 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Good afternoon. This is Business in Hawaii for Think Tech, and we're in downtown Honolulu on a hot day, the end of June, about a week before July 4th. And we're here today talking about issues and challenges of business leaders, specifically business leaders who are CEOs of organizations, trying to really be innovative, trying to push sales, trying to recruit and really develop line managers. The issues of CEOs are probably the same all over the world. And what keeps them awake at night, and how do they seek advice from other seasoned consultants and advisors? And that's the topic we have today on consulting, on traditional consulting, and the future of consulting globally. Welcome to the show. We have Jan Rumi, extreme left to me. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Ray. And we have Iqbal Ashwaf, just to the left of me. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Glad to be here. Great. Welcome by your esteemed backgrounds. And so, Jan, tell me just in a summary, how did you come to Hawaii? Okay, all right. That's a pretty interesting story. We did come here within a few years, a year and a half, I got married, and then I was driving through the licky, licky tunnel, and my wife was mesmerized with the beauty of Hawaii, and she just said, I mean, dear, can you find something over here? And then that's the end of the story. That's what we got to Hawaii. It's been about more than 32 years. Wow. So you've seen a lot of changes in Hawaii, especially in the business community. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I've heard that your background is in traditional consulting. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yes. I've been in charge of consulting for Grand Thornton, local accounting and management consulting office of Grand Thornton International. And I've been there for 14 years, so that is consulting, you know, as everybody knows, consulting. But I think you will hear from Iqbal and I guess part of the conversation that once I met Iqbal, the light bulb went on, and then I said, this is the new way of consulting. I mean, you would say management consulting, that includes the big firms like McKinsey that's been around, or Deloitte, or Bain, or Boston consulting, and Grand Thornton. There's many firms out there that assist many big companies, and SME is a small to medium enterprises. And would you agree that consultants will advise and also solve problems for CEOs of these businesses? Yes, yes. They, primarily, the large accounting or management consulting companies, like you said, Grand Thornton, Deloitte, KPMG, you know, they have audit department, they have tax, and they have rest of their office here, which is basically to help out a given client. Anything outside of audit and tax, that's called management consulting. That's great. And we turn to you, Iqbal. How did you come to my life? Yeah, so I grew up in India, and you know, when I first moved to US in 2004, I used to work for GE, so I worked in many different roles, and mostly, I lived and worked in Milwaukee. And then at some point in my career, I just got sick of working in a big company, living in a cold place. I had visited Hawaii before, and I said, I'm just moving to Hawaii. This was in 2008, and the neighbor since then I have been here. So you've been here for 10 years, and working with businesses in Hawaii. And so we come to, very quickly, can you define, Iqbal, how you developed this idea, a new model of consulting, and how is it different than traditional consulting? Sure. You know, before I started working on GEALD in 2012, 2013, I used to run a company called Pro Accounting, which was owned by Pro Service, one of the larger companies here. And we were basically an outsourced accounting shop, worked with many small and mid-sized companies. And as a person running that shop, I would advise the owners. I kind of came to a realization that if you think 10, 15 years from ago, if you were a small retail shop in maybe Kailua, you would compete with a small retail shop in Kailua. But now the whole landscape has changed. You are competing with much bigger companies, internet business models. As really, it's an unfair playing field. So I wanted to give top notch expertise to smaller companies, but at a price that they can afford, and that was the genesis of this idea. So give me an example. You say that you're trying to help a local company compete at a larger scale or compete with advantage vis-a-vis mainland companies or global companies, and to shortcut how they would get there. Am I correct? It's like a shortcut when you think about it. Give me an example how you can, in a project or you've done, that really brought consultants or advisors to a small company that they would otherwise never meet and never leverage that expertise. Can I answer that question? Yeah. I mean, it really jives with the issues that I had when I was part of the large accounting and consulting companies. Most of the Hawaii businesses are not that large compared to the mainland companies. So we're talking about mostly a small and medium-sized enterprises. That's a me market when we talk about Hawaii. Under 300, right? Employees. Under 300 employees anywhere between $5 to $25 million business in gross revenue, the top line. So what they have had a problem recently is that when you are going to compete with Whole Foods, for example, they can employ the top-notch consultants with the top hourly rate from the best consulting that you can get anywhere. But a local business may not be able to afford it. And that's where the guild model, our company's model of growth-oriented, innovative consulting company comes in. And that's