One-on-One with The RFP Company's co-founders

Gordon Perchthold and Jenny Sutton have more than 50 years combined in the management consulting profession. The two were working with Deloitte Consulting in Japan before forming The RFP Company, a firm aimed at helping clients select vendors and consultants because they noticed client projects "were destined to fail." In 2010, they released " Extract Value from Consultants: How to Hire, Control and Fire Them" . Consulting's One-On-One sat down with both Perchthold and Sutton to discuss the book, the consulting market and their upcoming presentation—What Clients Want—to be delivered at the Consulting Summit in Chicago on May 5. In the session, Sutton and Perchthold will talk about client expectations, the typical consulting responses, what a good consultant/client relationship looks like, and the things that consultants do that frustrate and anger clients.

Consulting: You advise clients on how to get the most out of consultants. In general, what would you say are the big mistakes clients make?

Perchthold: Clients needs to question everything—question the definition of the problem, question the approach to solving the problem, question the configuration of the consulting team, question the length of the engagement. There's too much accepting; it's very much the way healthcare used to be. In the past, you'd go to the doctor and he'd tell you what was wrong with you, and he'd give you a pill and you'd go away and take it. That sort of changed in this era of information and collaboration. Doctors that don't communicate with their patients—the symptoms, the side effects, the possibilities—aren't considered very good doctors anymore. Yet, clients are still quite comfortable laying out a series of symptoms and then leaving it up to the consultants to figure out the solution.