150 Lessons Learned From 50 Years in Consulting

Thomas Greenbaum

• Publisher: 72nd Street Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087977829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This is a practical book for business managers that is based on 50 years of consulting to Fortune 100 companies, medium size organizations and mom and pop local companies. It identifies 11 different aspects of running a company, and provides lessons I have learned over the years from consulting with them. This book is based on work with over 750 different organizations, working with clients in virtually every aspect of their business.

Chapter One
My Career in Consulting

A book such as this would not have nearly as much meaning without providing some information about how all the lessons were learned. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the various types of consulting positions I have had over the past 47+ years. Each of the positions I have had added different types of lessons primarily because of the nature of the clientele for whom I have worked and the wide variety of areas in which I have had to become involved.

Life in Business Before Consulting

As I look back on my career, I feel that I was extremely lucky in the choices I made, as they were integral to providing me with the training and experiences necessary to be an effective consultant. My first job, after I graduated from Columbia Business School (MBA), was with Procter & Gamble (P&G) in Cincinnati. There is no question in my mind that this was the most important job choice I ever made, as in 1966, when I went to P&G, it was generally regarded to be the best company in the world to learn about the field of marketing. This was true, but even more importantly, my work in the Paper Products Division at P&G taught me how to write and think as a business leader. While it was a very painful experience, due to the challenges your superiors would place in front of you, the discipline I learned at P&G has been the key to my success in the consulting business. At P&G, you learn how marketing should be done and what processes and practices you should employ to analyze and solve problems. Also, P&G provided me with real-world sales experience in the grocery industry, which has proved to be vital as I worked with clients in sales-related assignments.

In the middle of my P&G career, I had to leave for 731 days (but who was counting) to complete my ROTC commitment to the U.S. Army Infantry. I spent all my time at Ft. Benning, GA, despite the fact that everyone else in my 234-person officer basic training unit was shipped to (mostly) unpleasant places like Viet Nam. My two years at Ft. Benning also were great training for my ultimate career in consulting as I was assigned to a general staff as a member of the Infantry School budget office. I was lucky to be exposed to both formal schooling (Ft. Benjamin Harrison School of Finance) and practical use of special training in government finance. However, the most important part of my work at Ft. Benning was my responsibility to do extensive writing in response to immediate requests from the Commanding General about topics such as the financial impact of issues such as doubling the output of the OCS (Overseas Communication Service) program, the airborne school or the Army Ranger program. Further, my job required me to brief high-ranking generals from all parts of our military regarding the cost and management implications of the issues we were asked to evaluate. Speaking to groups like this was excellent training for my life as a consultant, as public speaking has never been an issue with me after all my experiences as an army officer in the high-pressure environment of the U.S. Army Infantry School.

After leaving the military, I returned to Procter & Gamble for two years and continued to grow as a result of their hardcore training needed to fit into the mold of disciplined marketing experts. A key part of my lessons learned upon returning to P&G after the army was the very intense sales training I received while working in my territory in the Cincinnati Region.

After 2+ years again at P&G, I left to become a product manager and then a group product manager at what was then a very small company ($16 million in sales) known as Church and Dwight. When I joined that company, they basically had three products. One was Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, which accounted for almost all company revenue and profits, and the others were Arm & Hammer Washing Soda and Arm & Hammer Borax. While at Arm & Hammer, I was assigned the task of introducing Arm & Hammer Laundry Detergent into the United States. Also, I was tasked with talking to inventors to attempt to identify viable new product opportunities for the company that would expand the product line further.

There were so many important lessons from the two years I spent at Church & Dwight. Whereas at P&G, I felt that I learned how to do everything the right way, I always felt that at Church & Dwight, I learned how the rest of the world viewed marketing. Church & Dwight did not have the same discipline or attention to detail as P&G, nor did they have the focus on emphasizing training and development of the employees, but I did have some very unusual experiences. For example, the experience of introducing a major new product in a highly competitive product category (laundry category) was very growth-producing both in terms of learning what to do and what not to do with a new product introduction. I also learned the challenges associated with managing a food broker sales organization rather than working with a direct sales organization, as was the case at P&G. Both of these were vital to the experiences needed to be an effective consultant.

