Here at Driver, we are always considering the best way to meet our clients’ needs. Reflecting on this, our CEO, Mark Wheeler, has collected his thoughts on how and why our services are valuable to our clients in the following article.
Ultimately, the purpose of engaging a consultant is to utilise their knowledge and expertise to improve profitability through either increasing revenues, growing margin, or reducing costs.
There are plenty of people out there who are more than happy to bill you by the hour for their advice. Consultants come in all shapes and sizes across all business sectors that I can think of, and I am sure there are many categories that I have never come across.
As the CEO of Driver Group, it is important to reflect on why the services of a consultant are helpful to clients in cutting costs, driving revenue, and delivering meaningful solutions. That means ensuring that each of our business units and all our employees are fulfilling those needs as efficiently, effectively, and quickly as possible.
Outside perspective
Playing a key role in the development of a business, project, or case will, by its very nature, lead to even seasoned business leaders developing inherent biases. Simply offering perspective from a client’s view is a key benefit of consultancy. Coming into a situation with a fresh set of eyes and questioning assumptions, identifying blind spots, and asking questions not only helps a consultant understand their client better, but helps clients understand their own business better — a winning formula for bringing a successful business offering bang up to date, renewing its competitive positioning, and resolving problems.
Specialist skillset
Having worked with a wide range of businesses, across multiple sectors and jurisdictions, consultants already know the possible approaches and solutions across the industries they support. In our case, this includes solutions from a wide range of jurisdictions around the world. Having this experience allows consultants to offer their clients strategic insights, tactical analysis, and comparative data, as well as being able to recommend operational improvements with a comprehensive market view that is invariably much harder (and expensive) to acquire or imitate in-house. That said, the skills a consultant can bring may well help to upskill the in-house team for the future, as a by-product of working with a specialist.
Temporary need
It is the nature of consultancy to meet a client’s immediate need, or a need that the client had not previously contemplated as commercially relevant or significant. Long term relationships between clients and consultants are invariably valuable, when all parties are invested and managed appropriately, providing the framework for the mutual exchange of knowledge and expertise that can create powerful synergies. Consultants who can execute as keenly on each project as if it were their first engagement are those whom clients should look out for.
Speed of delivery
Once the decision has been made to bring consultants in to assist with a complex or sensitive situation, the most efficient timeline to resolution needs to be established. Clients need consultants who can get rapidly up to speed on the situations or issues they have been asked to address, formulate a programme of activity, and then execute, with the ability to scale up and down the size of team and types of disciplinary and sector expertise that are required often being a major component of this.
Driver Group
In order to deliver for our clients, Driver operates through three brands, each offering a suite of discrete and mutually reinforcing world-class consulting services to clients: Driver Trett – focussed on dispute avoidance and resolution support; Driver Project Services – focussed on site-based project management; and Diales, which provides industry-leading expert witness services for complex commercial disputes.
In each business line, and as part of each engagement, we consider with tremendous care the client’s priorities and identify how they can best be supported to deliver added value, minimise risk, resolve problems and drive profitability for their business.
UK Production Project
I recall being introduced to a client with a large problem project that was affecting their business production facilities and preventing the consolidation of a number of them. After a protracted dispute over a very large concrete floor, the main contractor’s contract had been terminated, drawing a line under a troubled relationship but leaving no clear way forward.
After working with the client for a very short time, it became clear that they needed the facility as early as possible, but that they were unable to align the professional team of designers to the delivery of their needs, or to respect budgets adequately.
We were able to quickly deploy specialists to understand the disciplines which needed design input, and our Driver Trett resources quickly went through the supply chain and resolved any remaining disputes that were blockers to getting the right specialists back to site. The site was restarted, with input from Driver Project Services, and work began to take shape quickly. There were some innovative and highly unusual aspects to the design, which our quantum team were able to cost and, in conjunction with our experts, advise on how these designs could be descoped or reworked to be delivered under budget.
This significant production facility was soon open and up and running, delivering a transformation to the client’s business in just over 12 months. Prior to engaging with us, the site had been empty and effectively frozen for over a year. Now, we maintain an ongoing relationship, though in a much more limited advisory role, in order to help the client avoid a repetition of such issues in the future.
www.diales.com
www.drivertrett.com