{"id":53,"date":"2025-11-25T18:17:46","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T18:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/?p=53"},"modified":"2025-11-25T18:22:43","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T18:22:43","slug":"business-management-consulting-aka-keeping-people-from-screwing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/non-dilutive-funding\/business-management-consulting-aka-keeping-people-from-screwing-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Business Management Consulting AKA Keeping People from Screwing Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/fsa-mentoring-model.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-43\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a very old, pretty much ancient line about what consultants do:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">You give them a watch and they tell you what time it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I first heard this from a person who was always sure they were the smartest person in the room and made damn sure everyone in the room knew it. Not unexpectedly, this person was surprised a few years later when he was turfed in the 1st round of down sizing at his company. (Nope, like the people Iron Mike fought in his prime, he didn\u2019t even make it to the 2<sup>nd<\/sup> round!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But there\u2019s a lesson of sort in his observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The value of a consultant is less about what they know and more about what they\u2019ve experienced. This is particularly true today when AI has made us all brilliant &#8211; Everyone is the smartest person in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With that considered, it\u2019s the experience that counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is no better education than failure and the longer you\u2019ve been in business, the more education you get. And the more re-education you get \u2013 failure wears a lot of disguises and if you don\u2019t recognize the similarities in how things are playing out, you have to repeat grades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our job is making sure our clients pass the first time by being their cheat sheet for the pop quizzes that come at them every day in the business:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI just violated the cash reserves requirement on the operating capital loan I took\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>becomes \u201cHere is how to keep enough money in the bank to get through this down period\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I violated the cash reserves requirement a few times. Fortunately, it only cost me once (but it cost me dearly!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m on COD with 3 critical suppliers and I need the stuff in yesterday\u2026\u201d is graded as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cHow I keep my vendors on board even when I\u2019m not paying them\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>We kept key suppliers on board for 3 years, long enough to get to the stage where we could reward them for their patience. (And we did reward the ones that stayed with us!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cMy head of QA just left and took the department with them\u2026\u201d is really<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cStaffing plans that make sense and we can afford\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Companies kept poaching our best people until we came up with a compensation plan that had perks the large companies couldn\u2019t match. (And it wasn\u2019t about money or equity!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI just sold half my company for half what I think it\u2019s worth\u2026\u201d is taught as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cHow to define value in a way that prospective investors buy into\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Speaking of equity, it\u2019s very difficult to say no when you only have 3 months of runway. But it becomes easier when you know what buttons to push with the investors (it\u2019s not all about ROI) and how to extend that runway to a year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Want to be smart? Subscribe to ChatGPT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Want to survive long enough to be successful? Send us an email and we\u2019ll talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mark Logomasini, MBA, PMP<br>Managing Partner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a very old, pretty much ancient line about what consultants do: You give them &hellip; <a title=\"Business Management Consulting AKA Keeping People from Screwing Up\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/non-dilutive-funding\/business-management-consulting-aka-keeping-people-from-screwing-up\/\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Business Management Consulting AKA Keeping People from Screwing Up<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[7,6,8,9,11,5],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-dilutive-funding","tag-dod","tag-grant-funding","tag-hhs","tag-nih","tag-non-dilutive-funding","tag-usg-grant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foothillscientific.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}