In this week’s edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser, along with Consultant Bray Wheeler, discuss when to bring a consultant into your organization to help solve the challenges in front of you – and how to best make use of that time and engagement together.
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Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: Welcome to Managing Uncertainty, a podcast series from the experts at BryghtPath discussing global risk, business continuity, and crisis management. Will you be ready to lead your organization through its critical moment?
Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. It’s Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath.
Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant here at BryghtPath.
Bryan Strawser: And I want to start off today with a story, a story that was relatively pivotal in my thought process in my career, and so we have to go back to about 2009.
Bray Wheeler: Way, way back.
Bryan Strawser: Way, way back, a decade ago, more than a decade ago when this happened and the story was this. I was brand new in a position at a Fortune 30 organization as the head of global crisis management and business continuity. These two teams had never been under the same leader. They, in fact, a year prior had been in completely different parts of the organization and now they’re consolidated and under the global security team, under one leader. I’ve got new managers leading the teams and we had a relatively good crisis management process that I inherited that Bray was a part of.
Bray Wheeler: Thank you.
Bryan Strawser: But I had this business continuity function under brand new leadership under me that really wasn’t very visible in the organization, but the company was willing to invest in. And my boss goes, my new boss goes, “Bryan, I think the best place for you to start is to bring in a consultant and have them look at the business continuity program here and tell us what we need to do.”
Bryan Strawser: And then I looked at him and I’m like, “Did you not just hire me, promote me into this job from my old job to do exactly that?” And he goes, “Fair point. Tell me who on the executive team or the board in your first week on the job, having never worked in any detailed level in this field, is going to listen to you on your evaluation of a program you’ve just been appointed to lead, and tell them with credibility that you’re going to be able to move this forward. How’s that going to work?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.” He’s like, “No, you will go hire a consultant.” And I walked out of the meeting and I was kind of pissed off.
Bray Wheeler: Right. Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: I’m like, “You put me in this role. This is what I’m supposed to do.” And so I go talk to my girlfriend at the time now, my wife, and I tell her about this conversation and she looks at me, and she’s like, “I consulted for 10 years at E&Y. You hired these people to come in and tell them what you already know, right? You’re going to bring them in and they’re going to look at the whole thing, they’re going to use some methodology and they’re going to look at the whole thing. And they’re going to tell you some things to work on. You’re going to embrace all that and you’re going to have them present and you’re just going to ride those coattails and you’re going to get all the money and all the resources and all this stuff that you need.”
Bryan Strawser: And man, I was just flabbergasted, and that’s exactly what I did. I hired one of the big four firms. They came in and did an evaluation, they interviewed a bunch of people, they laid in their experience. They said, “Here are your strengths, here are the opportunities, here are the things you need to do. Here’s the roadmap.” And we took it to the executive team and the board and I got everything I ever wanted, and I was just totally amazed by that.
Bray Wheeler: It worked.
Bryan Strawser: It worked. It worked. They did great work. I don’t want to disparage that.
Bray Wheeler: Right.
Bryan Strawser: And that’s not what this conversation’s about it all, but this conversation, what we want to talk about on the podcast today is when do you bring in a consultant? And I don’t mean bring somebody in for staff augmentation to help you do something.
Bray Wheeler: Right or to just, hey, here’s my plan. Just read it back to them. There’s more to-
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Bray Wheeler: To that.
Bryan Strawser: So I want to talk about when you bring in a consultant and I would love, just as you listen to this episode, or read the transcript online, I would love to hear from you about when this has worked for you. Like how have you been able to leverage this? The topic that we’re talking about. When do you bring somebody in to help you like this?
Bray Wheeler: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: Help you solve a problem, help you build a strategy, help you benchmark what’s going on. Not somebody to just fill a hole on the team because you can’t hire somebody.
Bray Wheeler: Or to just assess.
Bryan Strawser: Or just assess.
Bray Wheeler: What you’ve already been doing.
Bryan Strawser: One thing that we do a lot, we’re in the middle of doing this now for a client, is we do spend a lot of time looking at … we do spend a number of engagements where we’re brought in to look at what a company has and tell them, “Here’s where your strengths and opportunities are. Here are our recommendations to improve.” We’re doing this right now for a client where we’ve evaluated the state of their program three times every two years.