when Iqbal and I first met and he was explaining his idea, business model idea for the guild. I got hooked in right there and then I say, okay, I was doing all of that in the past, now I know for this time of a business climate, it got to be guild or guild kind of consulting companies that would be appropriate for the local businesses where we can get the top-notch expertise from our 8,000 point expertise who are as qualified as the expertise that you would get out of McKinsey or Deloitte or KPMG or Grand Thornton, but about one-third of the price. And how we are accomplishing that, I'm sure Iqbal can embellish on that, but that is what we are bringing to the market. Okay, Iqbal, can you give me an example for the audience? Kind of, I'll give you a specific example. So a large, 300-employee business-to-business company here is growing really fast and their biggest challenge is they are not able to hire, you know, in this climate employees fast enough. So they had this problem and everybody, you know, kind of, this one kind of relates to that problem. And they can approach it differently. They thought, oh, you know, Google and Facebook and all those Silicon Valley companies that we hear about, they have had the same problem. What do they do to solve the problem? So what we did was they called that project, Building a Recruitment Engine. And this company prepared a list of 15 questions. But they wanted to ask those questions at the head of talent acquisition in these companies that we named, very well-known technology brands. Fortune 100 companies that are recruiting globally. So I was the, you know, local project manager for this consulting project. And then we brought on from our 8,000 member consultants, we brought two people. One person was the head of SourceCon, which is the largest talent acquisition, you know, conference in the US, in the world. And the other person was the head of HR, recruitment specifically for many companies which had made, you know, gone public and all that. And through their contacts, we were able to interview the head of talent acquisition in companies like GoDaddy and Amazon. And this kind of projects, you know, kind of, and done at a price point, so that would have been unimaginable for this client. They would never have met those people and gain insights, the best practices, going on in Silicon Valley today. So they understood about what metrics they use, what is their process flow, what are some of the hacks, you know, how do they attract clients, candidates that they really want to hire, how to be a better, you know, employer brand, how to build that, what kind of applicant tracking system to use, all those, you know, kind of little secrets, they kind of knew in like a one quarter long project. But it's very challenging for a company in the Middle Pacific to identify that specific expert to solve their problem. That's correct. So with that, if I may add to that, that that's where the local growth partners like myself, or Igbal, or we have couple others in our business here, right here in Honolulu, so we are the project manager, or the conduit to do what we can do here within our seasoned background being a consultant. But we would bring in this point expertise, like Igbal mentioned, at a price point that is almost like one third, or let's say 40% of what you would have to pay if you go to a regular consulting or other marketplace that we have here. So how is that possible? I guess our audience could probably think, you know, how is that possible? How can you charge $110 an hour? Whereas if you were to get that kind of expertise, it would normally, at the minimum, would cost you $225. Or multiples. Multiples of $100 an hour. And that's because GILT does all the marketing, all the project management, all other things that we don't have to pay a posh office, like a larger company. Like a larger consulting firm. But in order to understand the firm's issues and problems, the company has to have people embedded in the company to really learn about the issues and problems. Am I correct? That's right. And you're absolutely right. And that's where the project manager or the growth partner, like myself, are embedded in one of these clients. So we know the company. So when we are saying that, okay, this is a defined project, and we would like a point expertise who can solve specifically this particular segment of the problem that is growth oriented or CEO or the COO is trying to solve or look into an opportunity that the company is looking for. We have to kind of end there because we're going to take a break. And we're going to delve further into project management and growth partner and some of the details of what they entail. We're taking a break. Thank you. Truth is I'm impressed. I haven't been asked such intelligent questions in a long time. Thanks. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomei Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurant tours and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on at Thursdays at 4 p.m. And we hope we'll see you next time. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn't know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread and kissed them all soundly and put them to bed. Hunger is a story we can end. End it at feedingamerica.org. Welcome back. We're in the midst of an exciting dialogue with my two guests from Guild Consulting. And we're going to be delving a little bit further into how Hawaii firms in particular can gain access to global expertise and best practices in a way that won't break the bank like larger consulting models have done in the past. Jan, go ahead. I was going to point out that the hourly rate of our point expertise, the best of the best in a given targeted area specifically for that particular need of a given company, whom we can access out of more than 8,000 point expertise we have on our business model, they can come in and exactly do what we're asking them to do because they don't have to do any marketing. Therefore, there is no dollar expenses for them to do any kind of marketing. Any kind of office expenses for them or anything of that nature. They have been seasoned into large accounting and consulting or other big consulting houses themselves for many years. So therefore, when they're on our business model and available to our projects, all they're doing is what we're asking them to do. The social problem. Yeah, and therefore they can do at about 1 third or 40% of an hourly rate, a traditional consulting company would have to charge. And that's where the value proposition of guilt comes in. I guess maybe we should take a step back and explain what our business model is. So we have a really lean team of just four people here who are seasoned, generic kind of consultants. And we call them growth partners. You can call them project managers. And then on the other side, we have these specialists that Jan calls point expertise or subject matter experts. And they're all over the country. And they are specialists in any specific industry and in a function. So for instance, you can take the grocery industry vertical and inventory management. And we will have a few experts in that area. So when a client comes to us and says, I have this specific problem, we connect them to who is the specialist who has solved that problem like 200 times before. Somewhere in the world. That's right. There's been a little learning curve for them. And then we become like the translator, the person who does the legwork, everything in between. And we are also accountable to the business owner for the success of the project. So we are like the bridge between the expert and the person who needs their expertise. And one of the disadvantages in the middle of the Pacific for CEOs in Hawaii is that it's a market of 1.2 million people. There isn't a vast pool of consultants and advisors available to advise the CEOs in Hawaii. But at the same time, your best profile of a person who can take advantage of this new consulting model are CEOs who want to see growth in different. And tell me more about this profile of the person who really can take advantage and run with this model. Yeah, so we do two types of work. One is projects. Project-based, we do it for mid-sized companies and some smaller companies. These are mission-critical projects, big projects, where they need a specialist to come in. That's where we add value. The other is a specific service that we have launched called the Growth Partner Service. These are companies between $5 million and $20 million, where the CEO is really ambitious. They want to take the company somewhere, but they're just not happy with the rate of growth. And we bring in a structure for them where they can grow. And we become embedded in the company as a part-time general manager, kind of advisor, we show up multiple things. Then on a neat basis, we bring in specialists through us and we understand that company inside out and we know what is their budget, what is the problem that they're trying to solve. And we have several clients here who are very ambitious, who are thinking long-term, who know what the big issues are and they want our help and we work with them on an ongoing basis. That's right. CEOs want to be with people who have seen it before, seasoned managers, so not the fresh of the boat MBAs who may be set by larger consulting firms. I think that's a big difference right there. Jan, you want to add to that? Yeah, I do want to just add one thing is that when I was in Grand Thornton, a local company, when I would say that, well, I'm bringing in one of my consultants from the Wisconsin office or Chicago office or even LA office, San Francisco office, you know, a lot of time we had no choice we did. And sometimes it worked out, it didn't work out. And one of the big reasons it didn't work out is because that consultant may have been pretty good in the subject, but they didn't really know how to work with the local companies, local management, the local style of doing business. It's a whole culture. It's quite different than the impure area. Right, right. But that's where we come in. We've been here more than 32 years. I mean, I've been in charge of consulting for many years in Hawaii. I've seen all kinds of consulting both in the state government and a federal government, private sector, financial nonprofits, things like that. So we are the glue maker to define the needs of the companies here, both on a project basis, a specific mission-critical project, a growth-oriented project, or even to add the capacity of the existing employees. It's called capacity enhancement or capability enhancement. Are you talking about developing line managers to become... Yeah, I mean, they're good. These employees are good, but they probably haven't harnessed the rigorality of a seasoned way of doing certain processes. They're just missing a little bit. Discipline of large organizations. Exactly. So we bring in the discipline of the larger organizations to the SMEs in Hawaii. And if needed, as Iqbal said, we can bring in this point of expertise and bingo, we got it done with one-third of the price with the higher probability of success because somebody's not coming in from the mainland. We are the glue maker here and we are accountable to the CEOs and to the company. In fact, if Iqbal, you say some of the payment is also performance-based. That's right. You know, we believe in our model so much so that in