Inside a design ‘consultancy’

Over the years, I’ve heard so many recent graduates or aspiring designers cite ‘a consultancy’ as their dream role. This often tickles me somewhat, as it is often an answer based on the square root of bugger all knowledge. It’s the de-facto response. The knee jerk.

When I graduated I had no intention of working at a consultancy. I figured I might work at an in-house design or engineering team somewhere like Black & Decker (no idea where I got that from but its the only answer I can recall from my University days). Consultancies were the stuff of dreams, where playboys and motorbikes go to have fun. I simply didn’t consider myself anywhere good enough to apply, let alone get a job in one.

It’s therefore ironic that of my graduating year, I’m one of only a handful that have spent the best part of their entire career (bar an initial 9 month stint in a horrid medical manufacturing business) in product design consultancy. Go figure. That’s no slight on my graduating peers, as they probably all found much more worthy and rewarding careers, but just an interesting statistic.

So, given my recent conversations with graduates about potential places of work, I thought it might be interesting to pull a bit of the carpet back and see what lies underneath. Shed some light on what it is like to work in a ‘consultancy’. Some of it is deliberately tongue in cheek, but much of it is true enough. Admittedly, it is limited to my own experiences and I’ve no doubt that a product design consultancy is different to a graphic design consultancy or a marketing consultancy, but I’m also sure there are some uncomfortable similarities too.

So….in no particular order of importance…here are some things you might like to know.

I warn you…this one is a biggie…even for me.

1. Time is money.

This is THE most important aspect of consultancy and something that ultimately permeates everything. In the absence of widgets to sell, the only way to make money is to sell ‘brain juice’ typically measured in hours. There are myriad ways that consultancies frame this business model, and it is up to the individual agency to determine the way they phase this and cost this for their clients – be it day rates, value pricing or deliverables based output, but time is very much money.

Now this is absolutely fine under normal circumstances. You calculate how long you think a particular task or challenge might take based on the seniority and skills of the people you think you will need to tackle it, deliver it and manage it. This is then used to establish a framework, project structure or project proposal, and typically stems from a briefing conversation between senior members of the agency and the client doing the briefing. Assuming the client is happy with what is proposed and the costs involved, the agency starts work and works to deliver what was agreed.

Easy…right? Everyone does what was planned and the client is happy.

It should be straightforward, but imagine the budget is like a buffet at a wedding. The caterers work out how much each person might typically eat and provides a range of dishes to satisfy this plus a bit more to cover what they deem to be eventualities. But Uncle Andy likes his pies a bit too much and eats enough for 4 people, someone has brought their children who trough all the crisps in one fell swoop, 7 people have VERY specific dietary requirements and no-one likes the crab sandwiches. Many of the wedding guests end up going hungry and too many people end up with too little choice. Apologies for the poor analogy but that’s a bit like a consultancy budget. In the early stages, it is often the case that too many people get involved and start chomping through the budget at an alarming rate, account managers and directors have to spend more time than anticipated keeping the client informed of progress, the person you’d anticipated working on the project is now too busy or ill and you have to bring in a more senior (and more expensive) designer to work on the project in their absence. At the same time, one designer spends too long working on something deemed irrelevant to the project and the client introduces a few extra bits of information halfway through the project. This typically results in work having to be done faster than you may comfortably be happy with and with less rigour than you think is relevant.

Now this isn’t particularly different to many other industries. Budgets tend to define most activity in most walks of life, but in a consultancy, it is ever more present and pressing. You are reminded of it every week and at every turn.

Decisions to involve people become somewhat reliant on budget capacity and anticipated profitability. The more senior you are, the less time you have to contribute. There are fewer opportunities to seek wider support from lots of others in the business unless the business is happy for the budget to be exceeded. It’s a complex equation and one that gets recalculated daily…often hourly.

Now it sounds rather dramatic but it’s something that you soon get used to and adapt to. You tend to think in billable hours and days, rather than weeks or project duration. You have to become adept at slicing your time into usable, effective periods. You don’t often have the luxury of days to ponder or research or chat to people.