Bryan Strawser: We’ve done this to really help them understand where they’re maturing and where they’re not, and where their opportunities lie. But I think a lot of the times we’re brought in as our first foot in the door to help a company understand where they’re at and what they need to do because they don’t know. They don’t have the internal leadership to be able to pull that off.
Bray Wheeler: Or expertise yet.
Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I said leadership, that’s what I mean. They don’t have the leadership and expertise to be able to do that yet.
Bray Wheeler: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: They need that kind of guidance. We’ve done this … the story that I think comes to mind is we’ve clients here in the Twin Cities that we did this for them in late 2015 where there are things they did really well from a crisis perspective, but they realized they didn’t really have a business continuity program, and some things had come to their attention that they did need to have such a program.
Bryan Strawser: And that was our work, that we came in and evaluated the state of affairs. We interviewed the executives, we interviewed stakeholders, we looked over tons of documentation, and we helped them understand what they had, and what they didn’t, and where the points of confusion or opportunity were. And then here’s a number of recommendations for you to look at in terms of implementing. And not only that, but here’s where you stand in relation to other companies in your industry.
Bray Wheeler: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: To our knowledge.
Bray Wheeler: That’s huge, about where you’re at.
Bryan Strawser: And I think the fair discussion about do you really want to be at the very top of this list or is it okay to be in the top third or in the middle? What’s the right investment based upon your business model, your risks and threats?
Bray Wheeler: We, even thinking just from a maturity standpoint, where’s an acceptable level to get to, to fulfill the immediate needs? That more than a stop-gap, but knowing you can’t … you’re not going to go from zero to 60. You’re going to go from having nothing to industry benchmark overnight. That’s … unless you threw all the company resources at that, that’s probably not realistic. So what does that maturity model look like?
Bray Wheeler: I think the other piece too is, with bringing in consultants, not just to affirm, or assess, or things like that, really there’s an opportunity, and I think you touched on it a little bit as that fresh set of eyes to identify any blind spots that are in there. So there might be things that these functions, and these capabilities, and these teams are doing incredibly well, and they’re incredibly popular, and they’re gaining momentum, and everybody knows who they are, and how to engage them. But there might be little things in terms of, hey, we’re missing how to appropriately escalate this up, or we stumble when we need to connect to another kind of response function within the organization, or we have competing response functions for different areas of expertise. How do we engage and blend those? What don’t we know from our partners?
Bray Wheeler: People are a little bit more forthcoming with an independent person than they are with sharing that directly with the team in some cases. And so it’s nice to be able to get … address blind spots, address those gaps, opportunities like you talked about, but also reinforce here’s what you’re doing well, here’s what people are really excited about as well. You’re doing really well.
Bryan Strawser: Because I think most companies just like … I always am wired to, this is how I was trained, is all that stuff I do well is fine, but can we talk about the things that we’re doing well?
Bray Wheeler: We’re going to fix the problem.
Bryan Strawser: But we need to understand both, right?
Bray Wheeler: Right.
Bryan Strawser: You need to understand that these 25 things that you’re doing today, these are awesome, keep doing these things, but here are areas where you’re not so good, and here’s areas where just, they’re bad, or they’re nonexistent and how do we continue to push those things forward I think really matters.
Bray Wheeler: Bryan, what would you say when organizations are thinking about bringing a consultant in? What are the top two, three, four things that they should be thinking about or considering as they’re exploring bringing in somebody from the outside? Is there anything … key things to do?
Bryan Strawser: Well, I think there’s a couple of things to consider. I do think that, and I think most senior executives get this because they’ve been down the consulting road before, but I do believe that one of the advantages of bringing somebody in to look at a problem or an area of opportunity for you, is particularly when you get into more niche consulting, like the work that we do here at Bryghtpath. There are very few situations that you’re going to throw at us even if you’re calling us in the middle of a critical moment, that we haven’t already seen, that we haven’t already dealt with and dealt with that numerous times. And I don’t want to be, in the particular field we’re in, that can sound a little callous sometimes.
Bray Wheeler: Right.
Bryan Strawser: But we’ve led personally through active shooter situations, we’ve dealt with numerous fatalities with our clients and there’s a lot of things that are really rare in people’s experiences, but we do this work all the time.
Bray Wheeler: Well even just awareness to incidents that are occurring that we’re not even a part of, just right kind of totally-
Bryan Strawser: Right. Industry knowledge within the niche space. That’s what we’re supposed to be looking at.
