Hélène Laffitte believes in the famous saying by Warren Buffett that “Price is what you pay, Value is what you get.” The CEO and Co-founder of Consulting Quest feels that the concept of “value,” its inherent wisdom is not adequately embraced, especially when it comes to the buying of consulting services. “The consulting landscape today has an abundance of diverse offerings and innovative players making it possible for any business to create value through consulting but also overcrowds the market and makes it difficult and time-consuming to locate the right one,” says Hélène.
Hélène founded Consulting Quest because she had seen too many businesses hiring the wrong consultant for the job who were too expensive. “Hence it is my hope and urge to help all businesses, regardless of the size and stage of development,” adds the steadfast leader. For Hélène, “The idea, at first, was to provide disruptive solutions for both clients and providers in a way not currently available in the consulting space.” She adds, “I combined my own experiences along with my co-founder’s to shape the concept of Consulting Quest, a disruptive start-up that leverages big data to improve the performance for both clients and consultants.”
" We play the role of the disruptor giving client-side players the tools to build a strategic approach for buying Consulting. "
She realized that companies needed to be empowered with the right information, at the right time and in the right way to enable their best decisions and actions. “This disrupts the existing sourcing strategies by removing reliance upon the perception of the biggest players’, which in turn depends on the power of their marketing budgets and not their performance or expertise,” explains Hélène. “We play the role of the disruptor giving client-side players the tools to build a strategic approach for buying Consulting.”
According to stats 52 percent of companies only involve procurement in the last stage of the process. As a result, the consulting spend is scattered across the different units of the company, and not managed as a category by itself.
For companies that work regularly with consulting firms, the consulting spend usually represents millions of dollars. And if they don’t manage those expenses properly, they might be missing out on many opportunities.
To launch the journey, regardless of how far they want to grow their consulting procurement capability, Consulting Quest helps them analyze their consulting spend and establish their baseline. The goal of the exercise is to provide them with structured data to understand the trends & patterns of their consulting spend. It helps companies capture quick gains, get the buy-in of their executives and embark on a self-funded journey.
The first step into creating more value through consulting is to spend money on the right priorities. Consulting Quest helps clients identify their priorities for consulting, in link with their overall strategy, and define the budget for consulting. The implementation of demand management allows them to keep the spend under control while allocating the consulting resources to accelerate their strategy. The second step is to improve their sourcing for consulting services. “The best consulting provider for one project is not necessarily the right one for the next project. We help clients define their needs, identify the right set of consultants and manage the RFP process,” explains Hélène. Last but not least, Consulting Quest helps clients improving the relationship with their consulting providers by building an appropriate measure of the performance.
For the road ahead, Consulting Quest wants to concentrate on growing their global footprint and putting the final touch on a series of publications about consulting sourcing. “We are also aiming at launching our Consulting RFP wizard website and finalizing our SaaS software for consulting category performance management,” adds Hélène.
Hélène Laffitte
CEO & Co-Founder
Consulting Quest provides companies create value through management consulting fot creating and helping communities of leaders, consultants and clients.