Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. It’s the podcast where we talk about how the world of software is changing because of AI.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And boy, is it. So there’s a lot to talk about.

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: It’s all very urgent and important.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So let’s get into it.

Rich: Let’s do it!

[intro music]

Paul: You know Rich, how you doing? We haven’t talked about—yu know, we don’t banter on the podcast much anymore because it’s all, everything’s so, like, “AI, AI. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

Rich: AI, AI, yeah.

Paul: How’s the family?

Rich: Family’s good. We should move to a couch and just meander.

Paul: We’ve talked about it.

Rich: In conversation for four hours. We’d have three million listeners.

Paul: We had this conversation last week. You weren’t there. That we could go into the other room, sit on a couch.

Rich: We should do that.

Paul: With these—now we got the mic stands. We can do it.

Rich: You’ll triple listenership if we just sit on a couch and talk about how a certain burrito I just ate isn’t sitting well with me.

Paul: I gotta tell you, man, here’s the problem. I like being behind a desk. I don’t want to be all out there. You gotta tuck in your shirt.

Rich: You’re kind of laid out.

Paul: You gotta figure out what pants you’re gonna be wearing.

Rich: You’re not wearing pants right now.

Paul: No, I’m not. That’s great. It’s part of the relationship. It’s part of what makes this company work so well.

Rich: Speaking of not wearing pants, I want to talk about consultants.

Paul: Oof. Boy, that’s the last thing you want. If consultants show up not wearing a lot of pants? Just blazers? Get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Yeah, it means a reorg is coming. [laughter] You can tell. So no, I’m going to give you something that you say a lot.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: You like to look at me sometimes—sometimes in bed, you turn your head and you go, [whispers] “The billable hour is dead.”

Rich: I do say that.

Paul: You say that to your wife, you say that to everybody. You pull people aside on the train and you go, [shouting] “The billable hour is dead!”

Rich: It doesn’t land as a threat, for some reason, for most people. They just sort of call the authorities and say, “Go.”

Paul: Okay, so this is one of your things. We’ve put it on slides, we’ve said it on the podcast, but we’ve never really broken down what that means. And what we’re really talking about is the consulting industry. Not that, like, we’re not talking about your plumber.

Rich: Yeah. And look, everyone’s heard of consultants, and they’ve heard of the big consulting firms.

Paul: A lot of people don’t know what this is.

Rich: They don’t know what consultants are. Right? I mean, consultants are people that sort of show up.

Paul: The classic line is it’s someone who takes your watch to tell you the time.

Rich: I mean, that makes sense.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. So—

Paul: So we’re talking about big companies, like, if you see an ad for a company but you have no idea what it does?

Rich: That means they’re huge.

Paul: And it’s not Palantir.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Then it’s a consulting firm. PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKinsey, Accenture.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Deloitte, Booz Allen, Strategy&—I think they got bought by Pricewaterhouse. Anyway, there’s a lot of them. There’s big ones, there’s little ones. What do they do all day?

Rich: Well, I mean, let’s take a step back and say, well, why would a consultant show up?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Is a good place to start. And the truth is, as companies get big, or as companies hit a rough patch, and that rough patch could be a competitor blindsiding them, it could be their sales are starting to decline, and they can’t seem to get new customers, and whatnot.

What does everyone do? In life? You look for advice. You call people and you ask for help. Now, sometimes you may know someone, you may know a friend who you went to college with, that is an executive elsewhere, and say, “Look, man, I’m in a bind.”

Paul: And in this moment, because what you’ve said, when you hire consultants, you have said without saying the words, to your entire team, “You are inadequate. And I need to get someone who wears nicer clothing, drinks better wine, and has a better degree.”

Rich: Yes. Yes. Yeah, I mean, why are they there? They are there because you’re in a bind. Or you’ve decided you want to be a little ambitious. It’s not always born out of problems, by the way.

Paul: You’re missing one of the big chunks, which is compliance.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: An enormous amount of that industry, so if you’re like, “What the hell is PricewaterhouseCoopers?” When you are a large company, especially a public company, you have to be evaluated for compliance with an enormous range of laws, taxation, all the stuff.

