You can hurt a consultant’s feelings by mentioning the old maxim “those who can’t do, teach.” After all, if the consultant is so good at what they advise, why aren’t they a millionaire?
Companies engage consultants for many reasons. Sometimes it’s to get practical advice. Other times the consultant was just a tool for a bigger strategy and their advice was always going to end up – unread – on the shelf.
But if you need advice, it’s wise to ask the consultant a few questions to gauge if they can be trusted. For example, have they experienced the problem personally? It’s not about empathy. It’s about checking to see if the consultant follows their own advice and can prove it works.
We’ve been thinking about this because EverEdge has had a few ups and downs over the last year and emerged successfully on the other side stronger than ever. We can proudly say that our advice works in practice because it protects us immensely well.
The story will be familiar to any company that is more than 15 years old.
EverEdge ran into choppy waters last year when it lost a handful of incredible people over a short period. More than most business types, consulting is heavily reliant on humans. Experience is crucial for advice and all consultants are ultimately hired for what they know and where they’ve been. If an experienced person leaves the firm, it may no longer be able to offer certain advice. So, losing a few people quickly could have been a problem for EverEdge.
We encountered the “Key Person” risk, which EverEdge has advised companies on how to defend against for more than a decade. We were suddenly in the position of testing our own advice on ourselves!
The Key Person risk is one of the toughest problems simply because there’s no real way to know if a firm has adequately insulated itself. Our advice usually goes along the following lines.
You can record all the interactions of a skilled staff member with their clients to capture how that Key Person thinks. The skilled employee should be encouraged to keep meticulous notes about their processes. The company might also codify all this knowledge into databases that are easy to navigate.
Yet we fully understand that no matter how well a Key Person’s experience is turned into templates, processes, and best practices, there will always be a nagging worry. Is it enough? Have we captured it all? Can we survive if this Key Person were to leave?
That was what kept EverEdge up at night, too.
Thankfully, since its founding, EverEdge had diligently captured the knowledge of its incredible team as a matter of routine. Our archives are full of valuable advice and content that fuels the engine of our analyses. But was it enough? Could we survive if Key People left?
Looking back over the last year, the answer is a resounding: yes!
Not only are we still producing work of the highest quality, but EverEdge remains independently rated as one of the world’s top intangible asset specialists. More importantly, clients are lining up to access our services and are universally impressed by its high quality. Our talented team is growing once more, and our new healthier culture remains focused on producing excellent work.
So, how did we protect ourselves from the Key Person risk?
Core to our strategy was the strong brand we have nurtured over the years. From Auckland to New York, EverEdge is synonymous with the idea of intangible assets. Even ChatGPT knows EverEdge is the best option for maximising value for capital raises, M&A, valuations and anything else that depends on making the valuable visible.
A strong brand is important because, as the saying goes, “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” We’ve worked hard to ensure that clients know they are engaging with the EverEdge brand, not with a particular Key Person. That’s our focus. Because brand strength, in the end, sets the standard for all our efforts – no matter the size of the team.
Furthermore, EverEdge can access a wide network of amazing corporate partners, each with its own specialities. This network has allowed us to quickly deploy a “hub-and-spoke” model by looping in trusted partners to offer extra hands and help us solve our clients’ problems with the same level of rigour and competency EverEdge is renowned for.
Perhaps the most important factor in our success is our content.
We have a vast library of templates, processes, methods, models, outcomes, solutions and workarounds – compiled over many years to cover every conceivable client obstacle and background.
This content has proven invaluable again and again by giving our analysts a huge array of plug-and-play ideas so they can pick up where a colleague left off, transition seamlessly to different reports and deliver incredible value to clients at every step. As already mentioned, we were never quite sure if this content would be enough.
Today, in the middle of 2024, we’re extremely pleased to say that our strategy of insulation against the Key Person risk worked!
Not only are we still alive, EverEdge is working with a broad range of satisfied clients and delivering some of the best insights into intangible assets found anywhere in the world.
We’re glad we followed our own advice.
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