As a consulting firm, your company should strive for perfection on every project that you engage in. Your purpose and intent should be to provide real value to your clients. Your position on providing value should never be compromised. However, striving for perfection does have its limitations and can be directly proportional to cost effectiveness on both sides of the equation. Cost effectiveness in relationship to your clients price point and cost effectiveness in relationship to your time investment individually compared to the time actually billed. Think of the fill rate scenario. It is easy to go from a 97% fill rate to a 99% fill rate. All you have to do is increase inventory by ten fold.

We all have different strengths, different methodologies and different experience in the world of wholesale distribution. These differences will impact your individual approach to any task or project. This can become an area of risk for some of you. You must be conscious of your own unique style. This is especially true when it comes to client management.

Academically speaking, if as an individual you fall into the thinker classification, your strengths include accuracy, dependability, independence, clarification and testing skills, follow-through, and organization. As a Thinker you often focus on expectations (e.g., policies, practices, and procedures) and outcomes. You want to know how things work so you can evaluate how correctly they function. I picture a fox as an appropriate symbol for Thinkers--cagey, resourceful, and careful. Because they need to be right, 100%, they prefer checking processes themselves. They often put much more effort and time into a project or task than may be necessary. This may be related to their individual confidence ratio based on their perceived value of their own experience and competencies.

This tendency toward perfectionism, taken to an extreme, can result in "paralysis by over analysis", excessive time commitments and over-billing the client. These overly cautious traits may result in worry that the process isn't progressing right, which further promotes their tendency to behave in a more critical, detached way. This directly relates to an over investment of time. Sometimes this is even true in the simplest of tasks. It can result in poor client management by doing too much hand holding and work that is the responsibility of the client.

This can become very frustrating from a time management standpoint and an equitable ROI standpoint not to mention lost sales due to uncompetitive bids. However, the fox alone is in control of this scenario and should look into the mirror when considering cause and effect.

I am not suggesting any one of you have every one of the characteristics of the Fox. But I am suggesting that we all should reflect upon this when we are building our project plans, doing our work and even when our frustrations make us whine a little.

Just some food for thought; we cant afford to operate any of our practices like a fox. We need to become Wolves, Hungry Wolves that can provide maximum value to our clients without overcharging for individual time and talent.

Which one do you want to be? Its your choice.