Rich: That can come out of the box with a good consulting firm, right?

Paul: Especially when you’re public. And so then they come in and they implement a lot of software that helps you stay compliant. When you’re a public company, like, stuff like your GitHub commits in a technology org might actually be understood to be relevant to your value. Right?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So now you have to, like, justify all that, put it into the system, and then PricewaterhouseCoopers at the end of the year, the fiscal year, goes, “Good job, you did not break any laws.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And that is millions of dollars for really big companies.

Rich: And that’s one category.

Paul: That’s one. So that is sort of like, nobody cares about that, right? They’re just like, okay, when we talk about consultants being kind of annoying, that’s just like you got to bring in outside people. Just like you need a lawyer to defend you in court instead of you defending yourself. You can’t analyze your own value in the stock market. You have to have somebody vet it.

Rich: Yeah. And in some cases it doesn’t make sense to have those people in-house. Like, there’s so many categories of this. Like, if you’ve decided, okay, it’s time to rebrand.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: There could be a six-month exploratory journey that leads to designers putting up options and doing surveys and polls to see which colors matter to your customers. You can spend millions of dollars changing the label of a shampoo bottle.

Paul: And you shouldn’t do it in-house because you’re only doing it once every few years.

Rich: There’s that.

Paul: You know, one of the best—everyone is very cynical out in the world today. And Google has a lot of challenges as an organization. But there was a day when Google rebranded, they just changed their font.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: They did all sorts of stuff. It was the best-executed thing I ever saw in my life. Like, all the buildings, all the websites. Everything—snap.

Rich: Like, over a weekend.

Paul: Yeah. And it’s like a lot of physical plan—it’s a lot of products, and they rolled this bad boy out, and it really worked well. So there’s a lot of craft involved. You know, often when you work with a branding agency, that’s what they’re good at. They’re like—

Rich: Execution.

Paul: You know, Pentagram, one of the legendary design firms.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You don’t just go to them for a logo. Everybody’s like, “Oh, why would you… [incoherent whining] Draw it on a napkin.” They also help you publish a magazine and they make sure that the magazine looks good in-house.

Rich: All the applied uses.

Paul: Your annual reports. Your website, your, you know, the logo on your checks, whatever, if you’re a bank.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So it’s this big sort of holistic way of looking at the world.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And that is what consulting supposed to be able to do. Not just do the thing, but get the whole process right, and do better than you could if you want.

Rich: Like, a lot of times they pair up with firm. Like we could, we could go down any one of these rabbit holes. But there are many flavors of consulting. Marketing consultants, strategic consultants, technology consultants, tax consultants, legal—it just goes on and on.

Paul: All right. So the billable hour is dead. Is Pentagram’s billable hour dead?

Rich: Okay, let’s back up for a second and talk about how consultants make money. I see the consulting world in two categories.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Consultants that tell you what you should go do.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: What is often called the management consultant. It’s the best consultant because they tell you what you should go do, they charge you a lot of money.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And then they don’t care if you go do it or not.

Paul: Aw, I mean, that’s—so this was a really hard thing for me to learn. And this is going to come back to what you’re talking about, which is building, I see building something as the only way to prove that you’ve really thought it all the way through.

Rich: No, no, no, no, no, my friend.

Paul: Yeah, and I, when I started to get further along in my career and I would work with more and more consultants, they’re like, “Why would you ever build anything? You seem like a smart enough young man. You should never build or do anything. You should think your thoughts, deliver your thoughts, and run as fast as you can. Because in execution lies all risk.”

Rich: There’s a saying in consulting. The shorter the deck, the bigger the bill.

Paul: Yeah, there you go.

Rich: Say your piece, explain rationale, tell them what they should go do, and then let someone else go do it. Now look, some firms are so big, they will execute as well. And if you win over a client, they’re like, “Look, you’re the best bet here. You told me exactly what to do. I believe you. Can you please do it for me?”

So that leads me to the second category. There are consultants that tell you what you should go do. Management consultants. Sometimes they’re called strategic consultants. And then there are consultants that’ll do the thing, that’ll do it for you.

Paul: Which often involves firing a lot of people.