On To Consulting

Exactly two years after I joined Church & Dwight, I had the opportunity to join a very successful consulting company called Glendinning Associates. This was a consulting organization that was staffed almost exclusively by former P&G marketing or sales personnel, many of whom had made an intermediate career stop somewhere else to gain some varied experience. The “reason why” of the Glendinning organization was that its staff of P&G trained consultants would impart the knowledge and practical experience learned at Procter (as it is affectionately called) to improve the marketing and sales effectiveness of our clients. Most of the companies with whom we consulted were very major organizations, giving me the experience of working with internationally known names like Lever Brothers, The Wrigley Company, Ralston Purina, and The Bank of Montreal, just to name a few. One of the things I did not learn at Glendinning Associates was how to work with very small companies, which was a major part of my career several years later when I worked for SCORE.

Following almost eight years at Glendinning Associates, four other colleagues and I left and formed The Connecticut Consulting Group. Four of us were former P&G marketing or salespeople, and one was a veteran of General Foods, the other great marketing training company at that time. This was another great situation to learn even more about how to work with large companies, but also it gave me the experience of a partnership where five equal partners had to work out the strategies and logistics to run an effective consulting practice. I learned how partnerships should and should not work and how important it is to have strong partnership agreements when you stake your career on the efforts of yourself and others.

After seven years building The Connecticut Consulting Group to be a large and profitable consulting practice, we had the opportunity to sell our organization to what was then D’Arcy McManus Benton & Bowles, which eventually became Publicis. The process of selling our company was one of the most important lessons I learned, which would prove to be very helpful to my clients in future years as they dealt with the opportunity to sell their company or buy another.

The sale of the Connecticut Consulting Group actually started me on another consulting career that was vital to my “lessons learned” up until the current time. While I continued to consult with large corporate clients, in 1986, I wrote my first book, The Practical Handbook and Guide to Focus Group Research, which enabled me to migrate from large company strategic consulting to the market research business, specifically conducting focus groups. My new career (focus groups) was supported by our new company and enabled me to be a specialist in this much larger marketing agency and consulting practice. Focus group research was the primary consulting work in which I was involved during the four years I spent with Clarion Marketing & Consulting, the new name for our consulting company resulting from the merger of the Connecticut Consulting Group and Ted Colangelo Associates which was then a D’Arcy subsidiary.

In 1993, I departed Clarion and started my own focus group company, Groups Plus, Inc., doing essentially the same type of market research projects that I was doing while part of Clarion. An important “lesson” I learned very quickly from my work in the market research field was that the industry had almost no one who was a qualified focus group moderator and also an experienced strategic business consultant. As a result, I had a very strong point of difference between myself and almost everyone else in the business, which was the key to my being able to obtain clients representing both large and small organizations. In my role as focus group moderator and marketing consultant, I was able to conduct the research to explore their research needs, AND importantly use my experience to recommend what specific actions they should take as a result of the findings and conclusions from the research. I conducted almost 4000 focus groups with over 300 different organizations during my time as President of Groups Plus, Inc.

In 2009 I started a completely new phase of my consulting career, which produced the most important lessons of my career relating to starting and running a business. Although I had run my own business for 15 years, it was not until I had spent about five years at SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) that I felt I was sufficiently skilled to help small businesses. I worked as a volunteer counselor for 11 years at SCORE, counseling with approximately 1100 different SMALL BUSINESS clients, helping them in all aspects of their business, including such areas as organization startup/corporate form, fundraising, marketing, sales, and importantly, the whole area of social media and web site development and operation. The type of clientele we serviced consisted mostly of 1–2-person organizations who wanted to start a business or get help managing one that already existed. With this type of counseling/consulting, you can really make a major difference in an organization in terms of whether they become successful or not. The following are three examples of success stories from my years at SCORE (written without names for confidentiality) that were key lessons learned by me, which have been reflected in this book.

 

CASE #1

I worked with a client that appeared to have a very successful company in terms of total dollar sales and sales growth, but the owners were unhappy because they never had enough money in their bank to generate income for themselves, which was consistent with the sales revenue. After an analysis of the organization, I learned that while the sales were very strong, the weakness of the company was they were not successfully collecting the money they were owed, so their outstanding receivables were almost equal to their sales. While the reader of this might suggest that the owners were dumb and this was unusual, I can say that probably the most common problem I saw with small companies was their lack of attention to their receivables. If you do not collect the money due to you from sales, the “sale” has not been successful. Thus, I learned a very important lesson that has been shared with scores of clients over the years.

