Successful Consulting:  Don't Give Away the Store Before the Job Is Yours

by Nathan O. Sokal

Editor's Note: This is the third article in a series about consulting practices.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

Engineering consultants reap rewards and benefits few of their corporate-environment colleagues can boast. Projects and challenges are always fresh and different; they enjoy a degree of job flexibility that eludes most office employees; and they have the opportunity to benefit from participating in a broader spectrum of activities with a diverse group of professionals.

The grass isn't always greener on the consulting side of the fence, however. Take compensation, for example. In the traditional workplace, paychecks are guaranteed in most cases — even taken for granted. In the consulting world, it's not always so simple.

Giving and Getting Something for Nothing

Consider the following scenario:

Your potential client asks you for a fixed-price proposal. They tell you that you have not yet "proven" your capabilities to them, which puts them at risk of not receiving an adequate solution. To reduce that risk, they want you to demonstrate that you understand their unique problem fully by providing them with a proposed solution. Your proposed solution must have a sound scientific basis that will lead to a reliable and reproducible product. You must provide them with a detailed technical explanation of your proposed solution's operation principles, along with calculations that demonstrate you have considered and accounted for the deleterious effects of all tolerances, parasitic parameters, variations of parameters with ambient conditions and aging, and so on.

Or consider this variation:

A potential client's project schedule is too tight to take a chance that you might fail, requiring the client to find another consultant to do the job over. The client wants you to remove that schedule risk by demonstrating conclusively that your proposed solution will meet the requirements.

You devise a really clever solution and submit your proposal. You get no reaction from the client. Every time you telephone them, your contacts are "away from their desks" or "out of the office." You leave messages but your contact never returns your call. When you write to the company, they don't answer your letters. If you do finally catch the people you need, they thank you for submitting your proposal and inform you that the company either went with another consultant or decided not to pursue the project.

Don't Get Set Up

What this potential client didn't tell you — and it didn't occur to you to ask — is that staff had tried and failed to solve this problem for two years. They were looking for a clever solution to their technical problem. You gave it to them in your proposal — for free.

While some companies want — and occasionally get — something for nothing from consultants, others look to consultants to provide an independent cross-check on a technical approach and on cost and schedule estimates submitted by their engineering department. While most will enter into an consulting agreement for this evaluation, some companies try to get it for free by asking for a formal, detailed proposal, with no intent of actually hiring you on as a consultant to do the work.

When you get requests for proposals from companies that want you to demonstrate your technical capability using their problem or project, refer them to your own previous work as your demonstration instead. In other words, don't give away the store. You can provide them with a demonstration of your thoroughness in thinking through solutions, and you can give them references for clients for whom you've done similar work. But if the company is looking for a free answer, you'll never hear from them again.

The views expressed in this article are the author's and not necessarily those of the IEEE or IEEE-USA.

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Nathan Sokal is president of Design Automation, Inc., an engineering consulting business. Mr. Sokal has been a consultant for 36 years.