It is one of the main reasons some people don’t necessarily ‘click’ with consultancy life. Everything tends to feel a ‘little’ rushed and you rarely feel like you’ve had enough time to do as thorough a job on things as you’d initially think. But, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As designers we can often be accused of spending too much time over-thinking, deliberating and concerned that we could do better. Consultancy life tends to eliminate the ability to do that (unless you want to spend countless hours unpaid after everyone has gone home, reworking your ideas!) and does tend to make you a more focussed machine.

It’s not for everyone.

2. Sort of collaborative.

Many assume that consultancies are a hot bed of collaboration. That people from different teams sit around surrounded by wall hung fixie bikes, freshly ground coffee beans and acres of glass and exposed air conditioning ducting, challenging each other, supporting each other and firing new and exciting ideas around the room. Pizzas get consumed, no idea is a bad idea and everyone hugs.

Sorry to shatter the illusion, but true and effective collaboration is tricky in consultancy. For the main reason discussed in Point 1 – time. If you have a pre-agreed budget, unless you’ve factored in 5 people for every hour’s worth of productive work, it is unlikely that it will withstand the kind of broad, inclusive collaboration that you have imagined.

At best, a project owner will tactically pick a handful of people who they know are similarly effective (and possibly affordable i.e. cheap hourly billable rates) and bung them in a room for an hour…two maybe…at a push a whole morning, to squeeze the best out of a focussed mob, from which that project owner will go away, filter the crap, amplify the gold and dip in and out of other similarly tactical follow up conversations to make the most of their budget.

Unless the project has been set up as a open client/agency collaboration project with workshops, reviews and working sessions, it is rare that more than two people will work on a project at any one moment in time. For sure there are instances when time pressures are such that you need to ‘panic’ throw a whole group of people at a project, but under normal circumstances, one person will be doing the main work with supplemental work being ‘tasked’ in as needed and as finances permit.

It’s not the way it should be done. Creative work always benefits from more points of view and a balance of perspectives, but the consultancy ‘time and motion’ model that most consultancy businesses employ (at least inwardly in terms of people management and budget allocation) is such that it inhibits and in some cases, significantly prohibits genuine collaboration between colleagues, teams, seniorities and expertise.

Some agencies will be open with their teams about budgets and other will shield them from the numbers. It rarely matters which, as ultimately the direction coming from the senior leadership or team leaders will be heavily influenced by the budgetary limitations.

I have my thoughts on how this should be done differently, but the industry standard for creative work and the idea of ‘rate cards’ is so ingrained in the bedrock of agency life that it’s hard to see much of a change anytime soon.

3. You don’t get to choose what you work on.

Variety.

It’s the primary reason I went into design and specifically fell in love with design consultancy life. You simply cannot predict what you will be working on in 2 months time.

Now there’s good variety, and bad variety.

Consultancy is a bit of both.

On the one hand, you might be fortunate and work on a slew of interesting and varied projects for clients as diverse as chewing gum, fertility treatments and welding. They might be morally sound, incredibly worthy and sustainably rooted, but similarly they may be ethical questionable, landfill tyrants or hugely exploitative and you may not have a huge amount of influence to steer it.

Most decent businesses will have an ethics policy or a morality standpoint which may prevent them from working on overtly ‘wrong’ things, be it tobacco, alcohol, legally ambiguous drugs or military weaponry for instance. But there may be stuff that comes through the door that you don’t necessarily agree with or have an issue with, that you will be required to work on. You can decide to abstain and that is for you to decide alone. I’m not suggesting I’m a morality guru, but I resigned from my first job (not in a consultancy) when my boss requested that I work on a catheter that was going to be used in the Marie Stopes ‘15 minute abortion’ clinics back in the late 90’s. My boss was at liberty to accept the work, but I didn’t feel comfortable with what he was doing, nor what he was asking me to do, so I quit. There and then. I don’t regret it for a second. He is still trading and I’m still a designer. The clinic probably got their catheter, but I felt strongly enough to risk my career to make a stand. I’m not here to sit in judgement, but my point is that you will need to make your own decisions as there are circumstances in business that may put you in a position you are uncomfortable with.

