April 4 2012
Many of the services we provide – assessments of operations and strategies, research, executive search assistance and strategic planning, just to name a few – represent tasks that colleges and universities can do themselves. Given scarce resources why do so many campuses engage the services of a consulting firm?
Here are a few reasons we hear or observe:
- Time The time spent developing your own strategic plan or conducting research could be spent in other ways. Doing it yourself has an opportunity cost associated with it . . . if you didn’t have to search for your own candidates, for example, what more strategic activities could you engage in as an alternative?
- Timely Beyond the time spent on the project itself there is also the issue of completing it in a timely fashion – consultants must be aware of the campus culture to spend time “fixin’ to commencin’ to doin’ something” as we say in North Carolina, but can help the campus rise above those tendencies to finish a project and, most importantly, move to implementation of the recommendations, plan, research findings and other benefits.
- Will As one president said to me at the end of a strategic planning process, “it isn’t that we couldn’t have done this ourselves, Tim, but that we wouldn’t have.” Sometimes a consultant can help provide the impetus to complete an important project that would be difficult for campus leadership to pull off.
- Perspective During the last five years on the consulting side of higher education I’ve encountered numerous situations where an outside perspective helped campus leaders get unstuck and move beyond a parochial perspective. As one of my colleagues says, “It isn’t that we’re smarter than campus leaders; we have the benefit of the perspective serving 75 campuses a year brings.” Many campuses get stuck believing they are the only ones who face particular challenges and it is freeing for them to realize other campuses face those same issues.
- Perception Often when we do search assistance we’re taking over a search a campus has struggled with on their own. Our introduction into the search typically brings a new wave of candidates who didn’t apply the first time – the fact that a search firm is leading the search gives them a perception of a higher level of confidentiality and adds a sense of prestige to the campus and the position itself.
More to say on the subject but in the spirit of blogging let’s leave it at these five reasons . . . call or email if you want more! Tim Fuller Vice President / Owner