many of the projects that we undertake, we peg part of our fees to performance to the results that the client sees. Because, you know, our clients, they are really not interested in a book of recommendations that other consulting companies might give them. They are interested in the execution part. They need help there. So we are very hands-on when it comes to providing. We are not just providing advice. And when they see the results, part of our fee is also linked to them seeing the results. You mentioned non-profit as you mentioned government. There's a diversity of the private sector in Hawaii from the hospitality, hotel, restaurant, IT, a lot of wholesalers. Is there any specific or healthcare, any specific areas, sectors that really are more demanding or that you really can solve problems across the board? I would say Hawaii is a small market. You know, when I was in charge of consulting of a Grand Thornton, I had no choice. I had to go for all kind of clients. You don't have a deep, you know, vertical industry that I can only focus in there and make the consulting fees. In Hawaii, it's a small market. So, GILT model works with all industries. It is not specifically for financial industry or non-profit or government as such at all. So, and therefore, this value of this, more than 8,000 point expertise out there comes so handy. We got the top expertise in inventory management for construction material suppliers or hospital supplier companies and things of that nature. But I want to go back to this thing I call performance-based pay. There, in my career as a consultant for more than, you know, 32 years, I have rarely seen a big consultant agree to performance-based fees. And that is hard to... Hard to not entertain if I were a CEO or owner of a given company. You know, to kind of answer your... The reason consulting companies specialize in industry is because they have limited number of people in their payroll. And they are specialists in this industry and they know how to work. In our case, we are a network-concerned model. We are not constrained by the number of consultants. It's membership and, you know, they're not on a payroll. So, we can be really agnostic to the industry. As project managers, we have general skills and we can work in many different. But real service delivery happens by these specialists who are from different industries and functions. So, we're really not constrained. That's right. It's a matter of partnering with the CEO to uncover issues and problems and then finding the right specialist out there. And you're correct. It is a new paradigm, a new model. The networked consulting firm may be the future of consulting in many ways because of the Internet that you can have access, like you said, to 8,000 different consultants globally which is quite different than a set of skills within only one organization. Each one of these consultants have been consulting on their own under umbrella of large organizations for many years. They're vetted as... Yeah, so in the last five years, you know, we have spent... So, we have criteria for each industry when we, like, these are people that we will invite to join us and we interview them at the time they become members. And then we only... We do a lot of kind of matchmaking. So, basically, you want, when the client tells us this is a problem they are facing, we want a person from a supply side who has solved that exact problem in a different context. Somebody who just says, oh, I think I can solve the problem. We will not even match them to that project. So, that really helps us take the risk out of a lot of problem solving that we do. And that's a good word to use because CEOs always look at risk as they develop their business and they want to minimize risk and to solve the problem in a most efficient way and get results and performance. And go forward, you just mentioned about project management. These projects, what kind of skills do you bring that really you think enhance or really bring good outcomes to these projects? So, if you think about Project Management Institute, you know, published a report and these are across many different independent objective reports, most projects fail. You know, you talk about IT project, HR project, whatever, most consulting projects fail. Some numbers are often quoted as 70%. And most common reason they fail is the person does not have the expertise to solve that specific problem. Maybe they oversold the client and then their communication breakdowns. So, we are just approaching our model by having the growth partner as a person who's in charge of communications and the person who's working the project has real expertise in solving that problem. And that is the way we are trying to de-risking the project. Does that answer your question? That's right, it's a very exciting model and we're also coming to exciting clothes. I just want to add one thing to Iqbal and your comment that even though we are project manager, growth partner, we're general, but being a part of Grand Thornton for 14 years or so, I have also been honed in a particular industry. For example, myself and each one of us, four of us in the guild, have deep expertise in specific area like a non-profit, financial sectors, the state government and things of that nature. Well, exciting to hear and I hope it's exciting for the CEO out there and what makes the CEO awaken night? All kinds of issues ranging from innovation to sales, but especially tied to growth. How do you grow a company? And this new model, the network consulting, may be the answer that could solve the CEO's nightmares. Thank you again for listening and watching Business in Hawaii and we'll see you next time. My name is Ray Tsuchiyama.