Rich: Firing a lot of people, building a lot of software, managing a marketing campaign, handling a merger and acquisition. There is, “You should go buy this company. We think this is a good target for you, and it’s strategic.” And then there is, “You’ve decided to buy it. You need lawyers and accountants and bankers to take you through the process.”

Paul: This is—so, for example, the, the classic book on M&A, which I think is called, like, M&A. I can’t remember.

Rich: Good name.

Paul: Yeah. Was written by McKinsey consultants.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Like they’re, they’re seen as like these apex—so I am a mining company.

Rich: Totally.

Paul: And I need to get into bauxite.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I call McKinsey and they will see it, they’ll be like, “Oh my God, these guys have like 25 Caterpillar earth movers.”

Rich: They’ll also, by the way, look at your own resources and your own capabilities and say, “We’ve done an analysis and it’s actually better for you to build it yourself than to buy something else.” Back to the two categories. The ones that tell you what you should go do.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And the ones that do stuff for you.

Paul: Okay. Which billable hour is dead, then?

Rich: The ones that should tell you what you should go do are so grounded in personal connection and relationship. They’re so relationship-driven.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: That they don’t even think in billable hours. They think in these sort of one-row invoices. [laughing]

Paul: I mean, the horrible thing, I mean, to be frank, that’s you and me—

Rich: “You can’t price my hour. I’m gonna save your company.”

Paul: That was you and me at our last agency.

Rich: Yeah. We never built for ourselves.

Paul: No. And they would come to us and they would—I did once, early days. $6,000.

Rich: You gotta make a living.

Paul: No, I built like a stock-tracking tool.

Rich: That was very nice.

Paul: You literally said to me, like, “Why don’t you make some money for us?” It was when I was landing Time Inc.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I was like, all right, “I’ll go over here and do this for six grand,” just to kind of prove—and then all the engineers are like, “Why are you touching code?”

Rich: “Why are you here? Go away.”

Paul: Yeah. Good times.

Rich: So that isn’t a billable hour. That person is often a loss-leader. They are there so that waves of other people can come in.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, this is what’s tricky. Sometimes you’re in a—if you’re, like, a younger employee and you’re like, “I don’t know what that person does all day. They seem useless.” That might be a really useless person who’s actually dead weight on the organization or the number-one rainmaker who brings everybody’s jobs in.

Rich: For those that know about the consulting model, partners, their job, mainly, is to bring business in. That is their main job. Like, there are other partners that give expertise on tax issues and whatnot. But most partners, that’s their job. Those people are going to be fine. Why? Because you could have the slickest, coolest, most elegant AI prompt in the world. But you cannot replace relationships and expertise and trusted expertise that is brought in. That is just life. That’s humans actually relying on humans. It’s something very fundamental.

Paul: Well, let’s also be clear. That is one relationship, and that relationship tends to represent at least millions, often tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in change to your organization.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And there is a human need to look into somebody’s eyes and go, “Do you think we should buy them? Do you think we should close down this part of the company?” And for $100,000 or $200,000, you’re paying for those eyes. You’re paying for eye contact. Why would you ever spend $20 bucks a month and delegate that?

Rich: You’re assuming that they have an idea of what they should do and they’re looking for validation. Very often they’re saying, “Tell me what to do.”

Paul: Okay.

Rich: “I was just at Goldman Sachs and now I’m here at Wellington, so I’m going to tell you what to do.”

Paul: So you’re saying that the most abstract, relationship-driven part, where they’re giving you guidance as to your next step—

Rich: The apex consultant is very assertive.

Paul: Okay. And they’re gonna stay, they’re safe.

Rich: Yeah, absolutely.

Paul: No way anybody’s gonna be like, “Hey ChatGPT, should I buy—”

Rich: There’s probably too many of them anyway.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And some of them have done terrible.

Paul: [whispers] Oh God, yes.

Rich: But, yeah.

Paul: They’re so exhausting. I mean, I should be more charitable because I’m of consulting, but my God, they’re the most smuggest people.

Rich: Except you. And me.

Paul: Well, no, we’re actually—because we built.

