You Need Help — Now

Okay, from time to time I've been known to earn part of my living performing consulting work and you may think this article is totally self serving, but...

The cleaning industry has a problem. Many of your customers are downgrading the importance of cleaning. This causes you to scramble even more to figure out how to deliver clean facilities at lower cost, with less frequent service. The question I’m hearing more and more is, “How do I do more with less — a lot less?”

An independent consultant might be able to help. Consultants have an interesting niche in the cleaning industry because the valuable ones work with troubled organizations everyday. Let’s face it – consultants are not hired when business is going smoothly.

But why not simply convene a meeting of managers and exectives to find out what’s wrong? W. Edwards Deming once observed that you shouldn’t expect the people digging a hole to invent a better method of digging holes — they’re too busy digging. Better digging methods come from people looking in, from outside.

Most organizations have a difficult time initiating long-term change. Change is difficult due to organizational political inbreeding. Political inbreeding is not too different from human inbreeding. When people marry among family members and have children, it gradually weakens the gene pool.

A similar phenomenon takes place within corporations. In most organizational structures, people are connected in invisible ways that don’t show up on the organization chart. Friends, allies, enemies, mentors and family all dramatically influence organizational change. Rarely will an individual’s title reveal who their organizational relatives are, who their champions are and how they got into the organization. Because of this, many organizations are not just politically motivated, but are emotionally driven as well.

The more an operation inbreeds, the more it is resistant to change. Generally, in an organization, even if they don’t agree with it, individuals will follow the status quo.

Humans are creatures of habit and old habits are hard to break, this is especially true from within a corporate setting. This is not good news if your business is starting to slide, or if you simply cannot make it grow. It can be especially frustrating if you are trying to change your organization, but cannot because of the politics and reluctance to change. Managers who are used to a set way of doing things like to stick to what they know and are not usually the best people to institute a change.

That is why it helps to hire someone from the outside. It is important to have someone come into your organization who has done something different, who has obtained results, who knows how transition to new programs and, above all, who knows how to help the existing operation adapt to the new environment.

But not all consultants are created equal. Be careful when bringing someone on board, because the last thing you need is a consultant making things worse.

Hire for results
Good consultants will help your organization grow. They can bring positive changes to the way you hire, workload, train, manage, track and communicate. These are all terms that you should discuss with any consultant before you hire one.

See what they have to say and listen for the word “results.” The No. 1 thing you want to find out before hiring a consultant is the results you can expect. Results are everything in the consulting business. Make sure to research a consultant’s previous results, both in the short and long term, in situations similar to your own. Find out what previous clients have to say about the consultant and what they did when they came in.

But, try to avoid being a guinea pig. It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s quite another to be able to put it in place. A lot of people who style themselves as consultants do not have a program that has been successful, and want to try it out on their unuspecting clients.

I have never before seen such massive amounts of budget cuts, layoffs, reduction of staff and reductions of frequencies. I’ve been surprised at the number of organizations over the past 18 months who have been faced with the need for significant organization change to operate effectively in the current business climate.

It may be time for you to face up to the fact that this industry is changing and that you may need help from the outside. An organization that is facing these challenges needs to get help and get it fast. Hiring the right consultant may help you breathe new life into your organization and help it thrive again.

John Walker is a regular Contracting Profits columnist. He is a veteran building service contractor; owner of ManageMen consulting services, Salt Lake City; and founder of Janitor University, a hands-on cleaning management training program.