If you want to buy a sports car
Good advice for buying a sports car, which is a product, not a professional service. So many differences, will not list them all.
So how do you decide you want to buy a Ford? I think most people in the market for a new car will do a bit of homework first, not by going to the car dealers and taking up their time, but first by reading and sometimes also asking their friends and family members. Often this is adequate to decide which car they want, and they head to the dealer, who is going to be compensated for the time he spends with them, by way of a commission.
Alternatively, after doing some homework, they might go to several dealers, to compare prices or models, or whatever. In this situation, only one of those dealers will be compensated directly for the time they spend. Not directly, but this is typically a zero-sum game. These shoppers might not buy a car from a particular dealer, but pretty much everyone who visits a dealer is planning to buy a car, so if this customer doesn't buy from this dealer, someone else who visited multiple dealers will. The time the dealers spend with customers who ultimately bought elsewhere is a legitimate "cost of doing business."
The situation we find with people who are "shopping" for consultants, is that, very often, and more and more lately, they are not shopping for consultants. They are shopping for free advice. In the car analogy, someone who doesn't own a car (because they "can't afford" one) goes to a dealer and says they are interested in buying a car and can I take it for a test drive. Then off they go do to their shopping and appointments, and, when they are done, they return it to the dealer and say, sorry, not what I was looking for. And the next day, they do the same with another dealer, and there are as many or more people "shopping" at the dealerships without any intention of buying a car as there are those who actually want to buy a car. Now imagine how many more would do this if, instead of having to bother to go to the dealership, they could just go online and ask for a test drive and the car would be promptly delivered to their door.
In the early days of automobiles (I'm old), there were people who just liked to go look at new cars, like there are people who go to open houses, some out of curiosity and some to get decorating ideas. And some who will actually go so far as to arrange a private showing with a realtor for the same reason. (These types are known as the "looky-lookies," although the latter practice fell off a good bit when women got "liberated" from sitting at home all day watching soaps.)
I don't think anyone takes the same approach when searching for other professional services. The second opinion in medicine was always largely a myth, always two at the most, and only if you are seriously ill and/or in need of serious treatment. And again, you are going to get treated, not just shopping around to find out what treatment you need and then go home and do it yourself. Very few people meet with lots of accountants before hiring one, and pretty much none of them have any substantive accounting questions, it's more a matter of services offered, rates, and "cultural fit," because they are not talking to an accountant to find how their taxes should be done and then go home and DIY. They might go home and DIY because of cost, but they are usually not interviewing accountants to find out how to do their taxes, and they certainly wouldn't ask the accountants for a copy of their tax software or a sample tax return. In this environment, the "looky-lookies" are the boorish who try to get free medical and investment advice at dinner parties. The latter are usually not seriously interested either, because they don't have a serious medical problem, or a lot of money to invest. If they did, they wouldn't be asking at a dinner party.
I did my research to know exactly what our gaps were and tried to understand what our real deliverables were from the consultant.
So the critical question is, did you then hire a GDPR consultant, or, after doing your homework, did you decide you had learned enough to DIY? Or after getting quotes, did you decide to forget the whole thing, because the company "can't afford" it? The latter is what happens when, after all that, they decide not to pursue that market after all. Moreover, in many cases, when they were asking, they were not planning to pursue that market, for which they would need a consultant; they were just trying to find out how much it would cost, and then they would decide whether they needed a consultant.
"Is this a good price?" is not knowable without at least 2 quotes.
Would you like to guess the percentage of times that all of the independents here at Elsmar have been asked for a quote in, say, the past year, after multiple online exchanges with a potential "client"? I have learned to quote my hourly rate without being asked, and up front, not because I think they are going to consider whether this is an attractive rate, but because that is one way to reduce the amount of time wasted. At least sometimes they promptly go away or cut it short, realizing I'm not planning to give them advice for free.[/QUOTE]
Do you want to guess how many potential clients who are price-shopping and say they are "doing their homework," but have never once even thought about looking for information on pricing of professional services, and would probably say they wouldn't know where to look, even though a simple google search for "hourly rate" and "flat fee" will garner you well over a million hits?
