So what kind of consultant are you?

Yesterday over lunch, a good friend of mine from the Limelight Marketing Group and I started talking about my recent transition. As you can imagine being in the DC metro area our discussion centered on the many business challenges associated with sequestration and our deadlocked government leaders. After a short while, she then hit me with the quintessential question,”So what kind of consultant are you?”

Elevator speech time!!

“Our baseline offerings are social media, business analytics, cyber security and hybrid information technology (IT) ecosystems. The modern organization continually engages its customers, constituents and stakeholders through social media. Analytics provides institutional knowledge of those customers needs and wants. Cyber security protects your customers, their transactions and your business processes. Finally, your hybrid IT ecosystem delivers your essential business processes – commerce, offering catalog, service delivery and customer support – through a cloud-based business engine.”

The reply,”Sounds nice, and I have no doubt you can do all those things, but they just don’t seem to go together.”

My jaw dropped and images of me standing in the unemployment line flashed before my eyes. The elevator speech had failed to show relevance and value.  Even worse, I had probably confused a prospect by presenting a seemingly jumbled and unrelated list of questionable capabilities.

Later as I was putting salve on my wounds, I realized that the conversation was actually indicative of the new environment in which we all find ourselves. Information technology has consumed our lives with social media being indicative of how our personal and business lives are now blended. The importance of the virtual in many ways has transcended that of the physical and organizations are struggling with the reality of it all. Changes in culture, policy and business models are rampant and we all need to work together to figure this thing out.

So good, bad or indifferent, I’m the kind of consultant that can leverage the linkage between seemingly unrelated things in order to further your organizational purpose, be that public service, national security or shareholder value.

Can I be of service?

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