The TBK Consult crew is gathered in Barcelona, Spain this week. We are having our semi annual internal Synergy Conference.

In April 2013 we were in Istanbul, Turkey. This time Barcelona is hosting our get-together.

For a full week we will be reviewing our experience with helping software companies grow and assume global leadership.

Today, Tuesday, we will be running the Management Consulting Essentials workshop.

We have a rule of thumb at TBK Consult. The value we create with our clients must be at least 10 times bigger than the fee we ask.  If we cannot identify this 10:1 relationship then the project is not qualified for TBK Consult.

We also have the rule never to engage in a project on a “time and materials” basis.

This may sound extremely odd for a management consulting company, but read on.

What do you want – hours or results?

We help our clients achieve measurable results.

All the projects we engage in have clearly defined objectives. However we want to keep the route to achieve the results as open as possible. By nature, international growth projects cannot be specified up front.  There will always be a substantial number of elements that will be identified and executed as we learn from our research and activities.

Global growth requires agile and lean business development approaches. Waterfall based frameworks are doomed to fail!

We would establish an objective conflict with our clients from the very first minute if we were to charge time and material.

Our clients will benefit dramatically from achieving the results as fast as possible and with as little investment as possible. If we charged “time and materials” we would benefit from the exact opposite! The longer it takes, the more hours would be consumed. Whenever new initiatives and activities are required to secure meeting the objectives and results our clients would not know if we are primarily motivated by the additional hours required.

Charging “time and materials” will jeopardize any business development.

The TBK Consult AIDA Process

At the workshop today we will review our experiences with our own [slider title=”AIDA”]Awareness -> Interest -> Desire -> Action[/slider] process. We will discuss ways to identify disqualified clients faster and ways to accelerate the engagement process for qualified clients.

In this respect we have the exact same interests as our clients: The faster we can get a project started the faster we can generate measurable value for the client and the faster the client will see the results.

A sense of urgency remains an increasingly important virtue in the software industry.

About TBK Consult

TBK Consult is the only management consulting company in the world that has experience with taking software companies from multiple countries to multiple counties.

We help Italian software companies into Turkey, Germany, The Nordics etc. We help Estonian software companies into The Nordics, Benelux, Germany etc. We help Finnish & Luxembourg companies into the UK, Germany, Sweden etc. We help Danish companies into Turkey, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Germany etc. We help US companies into Europe.

I think you get the picture.

At TBK Consult we do not  have a vested interest in any specific country. We help our clients identify those markets and apply the sequence that makes most sense and promises the best rewards for their investments.

TBK Consult is a group of independent business development executives. We operate on the basis that our clients pay for the value we provide.

TBK Consult: How We Operate from Hans Peter Bech on Vimeo.

Credits: The value based pricing concepts are inspired by Alan Weiss