Rich: There is a real arrogance, also—

Paul: [shouting] Because they don’t build! They can’t do anything! They only have like, “I have seven PhDs—”

Rich: It’s a lot of logic and counterfactual debating.

Paul: It’s those profiles on the website with the white background.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: None of them can ever be photographed in a background. It’s just people silhouetted in suits.

Rich: Look, man, it’s very important to not devalue your perceived value by doing the work. It’s actually dangerous.

Paul: It’s a real class thing too, right?

Rich: 100%.

Paul: Like, “I don’t cook my own food. Are you kidding?”

Rich: When I say the billable hour is dead—

Paul: They go to Davos, too Little Davos, little weasels in Davos, skiing—

Rich: I’m sensing some real anger here.

Paul: It’s just exhausting. Like, it’s just an exhausting industry. And it’s honestly, it’s like, could they just read a book? Not my friends in consulting. They’re great. I love them.

Rich: Nor the partners we’re seeking to have as part of Aboard’s ecosystem.

Paul: We’d love to work them.

Rich: We think those are great.

Paul: Because they’re so focused on execution. But back to you, Rich. What’s that first kind of consultant?

Rich: The management consultant.

Paul: [loud shivering noise] Those are the ones who do nothing, but definitely show up a lot.

Rich: They tell you what you should do.

Paul: Okay, so now there’s another kind of consultant.

Rich: I’m going to put that person in a plot line.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: The management consultant’s final sort of recommendations pitch to the board of some Midwest—

Paul: Mmm, yeah, yeah.

Rich: Bank in the Midwest goes incredibly well. And you know how you know it’s gone incredibly well? They turn back to you and they say, “Can you do it?”

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: “You told us what to do, but I don’t think we can do it. Can you do it?”

Paul: This is always—the ultimate consulting move too, is sort of like…

Rich: Yeah

Paul: “Well, I’m not really here to sell that work.”

Rich: The moment they say, “Can you do it?” That management consultant somehow becomes translucent and disappears.

Paul: [whooshing noise]

Rich: He’s gone. He’s done. He’s gone.

Paul: Up in a puff of smoke, yeah.

Rich: And then 28-year-olds show up.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Lots of them!

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Lots of and lots of them.

Paul: Backed by enormous outsourced teams.

Rich: Enor—armies of people.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Show up to execute on this thing. And I’ve seen it time and time again. Those people’s billable hour, those people have to produce—

Paul: [laughing] People don’t understand too like, okay, we have a big strategy. We’re going to implement it. Here’s the plan. And you said: The dude just vanished. And it’s a dude, a lot of the time. He just vanished. He is never—

Rich: He morphs into a thousand hummingbirds which fly away.

Paul: You will never, like, his—he just switched to a burner phone. [laughter]

Rich: He’s gone.

Paul: Because six months later you’re gonna be like, “This mobile app is never rolling out.” And you won’t even, He’ll be like, “I’m sorry, I don’t exist anymore.” [whooshing noise]

Rich: [laughing] Yeah. He’s gone. He’s gone.Those people, the armies of people who execute on the plan that boss man, the management consultant told you to do? Their billable hour is truly under threat. Because a lot of what they do is produce artifacts, whether it be documents or product requirements or decks or presentations or budgets and all sorts of things. This is where AI is, like, is truly additive and is actually a true accelerant for those artifacts that they produce.

Paul: Let me bring it back to a few things that AI is really good at. Bureaucracy.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And what’s happened is it spidered the whole web, it’s pulled in all these documents, and so many documents and so many things on Earth are actually about how to comply with an ISO code or how to get your mortgage structured in a certain way or how to—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: How to do mergers and acquisitions. And so it’s good, if you’re like, “I need to make a deck so that each division of this company can be aware of what we’re doing about ISO-9001 quality management.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It’s really good and it can really help you because it’s, nobody wants to do that work and it’s much faster. Then you don’t go away with your team for a week to make those decks and help those people and coach them. The artifact just can be assumed to exist.

Rich: Yes. And in fact those artifacts are important, because if you get into the psychology of the client, heft of output is very comforting.

Paul: They do like a big deck.

Rich: It’s very—not just a big deck. A folder. We are going to create a data room. This is a thing. There’s services out there.