Bray Wheeler: Right.
Bryan Strawser: That’s part of our DNA of what we’re doing is to look at that stuff. So even if it’s not direct.
Bray Wheeler: Right. Right. Agreed.
Bryan Strawser: There’s at least probably indirect connectivity that we have.
Bray Wheeler: Right. But I think beyond that, when you’re considering who to bring in, I think there’s a number of questions to consider and we have a blog post about eight things to consider when choosing a business continuity consultant we’ll link in the show notes so you can read the full article. But I think you want to look at the organizational capability of the company, of the consulting firm that you’re looking at. I think you want to look at their previous experience. I think if anything you’re doing is regulated, I think you want to make sure you have a consultant that has experience in the industry and regulations in question. We have a certain amount of depth in healthcare and in energy, in financial services, all of which are regulated here in the United States that if you don’t have experience in those areas then they’re going to have to play catch up to understand what those requirements are that are in place for them to dig through. I think those are important things to consider. A couple of important things to consider.
Bray Wheeler: And I think the capability thing, I think an honest consulting firm is going to be upfront about this when talking about their capabilities and whether or not they can handle the work, and I think it’s fair if you’re dealing with a smaller niche organization like ours and you’re a Fortune 10 organization, you should ask about can we handle the work, the scope, and scale of what’s there. I know we were approached by a company this year. One of the Fortune 10 was on my mind. It was a member of the Fortune 10 and it was a little bit … it was certainly an area that we had knowledge in.
Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bray Wheeler: But it was something they needed to move really quickly on. It was something that had international attention. It was something that had happened and they wanted to go back and look at all of the circumstances around what happened and give them quickly to their board. Here’s what went well, here’s what didn’t go well, here’s the areas of opportunity.
Bray Wheeler: And I listened. They called us, which I was flattered by. It was somebody there that I knew and had a many year-long relationships with and I heard him out and, and my answer was, “Look, we could do this work, but I think you’re better suited going to who I think are the industry leaders for this particular niche that have the capabilities and the stature to deal with what you’re dealing with.” And I made two recommendations to him and they ultimately went with one of those, and it was a better fit for them.
Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bray Wheeler: I would have loved the work. Right?
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Bray Wheeler: It was going to be … it was interesting. It was going to pay well. It was a high profile. It would have been great for us. We were not the best fit for that. And so I think you want a consultant that’s going, to be honest with you about their ability to manage the work.
Bryan Strawser: Yeah. And you should expect that too because if, back to the original premise that we started with, if you’re looking for somebody to walk in and credibly say to your leadership and your board that this is the right approach that you want to take, or you’re on the right track, here’s some recommendations to improve that, if there’s anything suspicious about that, that firm, or their ability to complete the work, you were better off probably making the case yourself. Because at the end of the day you’re going to be held accountable to it.
Bryan Strawser: And I think to that point, hearing out those consultants especially, we tend to do it quite a bit to refer to where the expertise lies in some cases, hear those consultants out because they’re affirming to you where you should go.
Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bryan Strawser: And also increases hopefully their credibility with you too for other issues that fit well for them that they’ve kind of helped make that case too.
Bray Wheeler: No, I think those are all great points and certainly do your due diligence into a potential consultant to understand the pros and cons and-
Bryan Strawser: Because bigger is not always better either.
Bray Wheeler: Bigger’s not always better.
Bryan Strawser: Not that they don’t do good work, but bigger’s not, it’s just not always better. Yeah?
Bray Wheeler: Yeah. I think you want to look around. There’s a certain cachet involved in, I think hiring Deloitte, or E&Y, or PWC, or McKinsey, or Bain, or Boston Consulting around something.
Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bray Wheeler: I’m not convinced in areas that they do better work than we do, for example, but if you need 25 people thrown at something, that’s not going to be us. You’re going to want to go to one of them to pull that off. But not many people are calling me, calling us, looking to throw 25 people.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Bray Wheeler: At a problem either. But I think these are all good things to think about when looking to hire a consultant. When you’re evaluating who to go with. I really think the harder decision, to go back to my original story, is when to bring someone in. When do you need that kind of help? I think we mentioned we get a lot of assessment work as our initial points of helping somebody through something, and that usually leads to some work to implement those recommendations. But if you really want a self sustaining process, you’ve got to build side by side with this capability within the business to run those capabilities.
Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Capability to run capabilities, capabilities. That’s our favorite word.
Bray Wheeler: An area we didn’t touch on, we’ve talked about assessments and getting things started, but I think another reason we get brought into situations, is a company is in the critical moment.
Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bray Wheeler: They’ve had something happen. This just happened last week. We had, fortunately, a client that we had an existing relationship with, so we understood the organization. They called and said, “Hey, we had a traffic fatality with our business.” It wasn’t one of their individuals, but one of their drivers had a hit and killed someone in a traffic accident. There was no fault. It was a traffic accident, but there were a number of factors around that where they needed help and we were able to work through that with them. I think that doesn’t happen all that often. Maybe it’s 10% of what we deal within the course of the year, but companies that haven’t thought through that, haven’t thought about how do we react in the critical moment. What do we say? Who do we say it to? How do we manage the human resources aspects of that?
Bray Wheeler: We get a number of calls in the door around that.
Bryan Strawser: One, and that engagement might vary on level of maturity, but I think there still is value in bringing somebody from the outside in, because one, if you’re a smaller capability within the organization, bringing somebody like us in surges that ability to support, and coordinate, and help facilitate, or help you facilitate what’s going on. If you’re a bigger organization, that may also be true. It may provide guidance, may provide a different perspective on the approach that the organization is taking, what we’ve seen work well, what hasn’t worked well, things like that.
Bryan Strawser: I think the other piece to that is often a little bit overlooked, and I think we’ve talked about this in past podcasts a little bit too, is thinking about that situation and the nature of this client’s business with the traffic accident and the driver that’s … it’s central, there’s an emotional impact that takes place.
Bryan Strawser: There’s an emotional kind of response, a human response to what’s going on. I want to say everybody’s sitting around the office crying and not doing anything or breaking things or whatever the case is. But there are certain instances, especially ones that are ingrained in your operations, or the core of your business, when something happens, not everybody’s thinking straight. And that’s real, that’s human, that’s a real thing that happens. And so to be able to bring in a consultant to help facilitate through that doesn’t necessarily have the emotional attachment.
Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bryan Strawser: The lack of a better word, and not sound callous again, but the human known factor between what’s going on helps steer, guide that process through while the company and the people are personally dealing with it and trying to move the operation forward. That consultant can really be beneficial to just helping guide that.
Bray Wheeler: And I see that happening in two ways. One is what you described, it’s … you’re coming in and you’re looking at a problem, or a reorganization, or whatever the underlying question is and, you have no emotion as a consultant you have no emotional or political attachment to what this is. So I think you’re able to provide more direct feedback about what’s going on.
Bray Wheeler: I know I certainly have felt unleashed on my opinions as a consultant. Whereas when I was in-house at a company for 21 years, I brought all of the restrictions, and political thoughts, and crap that went through my head and now I don’t have as much of that. I can really look at the problem and give my best advice based on my experience. But also think the emotional piece comes in a second way, and that is when you’re in the critical moment, you’re not emotionally attached to what’s going on.
Bray Wheeler: And I’m not saying that you’re not impacted because we’re all impacted when other individuals, whether we know them or not, are hurt, or killed, or have had some tragedy that they’ve had to experience. But we’ve dealt with this before, so we come in with a different mindset, I think about working through this.
Bryan Strawser: We’re not in the basement.
Bray Wheeler: We’re not in the basement as the Harvard NPLI folks say. We’re really talking, helping the company work through this. I know there was a fatality, we helped a business with an about a year, well almost a year and a half ago now, that was one of those 7:00 AM I’m walking in the door to the office phone calls from a former colleague and they had an industrial accident that had taken the life of one of their employees. And I have known him for two decades. He’s imminently capable of managing the situation. He didn’t need us for that. He said, “I need you to get on my crisis calls with the execs and I need you to help them understand how to manage this because they’re just hearing this from me and everybody else is a little bit of a hot mess.” And it was like 7 in the morning. By noon they were cool. They didn’t need us anymore. They got through the … but they weren’t thinking through the situation.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Bray Wheeler: They were just reacting once.
Bryan Strawser: Well, and sometimes it’s … you almost need that other voice in the room so that you can play good cop, you can play bad cop.
