in 99.9% of consulting companies. Not always.

The reality is that consulting work sells when it sells. Sometimes there’s lots of cash in the bank; sometimes, there isn’t. Other times, the stars align, and you get to provide someone with a neat opportunity. Sometimes you need them to stay at the same client for another 3 months until you can hire someone else.

But your reality doesn’t change what a consultant desires. Just moving forward full steam ahead despite what they may want and need is a good way to receive two weeks’ notice. Alternatively, the consultants’ desires don’t change your reality. And catering too much in their direction is a good way to run yourself out of business.

You’re going to have to find a way to strike a balance.

Balancing Your Clients and People

Ideally, your clients would be flexible and provide you with some wiggle room to make the best decisions possible for your company, and, ultimately, your people. In this ideal world, your client would wait on you to hire that one person before they got started. Or they’d speed up their timeline to make sure you’re not carrying those three consultants on the bench.

But that’s not reality either. After all, they have their own priorities and people to answer to. They need what they need when they need it and want what they want when they want it. Clients will fall in love with a consultant and never want them to go anywhere. Clients will fall out of love with consultants too. Clients will give you a verbal agreement on an SOW and turn around and say they want to start in six months. Then they’ll call you in two months and want to start now.

That’s reality.

But your client’s reality, like your own, doesn’t change your consultants’ wants and desires. You can’t simply bend over backward for every client, every time, and disregard what your people care about. On the other hand, it’s critical you keep clients happy and show up and show out when they need you. That’s how you stay in business.

You’re going to have to find a way to strike a balance.

Creating Balance, Certainty, and Trust

When it comes to striking a balance between your people’s priorities and the priorities of the other parts of your company, it isn’t always about having an exact answer. Like we said earlier, it’s about demonstrating that you have a plan for your people. And once you have a plan, it’s about the ability to effectively communicate that plan.

But it’s hard to communicate a plan when you don’t have information to communicate. When you treat each part of the company like a silo, each silo has its own information. Its own data. Its own knowledge. And while the info, data, and knowledge are interesting by themselves, it’s rarely actionable because it’s all dependent on the other parts of the business.

So, step one is breaking down the silos and creating visibility for your leaders. Once you’ve created visibility, you need to get all that information, data, and knowledge into one centrally located place. Now, you’re ready to be transparent and communicate openly and honestly with your consultants.

Imagine this. One of your best consultants realizes their client is winding down and comes to you wondering what’s next. You pull up your Professional Services Automation tool, and say this:

“Yep. I see your current opportunity is winding down in four weeks. Right now, it looks like we have three client options we think you’d be a great fit for. If all three clients close, I’d like to put you on Client A because I know you’re looking to advance your skills in this area, and I think I could pair you with one of our senior consultants who can help you make some great strides in that department.

If Client A doesn’t close, Client B and C are good options, but where we place you will largely depend on whether Client B opts for two consultants or three. If only one of those clients close, we’ll have to place you on the bench until we close them.

Don’t worry, though. We have some interesting ways to keep you busy doing some ongoing educational things that will help you get your next promotion, as well as some opportunities to provide some backend support to Client A. While the work at Client A won’t be billable, it’ll really help the client and us out, and you’ll still get to work with that senior consultant we spoke about earlier.

And if those other two clients don’t close, we have several opportunities in the pipeline that we feel confident we can speed up if we must.”

That’s a much better experience for the consultant than saying this:

“Not sure. Let me get with the sales and talent team and find out. I know we got some stuff in the pipeline, but I don’t know where we stand right this second. Let me get back to you on that.”

Both responses don’t provide a 100%, bulletproof scenario. But one inspires more trust and establishes you as an employer who has their act together and who has a plan.

But you can’t have that first conversation if you’re too busy running around gathering information, having meetings about meetings, constantly getting inaccurate information, and sifting through tool after tool—spreadsheet after spreadsheet—just to answer a consultant when they ask what’s next.

So, you want to keep your consultants happy and be the type of employer they can trust? Then you’re going to need to build a system that enables you to have the right conversations at the right time, with the right people.