The first version

Management consultancies, from sole advisers to firms of a few hundred: about 1.1 million in Europe. What they all have in common is that they sell hours, and the hours worth selling are the ones a senior person spends being senior.

The trouble is how few of those hours there are in a week. Before anyone can be senior at anything, somebody has to read into the client's data, produce a first version for the partner to argue with, and chase the client for the numbers that have been missing for three weeks. None of that is the work, all of it is required, and most of it lands on the person whose time is the most expensive in the building. Agents are unusually good here. For example, reading two hundred pages of a data room and coming back with the six that matter. Producing a first draft that is wrong in the ordinary ways, so the expert spends their hour correcting rather than starting. Asking the client for the missing numbers every Tuesday until they arrive, which no one enjoys doing and everyone forgets.

These firms also share something else: the work is already writing. The thing being delivered is a document, and a document is exactly what an agent is best at.

That being said, a consultant signs their work, and a signature is a promise that a person stands behind what is on the page. To that end, our embedding process for consultancies puts the person at the end of every chain. For example, your agent drafts and never sends. Everything it asserts is traceable back to the source it came from, so checking it is a matter of following a line rather than trusting a tone. And it works from a copy, so the file it read is the file that is still there afterwards.

If you sell your expertise by the hour, every hour an agent gives back is an hour you can sell. If you're interested in the advantages an agent can give your business, click here to let us know more about your business.