Bray Wheeler: That’s right.
Bryan Strawser: You can play an independent voice. So you’re not … that crisis leader isn’t the one on the hook for any fallout from, “Hey I got to say something that might be pretty callous,” and get the response and then be discredited from any of the other incidents going forward, or in that role, or things like that. Bringing in a consultant sometimes helps. We can be the ones to say it.
Bray Wheeler: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: And-
Bray Wheeler: We’ll take the hit.
Bryan Strawser: We’ll take the hit.
Bray Wheeler: That’s okay.
Bryan Strawser: That’s-
Bray Wheeler: I think too, and this, I think this is along the same lines is what you just described. Sometimes they know what the right thing is to do. Actually I would say often they know what the right thing is to do. They need the reassurance that what … the thing that they want to do is the right thing to do.
Bryan Strawser: It’s hard to get there.
Bray Wheeler: Yeah I remember on that particular call, the situation we’re just talking about with the industrial accident, I think everybody knew that the right thing to do was to close the place down. Close down, it was a warehouse, industrial warehouse. Close the thing down. Because for one, the loading dock was a scene that was being managed by law enforcement, and the medical examiner, and OSHA, and all of that kind of thing.
Bray Wheeler: But you know, I think getting folks together, and debriefing them, and giving them a chance to talk, and then sending them home for the day, paying them for the shift, send them home, come back tomorrow, have counselors on-site, do the normal, the right response.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Bray Wheeler: But I think … and I think they all knew that, but they needed the reinforcement to say-
Bryan Strawser: That is the right-
Bray Wheeler: What do you want to do about the workers that are there today? Do we all agree the right thing to do is to send them home? Pay them for the time. I’m not sure what your policies are, but let’s pretend we can do what we want. Can we send them home for the day and pay them for the shift? And if they want to hang out in the lounge, and grieve, and talk to each other, I would accommodate that.
Bryan Strawser: Yeah.
Bray Wheeler: But I think … do we all think that’s the right thing to do? And they were all like, “Yeah, we just didn’t … we just weren’t sure.” I think the right thing to do is let folks go home.
Bryan Strawser: Right?
Bray Wheeler: Let them hang out. If they want to hang out for a while, which some of them did I’m sure, cool. If that’s what they want. But I would let them go home and let’s deal with … let’s manage … we’ve got stuff to do here at the warehouse, and tomorrow we can reopen, and they can have a chance to do some group debriefing with a professional or meet one on one with someone, and take advantage of their benefits under their EAP plan. And let’s move forward.
Bryan Strawser: It buys you, some of us, I don’t want to make this inconsiderate, but it gives you that time as leaders, as response functions, to collect your own thoughts, get yourself a little bit squared away, making sure that the next steps you’re doing for the team are the right steps to do as well.
Bryan Strawser: To your point, the next day bringing in counselors, going to that next step and making sure that “Hey, have we done everything that we can possibly do for them coming in the door tomorrow?” What is our expectation of them tomorrow? That’s a whole nother set of questions that you have to be able to get to that you’re not going to get to if you still have people working and doing those kinds of things. So not to do down the rabbit hole on that. But that’s really the value that bringing in a third party or having a third party readily available for your organization, allows you to affirm what it is that you think is the right thing to do, gives you that support in order to make sure that your response is on par with what’s going on, is aligned with what it is that you want as values or objectives within your organization.
Bryan Strawser: There’s just a lot of different things and a lot of different benefits that can come about when you bring in a consultant.
Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There’s a lot of expertise I think to summarize. The time to do this is when you have a problem to solve or you’re in the critical moment and you need someone or an organization that can help you get through the situation because you need assistance. Because you need expert assistance from folks that have done this before and have likely experienced close to the various circumstances that you’re confronted with.
Bryan Strawser: And if you don’t … if you haven’t had that thought or that conversation internally, having it right now isn’t the worst thing either to say, “Hey, is this a step we’re going to take should we get into a situation like this? One of the levers we can pull as an organization and that we’ve decided to pull is we’re bringing a consultant in.”
Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bryan Strawser: Now, whether you line up that consultant in advance, or have conversations, or whatever, just even having that conversation of, “Hey, this is the lever we have the option to pull and is it something we’re going to make the decision pull right away or in the moment?”
Bray Wheeler: That’s it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Thanks for listening.