I digress slightly.

I adore variety. I love the fact that I can be working on bionic prosthetics one minute and chocolate snacks the next. Wound management to hair removal creams. Medical diagnostics to mosquito repellents. There’s no way of guessing what you might be working on in a consultancy. Even aside from the market or industry itself, the specific briefs are so hugely varied. Within chocolate, you might be working on ways to reconfigure ingredients to appeal to developing nations or trying to work out how to merchandise multipacks to maximise shopper appeal in a supermarket. You can’t predict it.

But here’s the rub. All these things might sound amazing and enticing, but you will have little choice. The likelihood of you working on a project will be a by-product of availability, hourly rate (seniority) and the skills required of the project at hand. You will have work and projects chosen for you, by your line manager or sector sales teams. And you may only get to work on bits of a project. A bit of sketching here. A bit of CAD modelling there. Supporting a workshop. Helping to present a project phase. It is as rare as rocking horse shit that you will get to take sole control of a whole project from start to finish.

If you get good at stuff and prove yourself to be a quick learner, adaptable, efficient (see point 1) and handy to have in a room with clients, then you will start to grasp some control over the work you do, albeit by proxy and influence. Some of it comes down to hard skills and the fidelity and speed with which you can apply yourself. A lot of it will come down to the soft skills and the chameleon-esque nature of your place in the team.

4. Timesheets.

Because time is the primary currency, ipso facto ‘timesheets’ are the primary currency converter.

The timesheet is something you simply have to come to terms with. I have a love hate relationship with timesheets. Every year I’ve worked in a company belonging to someone else I had to fill one out every week. Every 15 minutes of every day is accounted for…broadly speaking. I didn’t have them when I ran my own business and you could argue the pros and cons of that elsewhere.

The thing about timesheets is they court abuse.

Some people are diligent and make a note of their time as each day progresses.
Others wait until the FD is yelling at them on a Friday to fill it out (I put my hand up to that one!).

Some lie through their teeth and claim to have been working on stuff when in fact they’ve been browsing cheap airline flights or booking holidays. Others make their own project look good by booking to other people’s jobs. Some just blanket bomb a job code and hope nobody notices.

Wherever you place accountability, you drive behaviour that is self-preservational (if that’s a word). Despite reassurances to the contrary, staff will assume that timesheets will be used to calculate how ‘effective’ you are as a designer (as it’s the only true metric on offer) so people will then contrive that metric to be as favourable as possible to them. It stands to reason.

So timesheets are by no means a solid solution, but there are probably here to stay, until someone installs tracking cameras on every member of staff!

5. People are possessive.

For some of the reasons I’ve described earlier, as time moves on and you prove your worth, you can start to influence the types of projects you are typically allocated or become involved with.

However, with this comes territorial prowling and fierce protection.

I guarantee every consultancy will have people who will be the unmentioned owners of certain types of work, of certain clients and of certain types of projects, typically because they did it well at one point in their career and now ‘own’ it.

On the one hand this is not a bad thing. Familiarity avoids having to spend unnecessary hours explaining the business to a new project member, and ideas will typically be more agreeable as the designer knows what the client wants (or expects). But it can also breed stagnancy. ‘Eat, sleep, design, repeat’ type approaches to the same types of project.

Whatever the benefits either way, just be prepared for a fight if you want to get involved in one of ‘those’ projects. You may have to pry the client rights from their cold, dead hands!

6. Time wasters.

So, I alluded to this in my timesheets point, but there are a fair few people in consultancy (as I’m sure there are in every business on the planet) who “swing the lead” (as my Dad loves to put it).

People who are adept at doing just enough to avoid the firing cannon, but never enough to get the project delivered perfectly on time. They always have an excuse, or a doctor’s appointment, or something is wrong with their laptop, or “Well, that was what Adam told me to do!”

The impression I had before I entered the consultancy world, was that only the bravest of the brave were chosen to compete in these elite fighting forces. You had to prove yourself beyond reproach before you could even make the tea. You had to have a black belt in marker rendering before they’d even look at you, let along interview you. Navy Seals. SAS. That sort of thing.

