So, you’ve hired a business consultant. Now what? The immediate reaction most executives and business owners have when they engage I’M NOT MAD AT YOU Consulting is relief; just knowing that they have taken that important first step and enlisted experts who are energetically invested in company performance. When our consultants come in, we get right to work identifying obstacles to success, and develop a strategic vision with realistic goals. But it’s easy to get behind fresh new ideas and feel excited about the process before you set the plan in motion. Accountability is THE critical component toward achieving the goals set. Simply creating a goal and tactics aren’t enough- follow through and execution is how goals are met.

Where Are You in Your Journey?

Before you partner with I’M NOT MAD YOU Consulting, you’ll need to do some soul-searching. Knowing your personal answers to these questions is critical to the success of our engagement.

• Why do you need a consultant? Clients typically call us when they are at a crossroads or they feel stuck. Maybe they’re looking to streamline core systems, or rethink department structure, or grow their sales division. Regardless of the reason, any organization that wants a different result, needs to change its behavior. To continue the same actions and expect otherwise, is the very definition of insanity. We are giving you new tools, but you will ultimately be responsible for internalizing how they work, implementing them in your business model, and teaching others how to use them.

• Can you handle the bad news, as well as the good? We conduct Wheels Assessment Training (W.A.T.) interviews with individual employees to get to the root cause of company shortcomings. The information that comes out of those sessions is always revealing, but not always easy for company leadership to hear. It is important to remember that you didn’t call us in to tell you what you wanted to hear. You needed a neutral, third party to give you some straight talk. Our brutal honesty is our signature. If you cannot allow yourself or your company to be vulnerable, then the timing might not be right.

• Do you have the resources to invest in making your company better? Execution of the plan will take time. You’ll not only need the resource of time, but also a realistic budget, as well as a team that will defend new plans against pushback from nay-sayers within the company. You may need to divert time away from other projects to implement some of the bigger objectives I’M NOT MAD AT YOU recommends for your company.

Strategy Is Useless Without Accountability

Accountability requires a commitment to the actions taken for the benefit of a company as well as the ability to defend those actions when scrutinized. When decisions are made to further the objectives of the company, leaders must be accountable for seeing the strategy carried out. Failure of accountability is the number one reason that business plans fail. So why does this happen?

The unfortunate scenario plays out like this: Working with our client, we identify some clear goals, and create a strategy that aims to accomplish them. Then, we recommend a set of tactics for the company to implement in furtherance of the goals. For some reason beyond our control, the client ends up rejecting the tactics, does not execute against the plan, and fails to accomplish the goals. Accountability- out the window…

It takes follow-through of the tactics to test the soundness of a business strategy. Otherwise, you have nothing more than a hypothesis or a pipe dream. You have to trust the process in order for it to work. And our most successful clients make the decision to be accountable before the engagement even begins.

Your Success Is Our Success

We want you to succeed. After all, your success is our success, too. We accept full accountability for our work, and we expect you to do the same. Our partnership is based on honesty – that you’ll tell us when an aspect of the plan isn’t working for you, and on trust — that you’ll implement the solutions we’ve devised together. If you are ready to start on a new path, open your mind to new strategies and tactics, follow-through on the plan- then you are ready to call I’M NOT MAD AT YOU Consulting.