Paul: Oh, data rooms—

Rich: Data rooms.

Paul: If you want to know if you’re about to get fleeced?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The word “data room” is a tell.

Rich: Yes. And there are services out there that effectively are glorified file folders.

Paul: They really are. [laughter]

Rich: [overlapping] It’s not much more to it than that—

Paul: [overlapping] If you take Dropbox—

Rich: They’re very expensive.

Paul: Take Dropbox and put a Windows XP interface on it, on the web?

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And then charge, like, $10,000 a doc.

Rich: Put a lot of, like, shields and keys to show security.

Paul: That is an absolute—it is no more secure than Google Drive.

Rich: What’s interesting about data rooms is they’re transient.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They’re supposed to disintegrate after a certain point, whether it be at the end of a deal or whatnot. And they’re very serious. So all that stuff that has to get produced so you can bill those out. By the way, the currency for execution consulting is the billable hour. I have 18 people times 70 hours a week. And then at the end of the month we’re going to do some math and we’re going to bill the living shit out of it.

Paul: Right. So it’s, we are supposed to be shipping software, but it’s a big deal and we have to get everybody on board, and it’s going to take 18 months. We are supposed to be getting everybody compliant now that we went public with how we use NetSuite to fill out the form.

Rich: Yes. Yes.

Paul: Sometimes they’re delivering a thing at the end, but the thing is often incidental to a process change inside the organization, that requires a lot of PowerPoints and conversations.

Rich: It’s teams of people.

Paul: Yeah. They’re not supposed to be completely off—you know, when we were an agency, we were often kind of off to the side, but this is more like, we came and we live with you, and we’re going to help your whole company transform, driving the strategy that the person who disappeared set in place.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And the way we do that is by giving you decks and documents and training seminars and tools, and eventually shipping some software and getting your feedback and so on.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay. All right, here’s where we are. And this goal of this part is never to leave.

Rich: It’s billable hours.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: That’s your goal. Now let’s have an awkward exchange. [laughter] Ready?

Paul: This will be unusual.

Rich: Hey, what’s up, Paul?

Paul: Oh… Sciatica?

Rich: Really happy with this team here. We got them rows of desks, we’ve got 44 people here.

Paul: Wait, who are you?

Rich: By the way— [laughing] I’m one of your clients.

Paul: Oh, you’re one of my clients. Oh, okay. Okay.

Rich: So Janice is a gem.

Paul: Well, who am I?

Rich: I get a summary report every day.

Paul: Who am I?

Rich: You told me you just got promoted to senior partner at Consulting Co. Consulting.

Paul: Deloitte-sey.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. Okay.

Rich: Congrats, by the way.

Paul: Hey, thanks.

Rich: Yeah. That’s the watch they gave you?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Very nice. Very nice.

Paul: It’s an Apple Watch. I can go paddleboarding. It’s cool.

Rich: [laughter] Okay. Question, though.

Paul: Oh, okay?

Rich: Paul, I’m a reader. I read stuff. I’ve watched videos once in a while.

Paul: I literally flashed into the role because I’ve been in the role, and I’m just like—

Rich: Here it comes.

Paul: I’m gonna have to make something up now.

Rich: Just, you know, the bills are coming in.

Paul: Mmm!

Rich: They’re big. I know, I know we signed up for it, but.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I’m see an AI producing research and decks and whatnot. And I know you got, like, you got a dozen people just on research, and I know they’re combing through stuff, but, God, these tools are good. And I feel like I’m still paying the same bill. Shouldn’t they be working faster? And can you, would you mind, like, why am I not seeing that efficiency and that cost savings trickle back to me, Paul?

Paul: [sighs] Well, this is usually when I would just be silent for a minute because I never had a good answer for anything—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because I’m not good in the moment.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But let me take a breath, and I’m going to say what they should say, and then you’re going to tell me what they actually say.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yes. Things are changing very rapidly.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we are keeping really close on it. Obviously we still exist as a business. I just want to give you a heads up that things are moving, not quite moving as fast as you might think from looking online, there’s a lot to learn and there’s actually a lot of risk. So we’re figuring out how to manage it.

