The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:39:38 · Neil Plumridge, Vidit Agarwal
[00:39:38] S1: Yeah. So the starting point was in a lot of the conversations we had it became quite obvious that trust is not binary, but a lot of consultants think it's binary. You either got the trust with the client or you don't. We think there's a nuance to that and we think there's five levels, level one being sort of at the foundational level where you kind of do what you say you're going to do and the client trusts you to deliver what you've said you're going to do. I won't go through each of them. All the way up to a personal level of trust. And it's at that level four and five where you've earned the confidence of the client to be able to... For the client to have a big conversation with you. And that conversation may or may not materialize into work, but there is the client opening up their whole agenda to you. They're not talking about doing a single functional review or doing a specific project. They're actually talking about something more transformational, and it's at that level of trust is where you can have confidence to put forward points of view, co create paths to address that particular agenda item, and often it takes a long, longer time. Right? It's not the client issuing a brief. The client doesn't have a brief. They've got an issue or problem. And it's of a magnitude that they'll only deal with people at what we call level four or level five. [00:41:13] S0: Before we move to the next topic and I guess talk about AI and how that's enabling and changing industry at large, was there anything else in the book that either of you want to cover?
00:41:27 · Robert Nason
[00:41:27] S2: Well look, I think there was one story that was the last project that Neil and I worked on together that we reflected how that changed both of our careers. If you like, the moment has caught up to that time. We actually believe what happened a long time ago, twenty five years ago with the last project Neil and I done, we worked on a procurement job for a telco. And in that procurement job we found that the industry was moving in a separate direction than the telco was. All the vendors for the telco were moving from copper to fibre as a network. We're moving from analog to digital. We're moving from fixed to mobile. But the telco that we were working with was still stuck in the old world and was still doing long term maintenance contracts for a copper network that wasn't going to survive the decade. So we thought there was a big cost transformation opportunity coming out of that. Neil and I was sort of a junior partner at the time. Neil was not even a partner at that time. We sat down and said, what do we do with this? We don't know the CEO and this is sort of a CEO decision. So we decided to approach the head of procurement and say we think you should go to the CEO and offer to do a cost transformation of the company based on your findings out of the procurement work that we've done with the vendors. So that was the concept, that was the idea, that was the point of view that we gathered. We persuaded the head of procurement to do this. We worked and coached them on the evidence that he could take to the CEO. The CEO gave him the job and it was an enormous success. Neil, as he does said, we have to brand this because this is relevant for every telco in the world. So we called it next generation cost reduction. I went around the world selling it and then sent Neil to Brazil to do it. We did it in America. We did it in Europe. We did it in Asia and sold it about 14 times as a project. I think the world has caught up to that style of consulting. The consultant leading with an opportunity, something they've done selling it and getting reward for doing a good project by selling it multiple times is something that gave Neil the confidence. We've done it again and again in our careers doing similar sorts of things based on the success of that work and having the consultant coming up with that idea.
00:44:27 · Robert Nason, Vidit Agarwal
We put that story into the book because it's sort of foundational for us of the lessons learnt from history. [00:44:37] S0: I'd also be curious like one of the things I was wondering after the book launch the other week and reading your book is what are some of the mistakes even the most successful consultants or quote unquote rainmakers make? I'm curious, open question to either of you. In the journey of interviewing all these people and spending time with them and reflecting on your own careers, is there one mistake that even the most successful rainmakers tend to make?
00:44:37 · Vidit Agarwal, Neil Plumridge
[00:44:37] S0: I'd also be curious like one of the things I was wondering after the book launch the other week and reading your book is what are some of the mistakes even the most successful consultants or quote unquote rainmakers make? I'm curious, open question to either of you. In the journey of interviewing all these people and spending time with them and reflecting on your own careers, is there one mistake that even the most successful rainmakers tend to make? [00:45:07] S1: There's a couple I'll talk about personally. I didn't put myself in the rainmaker category but there's a couple of let me just share that I've made along the way. One is where you're so confident in your point of view that it comes across as selling and you're forcing a solution on a client that's not ready and it moves from, let's call it a point of view or concept into a solution. So I've made that mistake a few times, and the most successful people don't do that. They put forward an idea and a concept. The second is on trust. So it takes often years to get a senior level of trust, what we call level four, level five level of trust, and I've had those relationships. But, you know, one story which we tell in our training programs, our learning programs about how quickly you can lose that trust if you make a couple of mistakes and take the client for granted. You know, it can happen in a millisecond and it happened to me. But I won't on your podcast, maybe podcast two, I'll share that story, but not this one, Nup.
00:45:07 · Neil Plumridge, Vidit Agarwal
[00:45:07] S1: There's a couple I'll talk about personally. I didn't put myself in the rainmaker category but there's a couple of let me just share that I've made along the way. One is where you're so confident in your point of view that it comes across as selling and you're forcing a solution on a client that's not ready and it moves from, let's call it a point of view or concept into a solution. So I've made that mistake a few times, and the most successful people don't do that. They put forward an idea and a concept. The second is on trust. So it takes often years to get a senior level of trust, what we call level four, level five level of trust, and I've had those relationships. But, you know, one story which we tell in our training programs, our learning programs about how quickly you can lose that trust if you make a couple of mistakes and take the client for granted. You know, it can happen in a millisecond and it happened to me. But I won't on your podcast, maybe podcast two, I'll share that story, but not this one, Nup. [00:46:15] S0: Maybe your next book, if that happens, the next edition of the book, can include that.
00:46:15 · Vidit Agarwal, Robert Nason
[00:46:15] S0: Maybe your next book, if that happens, the next edition of the book, can include that. [00:46:20] S2: Yeah. And look, a couple from me, I think the trap you observe good consultants falling into is the boom bust cycle. I'm very busy, so I turn off business development. Not interested. I've got projects. I'm sold out for the next couple of months, so they do nothing. They develop no relationships. They just focus on delivering their project. Then they hit the beach. They're quiet, and then they turn full throttle on the business development and have 10 coffees in a week catching up with people they haven't caught up with. That boom bust cycle does not work and rainmakers don't follow it. They do business development every day, every week, no matter how busy they are. They put into their calendar relationship development and the things required to develop the next job. And the second one, I think, is waiting for the phone to ring is you've lost before you've begun, if that's your strategy. If you think put my brand out there and wait for clients to ring me with work, The industry is too hungry right now and your competitors will get in ahead of you and take your client from you if that's what you're going to do. You've got to be proactively engaged and up to date with knowledge and experience and working your relationships to succeed in today's world.