Which brings me back to cars. In an earlier life, I was a freelance scientific/medical writer. My clients were not usually in industry, which meant they did not have a product mindset. They had an expertise mindset. When they asked "how long is it going to take," they invariably meant turnaround time, not billable hours. In industry, they are always shopping for cars. An ISO 13485 audit is a car. They are extremely well-defined, and every AO has an excel spreadsheet or something like it, where they can enter a finite set of variables and come up with a very good estimate of "how long is it going to take?" and "how much is it going to cost?"
Consulting, actual consulting, is not a car. A colleague of mine, who isn't a consultant but a long-time employee at a pharma company, and therefore has used consultants and generally just pays attention, when asked "how long is it going to take," answers "how long is a piece of string?" A writer colleague's husband, also not a consultant, but a long-time employee as a programmer at IBM, used to put it somewhat more colorfully. I think I won't go there.
A lot of the poor quality in industry is a direct result of companies packaging expertise into a box so they can sell it as a product. Because products are easy to sell in industry, where expertise is hard. When clinical research moved from big Pharma (where it was an expertise) to CROs, someone who used to work in pharma dubbed them "the sausage factories," meaning they now simply cranked out products in the form of, usually, clinical study reports. As far as I can tell, clinical research has finally and predictably driven off a cliff, with no one left who has the expertise to do actual clinical research, and the repercussions have been severe for both pharma and medical devices. More so for the latter, because when device companies finally started shopping for clinical trials, they were sold the kind of product the CROs had to sell, which is a pharma trial. It seems that, eventually all chickens actually do come home to roost.
Anyone poised to make profit off you is not unbiased.
Definitely they are not. But with a consultant, they will make a profit (actually, for independents, it's just a living) if you secure consulting services. Almost no one ever ask consultants if they need consulting services. Some will price-shop a bit, and some will go with the $200/hour consultant who will may take 100 hours to do the same job the $250/hour consultant can knock out in 50. And of course, they know perfectly well that they have no way of knowing how long either one of them took, only what it says on their invoice, which makes shopping for "price" in this situation a total myth. Some think a consultant's price is a measure of the quality of the consultant. Sometimes it is, most times it is not, and usually only large disparities ($125 versus $250) that cannot be otherwise explained (e.g. a need to pay overhead).
For this reason (among others), some will go for the warm security of the flat fee, which can be the highest "price" of all, because the consultant knows, even if the client doesn't, that there is no way to predict how long the job is going to take. They have good reason to quote high, in case the project turns out to be a nightmare, which in this business, it does more often than not.
I do not know how typical I am, but the advice I always give for free to potential clients is what kind of consultant they need and how to find that consultant, because few of them have done any homework on this question. ("Asking around" is not homework, but an alternative to it.) The other service for which I do not charge clients is referrals to consultants who I think are a better fit for one reason or another. (I am not as knowledgeable in some therapeutic areas, jurisdictions, some types of submissions, etc, as other colleagues.)
My advice is decidedly biased, by the fact that medical devices are important to me. I want to see them developed and marketed properly and I want anyone who needs a medical device consultant to get one that can seriously help them do that. Not "best," that's a myth, but if I know a consultant who I think is clearly a better fit than I am, I refer, even though I 'can" do the work.
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Again, I think I will just stop here, and this time, that I will not pick this up again, at least not on this thread, nor another, any time soon.
I want to make clear that this is by no means a rant. It is simply information, much of which I have shared freely many times over the years, often to newbies and aspirings. Sometimes even to clients, if they were cut from the mold of wanting to see things from other people's points of view.
I also don't feel rant-y about it. It is what it is. I'm old enough to have seen a number of industries grow, consolidate, mature, decline, and the consequences thereof. The only good options are to adapt, move on, or retire. Just holding on is not a good option.