Hate to break it to you but there is quite a bit of average in consultancy, which makes the fight for jobs all the more galling as a graduate or junior. People who might probably struggle to get a job elsewhere were in not for fortunate circumstance and an ability to lurk in the shadows, doing just enough to avoid execution. Unfortunately, they are also the ones who typically give the new recruits the hardest time and make their positions seem more important than they really are.

This isn’t unique to consultancy I know, but don’t presume to think everyone working in one is supremely talented.

7. Don’t always believe what you see.

Consultancies do a very very good job of marketing their wares through website shop windows. But remember that most consultancies are filled with at least a few shit-hot rendering gurus. People who can polish the turdiest of turds. Make average look like unicorn dust. Take a marginal project contribution and make it look like they cured child poverty.

I’ve done it. It has been (part of) my job for more years than I care to imagine to seduce, captivate, convince and secure clients on the basis of past casestudies – the creds deck. Introducing seductive imagery of imagined futures and alluring lifestyles where all problems have been eradicated. Costs reduced, lives improved, sales increased, profits skyrocketed. That sort of thing.

It’s been something I’ve been both adept at, and simultaneously troubled by. My defacto stance is to want to be honest. To say exactly what we did and relate it to the client in front of me, but the language and tools of consultancy are sensational. They have to be. Because the next consultancy the client sees will do exactly the same. They will over sensationalise their contributions. They will produce phenomenally attractive visuals of desirable things to weave their own magic. They will quote business growth statistics that confound belief.

This also extends to the myth of ‘buzz’ or ‘culture’ or ‘ethos’. My personal view is that if you have to talk about how great your culture is, you don’t have one. But that’s just my opinion.

Just be careful what you read and what you are led to believe.

8. Solitude.

I’ve covered much of this in point 2, but I wanted to reiterate that much of the work you will do in a consultancy is solitary. Nowadays it’ll be sat in front of computer monitor or two, using some 2D or 3D creative software, communicating via Teams, or Slack or Email, and collaborating via Mural or Miro or some other platform. In some cases you will talk to clients more than you will talk to some of your colleagues. Not because you talk to clients a lot, but because you don’t really talk to you colleagues a great deal…at least not on an hourly, project basis. And I’m not just talking about remote working or COVID enforced working patterns…this was the case long before that.

For sure there is studio banter and conversation, but much of the work you will do on a day to day basis in delivering against a project brief will be solitary. There will be opportunities to check in and review your work on a regular basis with colleagues, seniors and managers, but the bulk of the day will be you and your thoughts tackling the challenge at hand.

9. Utilisation.

Remember those timesheets, and the curse of time based currency?

Well a by-product of that system is a lovely word called utilisation. It can be called many other things but the underlying principle is one of ‘commercial usefulness’ or ‘profitability’. If you calculate the number of hours that a designer is billing to active, fee paying jobs as a percentage of the available hours in a working week you get a ‘Utilisation’ value.

Different people within the business will have a different utilisation value. The more junior you are, the more of your week you will be expected to spend on live project work as it is assumed you will have fewer responsibilities than anyone else and therefore less time commitment to anything else. Once you factor in holidays, lunch breaks, administration tasks, team meetings and all the other things that might be acceptable alternatives to project work, you end up with a value. This could be 70-80% for a junior for instance.

As you get more experienced, the expectation is that you might become more involved with wider team management, sales, marketing, reviews…all the other stuff that makes a creative team tick. This means your utilisation rate is expected to be lower as you have other stuff to do.

The more senior you get, the lower your utilisation rate.

It is these values that a business will use to calculate profitability and hourly rates. When you crunch the numbers, each person has a utilisation target (broadly speaking) which can then be used to calculate projections, sales and all the other financial targets. They become the building blocks on which the company forecasts get built.

Which is why I defer you to my earlier point about timesheets.

If a designer knows they have a utilisation target and they know that the business expects that of them, then it is no wonder that designer will seek to be a little stealthy or sneaky when they fill out their timesheet. Stack the chips in your favour…right?