But the reality is, I think we’ll be able to accelerate and move things up in the roadmap, and I think we’ll be able to bring your people into this world as well. And I think the upshot of this is you’re going to need it. It’s going to take six months longer than you want, but by the end of this, everyone’s going to be more empowered and you’re going to have your stuff, at least on time, if not sooner. And I think that that’s what’s so powerful and great about these tools.

Rich: Okay, so everyone, if you’re in consulting, that was a world-class answer. That was good. You obfuscated. You created a little bit of confusion. You know I can’t fire you.

Paul: That was me trying my best to be honest and transparent.

Rich: It’s very good. Here’s what half the clients would say.

Paul: [laughing] Oh no.

Rich: And I kid you not. Paul, they’re screaming at me. I want to pay 20% less. Please?

Paul: ………okay. [laughter]

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: No, because—

Rich: Ultimately—

Paul: I will negotiate, but it will eventually be, like, 18.5% less.

Rich: Let’s top all this off with a reality of how politics works amongst humans. All that person needs to do is go back to their boss, maybe it’s the CEO, and tell them, “I got 20% off.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That’s all they need. You got to give them that little win. You’ll push back and say, “I can’t do 20. I’ll keep the whole team here. I’m gonna give you 10% discount.”

Paul: Well, I actually, I do have, I have leverage. So I can be like, “Well, 20% means we’re gonna have to cut the scope or we’re gonna have to…”

Rich: No, no, no. I wanna pay less. You have amazing robots now helping you. I wanna pay. less, Paul. Please?

Paul: Yeah, no, no.

Rich: And then it devolves, and then we get a drink, and then I will turn to you and say this: Just give me something, man. I got the guy tomorrow morning—

Paul: I will give you something. And I will also give you a really nice bottle of whiskey, and maybe, like, a bobblehead doll of your kid’s favorite, like…

Rich: [laughing] I thought you’re gonna say your kid. Which would have been disturbing.

Paul: No, no, like, you know, yeah, like, Travis Kelce, or just like, it’s just, like, that’s—

Rich: We turn this into a skit. But I kid you not. This is a very realistic exchange that can happen.

Paul: So you, so what you’re saying is, like, look, billable hour is dead. It’s gonna die in percentages?

Rich: No, the billable hour is dead is kind of dramatic, mainly because humans slow everything. They slow death down. We can mitigate death. Humans are good at that. We can delay it. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But eventually, you know the scene in Bergman’s movie, The Seventh Seal, wwhere he just keeps, he doesn’t want to lose the chess match?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And death, he’s playing with death.

Paul: Yes, I watched it recently. It’s. So—we’re also in the same building as the Criterion Collection. Just fun fact.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it’s such a good movie.

Rich: He knocks over the chess pieces every time.

Paul: Yeah!

Rich: Hoping he doesn’t—and Death remembers where they always are. Right?

Paul: No, no, it’s just they can’t, they can’t win.

Rich: You can’t win.

Paul: You get strawberries. You get, you try to live your life a little bit. But no.

Rich: Let’s give advice—the hell with the consultants. We won’t give them advice. They’ll know how to take care of themselves. That’s all they do all day, is survive. Let’s give advice to the client.

Paul: Mmm.

Rich: Think about the value you’re trying to get out of these consultants and price that value, because you’ve been essentially working with their currency, which is the billable hour. And the truth is, you can get your value cheaper. Now, the tools are real.

Paul: Well, I’m going to make this even real—I’m going to make this real simple. There is an incredible tendency when you work with consultants because there’s so much risk and they’re expensive. Like, bill—it’s not that consultants that are expensive. It’s the overall project, especially the execution part.

Rich: You can’t just shut it down.

Paul: You can’t just shut it down. And there is an incredible tendency, because they’re smart and they’re savvy, it’s what they do, to get you to work for them. They get your people to work for them, and essentially they’re delegating everything.

Rich: There’s a savviness to it all.

Paul: Ah, they start delegating to you. You have to now, and this is the hard part. You want to get that bargain.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You have to assert that they work for you. But easiest way to do that, because it is incontrovertible, is go make their assets and show them to them. That’s what I would do.

