Private Consultation

If you are interested in one-on-one consulting from Lodestar Consulting Systems, Inc. and wish to determine if this is, in fact, a good move for you, I suggest you read the following material to help you make the best decision for your company. If that decision involves me helping you, then we will take the action steps needed to make it happen. And if you decide that one-on-one help is not for you, that is perfectly fine too. You need to make the decision that is best for you and your company.

What Is Involved?

One-on-one consulting (what I call “private consulting”) is a rigorous process of determining what in your company and/or management style is holding you back from achieving all you are capable of achieving, and then helping you find a way around those bottlenecks. It will not be an easy task, nor necessarily fun. But it can be profitable.

Should you decide that this service is for you, you will contact me about some possible dates for our first face-to-face visit. After that has been set, I will mail you a data workbook to fill out. It is long and will take you at least a couple of days to fill out. You may find yourself wondering why I want to collect so much information before I come to see you, but the simple truth is that even the smallest air conditioning business is a very complicated thing and to get to the root of the problems that hobble it takes a great deal of deep, penetrating research. Complex issues require complex data analysis!

Do You Have the Mental Toughness Needed?

Equally important to my helping you find and solve your biggest problems, you need to decide if you really have the heart to do this. Consulting is easy on my part, but terribly difficult on yours, especially if we find out that you are at the root of most of your problems. People don’t like hearing things like that, and often when I suggest a course of action to improve the business, a client will balk or try to find ways to avoid the action called for, or even simply refuse to do what is suggested. I respect a client’s fear of change, but if this is going to work, you will need to be open to changing how you do things in your business, and that may include how you as a human being relate to others in your business dealings.

If I find that you are not willing to make the sacrifices that may be needed to improve your business, I may decide to cancel our agreement and let you go your separate way.

Before bringing me in to help you “fix” your business, be very sure that you are willing to make some changes, even personal ones. If this thought scares you, then maybe private consultation is not for you at this time. If that is the case, that is fine. Better to face up to it now than spend several thousand dollars to find it out later. Besides, you may later decide you can and will make the changes I suggest, and when that time comes, we can get together then and work on your business.

What Can I Expect?

That depends on what you are looking for. If you want someone to come in and rubber stamp what you are already doing, to pat you on the back and praise you, I am not the person to call. If praise is warranted, I’ll give it, but face it-most of the time, a business brings in a consultant because it is in trouble and that trouble is usually the result of something the manager(s) have done poorly or done wrong in the first place. I will never be rude to you, but I will be honest, and sometimes that means telling you that you are making some big mistakes in some areas. If you don’t want to hear that, don’t call me.

You can expect our first visit to be mostly of a fact-finding nature. I will spend part of the first day verifying the information you supplied on your data workbook. I will also interview your key employees (one on one) and generally observe your daily operation to see how it hums (or sputters). The second and third day of the first visit (third day if needed) will be spent delving deeper with you into the problems I noted on the first day and in your data workbook. We will also explore any issues and concerns you had on your radar before I came out.

I may decide to ask you and your management team to take a voluntary personality profile. This is usually a useful tool in figuring out why people don’t work together very well. If such a profile is given, I will spend part of a day later reviewing the results with you and the people profiled so everyone will gain insight into what some of the issues are and how they can work together to resolve them.

I will then return to my office (and you to your daily grind) and write a report to you detailing what I found and what I think it will take to solve the problems identified. I will focus on up to three major issues and six minor ones-any more than that, and you will be so disoriented by all the change that you might not survive as a business. I will mail you two copies of the report (more if you request them).

After you receive the report, we will talk over the telephone to make sure we are both clear on what the plan is and how it will be executed. (The report will contain action matrices complete with assigned duties and trigger dates.)

I will then schedule three more one-day visits, one each quarter, for the rest of the year. On these one-day visits, I will check to see how well you are doing on reaching your goals by the dates set. If you are bogged down (and we have not discussed that over the telephone previously), we will talk about how to get moving again. I may even have to hold your feet to the fire sometimes if you start balking at doing the plan we agreed upon. I don’t enjoy doing that, so don’t put me in a position to have to do it, okay?

By the anniversary date of my first visit to you, the problems we identified and developed plans to fix should be gone and your business well on its way to getting better and stronger.

Read more:

>> Consultation Fees

>> How to Sign Up for a Private Consultation