A missed opportunity?

Days at the Source offices have their entertaining moments, like the morning we had an enquiry about roadside assistance.

Of course, the question was really about how big the market for consulting services in the roadside assistance sector is. Nevertheless the mistake did conjure up a splendid image of consulting firms hurtling around the country in bright yellow vans, drawing up on the hard shoulder with offers of help to stranded motorists. You can see it now in all its Dilbert glory: a group of sharp-suited youngsters gamely fiddling with the engine while the puncture goes unnoticed. Talk about reinventing the wheel.

But, wait a second, isn’t roadside assistance exactly the kind of thing consulting firms should be offering? This is surely the industry with the best proposition on the planet. What do consultants do? They fix things; indeed, they fix the nasty, difficult things that line managers can’t. Our clients aren’t cars, but broken-down organisations which need expert help. Corporate recovery and car recovery aren’t – or shouldn’t be – that far apart.

So why does the industry have such a negative reputation in the media? Grudging I can understand: no one wants their car to break down or to pay the cost of fixing it. But not disdain.

Imagine for a moment a roadside assistance company which has spent the last decade persuading you to buy a broader range of services to keep your car on the road. Some are preventative maintenance; some are ways to improve performance. Now, ten years on, you don’t know whether that’s been worth it. Yes, your car hasn’t broken down as much as your previous one did, but is that because of your contract with the roadside assistance company, or because the car was better made in the first place? Is it because you’re driving differently? There are so many variables that it’s impossible to isolate the impact your contract has had. You can’t rewind history to see if, without the contact, it would have been different, anymore than an organisation can gauge what its performance would have been had it not used consultants.

Putting the clock back for the roadside assistance company would be difficult too: its entire business model is now predicated on selling a wider range of services. However, it can’t expect its customers to buy on faith, especially when they have less money to spend. It has to prove their worth, however difficult that might be.

It also needs to demonstrate it can still rescue a stranded motorist – and that I think is the hub of the problem. With all its emphasis on added-value services, most of the employees in our roadside assistance company aren’t used to getting their hands dirty. Faced with a broken-down car, so few know how to fix it, that the credibility of the entire organisation is called into question. And so it is with consulting: we’ve built a generation of consultants who understand preventative maintenance, not roadside recovery. Now might be a good time to change that.