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: I’d be, like, “You know, I actually plugged this into ChatGPT.” And not—

Rich: Oh! Use AI, and say, “Hey, this isn’t bad.”

Paul: “I was wondering, maybe we should just get the team to use this instead to make the decks for the ISO-9001 transformation. Because this is going to go a lot faster and I want to train everybody on how to use this.”

Rich: I mean, that’s the ultimate punch in the mouth.

Paul: Well, no, no. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t turn that into pricing right away. I would just be like, what do you think?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Get them to give some feedback on it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s really good. Let’s update our prompts. And then I would go, “Now, obviously, obviously, you guys aren’t going to be building this. We’re going to let ChatGPT do it. So can we get—”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I wouldn’t go 20%. What I would do is, “I think we can move this part of the schedule, we can really accelerate here.”

Rich: Yeah, just get it to me faster.

Paul: Which is equal to 20%.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Then all they can do is sit there and wiggle in their chair.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because you just spit out 30 PowerPoints that they didn’t do.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: And they’re in your hand. So what are they going to do? They’re going to say, “Oh, well, we got to make them.” I’m like, “Well, aren’t you going to use ChatGPT?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because you said you were accelerating everything with AI and then suddenly they’re not the smartest person in the room.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that’s what I would love to do. That’d be fun. You know who would love to do that more than anyone else, though? You. You would love to take money out of it. [laughter]

Rich: Yeah. I mean, this sounds all, this all sounds very anti-consulting. We are former consultants. A lot of Aboard is based on our—

Paul: You love punishing consultants.

Rich: I do.

Paul: Yeah. It’s fun because they just, they come in, they say, [insulting voice], “Oh, look at you with your little software company.”

Rich: Let’s not pick a team here. If you’re a consultant or you’re a partner at a consulting firm and whatnot, these tools are incredibly powerful.

Paul: I don’t know. If they want to pick a team, they should pick Aboard. Get in touch. We’ll help you accelerate your software development.

Rich: We’ll get to the pitch in a second.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, no, but you guys should pick a team. I’m tired of me having to pick a team.

Rich: [laughing] Fine.

Paul: [shouting] You pick a team! This stuff is coming for you! It’s coming for you!

Rich: All right. Aboard is born out of many years of consulting.

Paul: [weary whisper] Oh, boy, is it.

Rich: We are seeing magic happen inside our walls and—

Paul: It’s a little weird lately, dude, I gotta say. Like, I’ve been telling, “Oh, you know, it gets the first like 60% done,” and something, but it’s starting to happen.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Software consulting is incredibly expensive, and it’s incredibly time-consuming. We’ve built a platform that lets you accelerate the software-development life cycle so dramatically. We’d love to talk.

Paul: I’m going to say something straight-up. Software is now like creating a deck.

Rich: Oh, there we go. There we go.

Paul: Where if you’re seeing a PowerPoint—

Rich: CC: Marketing!

Paul: If you’re seeing a PowerPoint instead of a deployed application?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: You should question everything about your engagement.

Rich: Yeah, agreed.

Paul: Not to your future spouse. That is a really different experience.

Rich: That’s different. Yes.

Paul: They shouldn’t be building software for you, for the most part.

Rich: We’re starting to build stuff for people, Paul. Get in touch. Check us out at aboard.com. It is a tool, it’s not a toy. We are aiming for more complicated software that you want to put in your organization.

Paul: I mean, let’s be frank. We’re starting to take on work that consulting firms would love to get.

Rich: Yes. At a fraction of the cost.

Paul: Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.

Rich: Hit us up at aboard.com. Reach out if you’re a consultant and need a shoulder to cry on. Hello@aboard.com.

Paul: Or just log into ChatGPT.

Rich: I think consultants are going to do fine. There’s going to be something real different in the future. And off we go.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think that—

Rich: We’ll give them a new name. Don’t worry.

Paul: There’s more change coming than that part of the world is fully ready for. I do believe that.

Rich: I agree. Fun chat, Paul. It’s cool to roleplay.

Paul: Yes, yes. I don’t even want to touch that. If you need us, hello@aboard.com, we love you and we’ll talk to you real soon.

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

[outro music]