My Personal Consulting Story and How I Landed at Redapt

My name is Ben, and I’m a consultant. 

This may sound like the beginning of a support group meeting, but it’s not. It’s an attempt to redefine a term that has changed semantically—and caused me some professional confusion. 

Prior to the change, a consultant was an individual who advised an organization about their position in the marketplace, their direction, and their approach. This term was wholly owned by a select group of consulting companies.

After the change, which was a market phenomenon driven by companies procuring short-term contracts from any number of boutique firms, the term “consultant” included “staff-augmentation.” Unfortunately, many companies hired staff-aug providers to solve problems, and since those providers weren’t traditional consults, this often led to a failure to solve the problems. It also created resentment, organizational fatigue, and, sometimes, deeper challenges.

My career has coincided with this semantic change, and it has left me wondering where I fit in the marketplace. I was trained by the Big 5 consulting firms to provide “advisory services,” which is a set of functional skills. These services require the ability to understand an organizational challenge, build an action plan, and deliver results. I took these skills to a select group of boutique firms that I thought could deliver results—only to be disappointed.

Now I work at Redapt, where there is no confusion about what we do. We are traditional consultants, solving problems and delivering results. The reason that we get the biggest challenges from the biggest channel partners is because we continually focus on having the deepest technical bench with advisory services of the highest caliber.

This is why I’m excited to log in to work every day. I know I’m here to advise an organization about their position in the marketplace, their direction, and their approach. And I know I’m going to have a phenomenal team around me to help me understand a challenge, build an action plan, and deliver results.