Broadly speaking the deviancies in the numbers tend to iron themselves out, but you can see how these foundations become a little sandier and a little less robust if the incentives to perform are inherently linked to trustworthiness in reporting or threats to job security.

I’ll leave it there.

10. Client’s rule.

The last point but probably the most important is this one. The client.

Creative design consultancies trade on service. They sell value loaded time to people who need problems solved. Nuts cracked. Challenges sorted.

But the ultimate arbiter of the success of that service is the client. They are the ones to decide if your business is the one they want to work with. They agree the budget. They review the work. They decide whether the work you’ve done is up to a standard they expect or higher. They will refer and recommend if they feel you’ve done an exemplary job. They become advocates if you consistently deliver and make them look good.

There’s no algorithm. There’s no sales figures. You can’t sell more creativity than less creativity.

It’s like food. A chef can cook something complex, using myriad technical skills and a whole host of exotic, hard to source ingredients, but if the person eating the dish doesn’t like the taste of it, it’s a failure. Even if a hundred other chefs heap praise on the mastery of the aforementioned chef, the diner will not return to the restaurant unless they enjoyed the dish. It’s in the taste of the diner. Very specific to that person and what they find appealing. You can’t tell someone to like the taste of something. They either do or they don’t.

You could argue that there are plenty of sideshow tricks you can employ to sub-consciously influence the diner’s impression. Ambiance. Conversation. Décor. Razzmatazz. And for sure this can help…even bamboozle in the short term. But ultimately the diner will stop returning if the food never quite hits the spot.

The same is true of clients and their view of creativity, or of the way in which they measure success. If you’ve done your job properly in the early stages of a project briefing and client ‘getting to know you’ bit, you will have established those measures of success. You will understand the clients’ motivations and ambitions. You will know how the client defines creativity.

You will have effectively ensured that the ingredients you use to cook the dish are palatable, the process will align with expectations of delight and the theatre of delivery is suited to the tastes of the audience. If you can do that early on, you ensure that you stand a fighting chance of building a robust client relationship and one that may go on to develop into advocacy or even genuine friendship.

It’s not about contrivances or cooking the metaphorical books to ensure the client sees what they want, but ensuring that you’ve made the client feel at home, that you have their best interests at heart and that you have been listening. Trust breeds contentment, and a happy, relaxed client will respond much more honesty and genuinely to work than one who has been on guard or in a defensive stance the whole time.

Designers – as a whole – tend to overlook the client ‘bit’ when delivering their goods. Many inexperienced or naive designers expect clients to be impressed with fancy visuals and glossy presentations.

But the ultimate success of any consultancy is not in the empirical design values of the work itself (which has to be good…don’t get me wrong…but lots of agencies and lots of designers do good work) but in the solidity of the client relationship and the suitability of the solutions to the needs of that specific client.

I can feel myself disappearing down another article wormhole here, so I’ll stop there on that one.

You should get the point by now!

For all the pessimism and pragmatism in this article, I just want to reiterate that I love what consultancy life has given me. I’ve spent 25 years working in consultancies large and small, here in the UK and abroad, as an owner and as an employee. As you can tell there are good bits and bad bits. Bits that make sense and bits that are absurd.

But the bit that grabbed me by the ‘short and curlies’ (as my Grandfather often used to say!) was the client interaction bit. The merry dance and dreamweaving that happens when you are first introduced to a brand new potential client and you get to listen, understand, reassure and promise to deliver your utmost to them.

The work is almost incidental.

The bookends to the work are what keeps my blood pumping. The parts where you get to present your thoughts, insights, solutions and inspiration to people who had faith in your abilities to solve their challenges. To find creative sparks and huddle them until they became a flame. Where you start to build on that initial introduction, pay back the faith they afforded you by placing the work with you, and slowly manifest a service relationship that they – and you – can start to rely on a little bit more each time.

I am privileged that many of my past clients have become firm friends. Not all. But some.

And that only happens when you can believe and trust each other.