 

CASE #2

Another example of a great lesson learned was a company that came to me during their first few years in business, with the complaint that they were not growing and could not see a viable future that might generate a meaningful income for the two partners. The company had two very smart, competent owners who were teaching swimming to a very specific group of challenged children. The main issue/lesson learned with this client was that the only way for them to grow was to work more hours every week. They did not understand the concept of leverage in terms of training people who do what they did, so it was possible to expand the services to other places, thus generating more income.

The most important contribution we made to this organization was to convince the two principles to reduce their time in the pool so the employees could do most of the teaching while they focused on expanding to other cities where they could hire more people to teach using their methods. Further, they learned about the importance of supervising their employees, so they were diligent in following the teaching methods they had developed. It is very common for the leader(s) of entrepreneurial companies to feel they must do all the work because (a) nobody can do it as good as they can, and (b) if they are not doing the work, they don’t feel they are making money for the company.

I have seen this exact same behavior while working with people in the legal profession, medical profession, and the retail store category. It is an important lesson, but the key to a successful business is to use leverage in the organization by hiring others to do work for you while you focus on building the sales of the total organization. Another key lesson from this case was learning that the time spent training someone to do the work would pay out in multiples rather than the owner feeling that he or she must do all the work to be successful.

 

CASE #3

Another example of where experiences with clients have generated important lessons learned was the work I was involved in with a toy start-up company. This client came to me after having won numerous awards for the quality of their toys, and they even were successful in getting a major piece on the TODAY show. Still, they were not succeeding, despite the great product and wonderful public relations activity. Their sales were a fraction of what they had projected. Interestingly, this client had written a very extensive business plan which won a major award sponsored by one of the leading MBA programs in the country. The owners simply could not understand what was wrong.

With this client, the major problem was a lack of understanding of their target customer’s buying habits. As a result, they were focused on selling their products using sales channels that were not optimal for this product. After analyzing their business and the product category in order to understand the buying behavior of their target audience, we learned that their customers bought the vast majority of this product category in traditional brick and mortar retail stores rather than online, which was the focus of their marketing plan. Once the sales strategy was changed to a retail store model, the company flourished, even getting distribution in stores such as Toys ‘R’ Us and FAO Schwarz.

After 11 years in the SCORE organization, I got tired of volunteering my time for 20-40 hours per week, and I retired from this nonprofit to go back to my roots as a strategic business consultant. My new consulting company, ENCORE Strategic Business Consulting, was started in November 2019, and as of this writing, it has been a very successful venture for me. I have worked pro bono for a couple of needed organizations, but more importantly, have had 3-4 fee-paying clients which whom I have been working regularly doing the type of consulting I have done all my life, applying lessons learned from many years in the business to my current clients.

The balance of this book contains the lessons laid out in a format that I hope will be helpful to many people who read this book. I have enjoyed writing it (as I have all my other books) and only hope it achieves my objective of HELPING businesspeople succeed in their business careers.

 

Chapter Two
Lessons

Marketing Lessons

1)

Never change the composition of a product in order to save money. It is not uncommon for an organization to try and increase the profitability of a successful product by changing some ingredients that are less expensive than what is currently in the formula. The thought is that if these changes are made, the consumer will not know the difference, and the product will contribute more profit to the organization. Based on my experience, eventually, the consumers will recognize the differences, and the brand franchise will begin to decline. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the introduction of the new Coke in 1985. While there are many reasons why this was one of history’s most famous marketing failures, the primary motivation for this was the need to improve the financial structure of the company. A few years earlier, they had replaced sugar with corn fructose, a much less expensive sweetener, and they experienced a significant market share decline to Pepsi Cola. As a result of this, the Coke chairman, Mr. Giunta, felt a new, more profitable Coke would turn the situation around and restore the brand to its former market share. As everyone knows, the new Coke brand lasted only a very short time, and Coke did not restore its earnings position until Diet Coke became the #3 brand in the world behind Coke and Pepsi in the late 1980s. Another example of this to which almost everyone can relate to frequently occurs in the restaurant industry. A new restaurant opens to great reviews, and it is almost impossible to get a reservation. As a result of this success, it is not uncommon for the restaurant to try and cut costs by eliminating some amenities they had during the early years (i.e., desert candies, complementary after-dinner drinks, an amuse-bouche at the beginning of the meal, or even the quality of the bread that is served. In relatively short order, the restaurant loses some of its allure, and they start to wonder why.

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