How Do You Stay Ahead of the Curve

Speaker A: Hi and welcome to the crackerjack Consulting podcast. I'm your host, David A. Fields, and there's something I know about you and your consulting firm. What I know is that you think you're pretty good at what you do. And I'd venture to say your consulting firm is good. You've developed useful approaches that help your clients. But how do you continue to innovate and develop outstanding solutions for more challenging issues so that your firm becomes increasingly valuable to your clients and you avoid ever becoming, uh, passe, let's say, or commoditized or obsolete? How do you stay ahead of the curve? Well, that's the topic I want to explore with this episode's guest, Charles Moro. He's the president and founder of Moro Usability Science. And they're a boutique consulting firm that addresses the complexity problem at the interface between people and, and technology. Which to me means what they do is they bridge the gap between technologists, scientists and engineers. And people love to create technology and users, the folks that actually have to make sense of a product or a service. So, Charles, welcome and thank you so much for joining the show.

Speaker B: Thank you very much, David. Thanks for the invitation, Charles.

Speaker A: Unlike, uh, many, uh, of the guests I've had on the show, you and I actually have not known each other for years and years. In fact, we met fairly recently by chance. We both happened to be vacationing in Charleston and we're staying at the same lovely boutique hotel and got to talking, uh, and I realized your insights, your experience would just be incredibly valuable for other leaders of boutique consulting firms. But since I actually don't know you in great depth, I would imagine most of our listeners are not aware of Moro Usability Science. Would you do like the 30 seconds version of the firm? You know, how long the firm's been around, how big is the firm, that sort of stuff.

Speaker B: Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to do that. Uh, the firm was founded in 1975 by myself, obviously. I've been active in, um, the consulting field for almost 45 years. I founded the firm initially in, uh, New York. We've been a New York consulting firm for the entire time. We have two offices, we have 12 full time employees. Relatively large base of consultants who work with us, specialists in other fields like artificial intelligence, medical modeling, physiological testing, those sorts of additional expertise areas.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: We've been continuously profitable since the day of our founding. Just a very, very brief history.

Speaker A: Yeah. Wow, that's impressive. You have 12 full timers and then a large base of consultants. Those are what we would call 1099 contractors. In addition, these specialists in AI and, and other stuff which went over my head, but it sounded very impressive.

Speaker B: Yeah, they're by and large, when, uh, you're in, in a research field like we're involved with, you have the need for contacts with leading academics. Especially because they have two resources that are incredibly important to the success of your firm long term. And that is they have extraordinary expertise in their own right. But they also have very bright graduate students.

Speaker A: There you go.

Speaker B: You know, we tap into that resource, uh, you know, when necessary. But all of our core research is executed by full time employees and all of our intellectual property is maintained and managed, um, entirely by our internal teams.

Speaker A: Got it. Okay, well good, so let's dig into that a little bit, especially this sort of core technology, because one of the things that impressed me about you, about your firm, look, you said you've been doing this for, you know, four decades, which is pretty darn impressive. Congratulations.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: And yet my sense is none of your clients would say, oh, yeah, well, they're kind of old fashioned. They do things the way it was done 30 years ago. It's more like you're still cutting edge, you're leading the curve on how to do the type of work you do. So first of all, is that a fair assessment?

Speaker B: Uh, yes, it is. And I think that's more than being particularly, uh, you know, insightful on my part. It's just a matter of, you know, Darwinian survival. If you're a small consulting firm, you have to have extraordinary expertise in order not to be marginalized by your clients. In our field, usability testing or human factors engineering research, there's many clients that we work for at the highest level. Apple, Meta, Amazon, Dyson, you know, all blue chip corporations. Ah, they have their own internal human factors engineering and usability engineers. So, you know, the question that as a small consulting firm you have to be aware of is, well, you know, why would they come to a firm like ours? And the reason is very simply that we maintain an absolute leadership position in terms of methodology and the ability to apply advanced, uh, methods that from a corporate point of view, they either don't have the time or the resources to develop. So we are told by our clients frequently that we are consistently on the leading edge of this type of research, but we do that because we have to survive.

Speaker A: Okay, I hear that you're doing MPGF to survive, but now we need to dig in because a lot of the folks listening would say a couple of things. One, what you just said is somewhat counterintuitive. I get the need to survive. But as a small firm, how do you have the resources to be on the leading edge? As opposed to Apple and Meta, you're talking about the best of the best in businesses that pride themselves on being cutting edge. And another argument would be, yeah, but the big guys, the McKinsey's of the world if you will, or Accenture or Deloitte or choose your big mega firm, they've got so many resources and they hire all the experts. How come they're not at the leading edge? So what is it that allows you, as a leading, a small firm to be ahead of the best of the best on the client side and the big guys on the consulting side?

Speaker B: Yeah, well that's a great question. And the answer very simply is that we are razor focused on one aspect of, of research and that is strictly usability performance. So if a large corporation like let's say Apple for example, which has hundreds of human factors engineers and usability specialists, they get siloed into specific product categories, the watch, the car, you know, the iPad, and they do not have the time or the resources through management structure and methodology internally, to constantly be looking at what are the latest methods that are coming out of academia or coming out of research labs that may not even be directly associated with usability testing per se. Like if you went out, you did a search, you know, would you come up with, for uh, example, a data integration platform from Imotions? If you looked at usability engineering, you wouldn't find that. But we keep our eyes out continually for all forms of psychophysical research methods that might apply to usability engineering types of problems. So for example, we have a proprietary methodology called 3D Spatial Tracking. And this allows us to attach a small sensor to a product, any product, and we can track ah, the user's manipulation of the product in 3D space at a sub millimeter level. So for example, if you just went into the usability testing research methodology space and look for that, you would never find it. We found that methodology from uh, neuroscience and brain surgery because that same little sensor is inserted into the human brain. And that's what surgeons use to ah, target very specifically areas of the human brain for surgery. We took that little sensor, we re engineered it, we wrote new software for it, and we now insert it into products that allows us to test products in terms of physical manipulation in a way that none of our clients can. And we know that that's a gating function for one of the reasons that they retain us in many other areas of research. We're looking at these methodologies that are out there that are not strictly identified with usability. They may be psychophysical, they may be psychological. And we pull all those together into a sort of kit or palette of, uh, methodologies that we choose from, depending on the type of problem that we have. So if, uh, for example, Amazon comes to us with a specific problem on a new product, we may use 3D spatial tracking, we may use force measurement, we may use microfacial expression. Those are like three very robust performance testing methodologies. And we'll put those together into a specialized kit. So as a small, specialized firm, we can create these highly focused pallets of two tools, whereas big corporations and internal teams cannot, because they're. They're product driven and we are methodology driven. Fundamental difference. Yep.

Speaker A: Okay, so I love that. And with any kind of consulting firm, your clients, whether they're product companies or not, their expertise hopefully is in their area of business, whereas your expertise is in what you do, whether it's human factors engineering or organizational design or leadership or, you know, you name it. Okay, so I've heard a few things here, and I need to dig in a little more. One was very clear, was focus. Part of the reason you're able to stay ahead is you've chosen a niche. You've chosen something to be the best in the world at.

Speaker B: Correct? Absolutely correct. Critical.

Speaker A: My past mentors have said this is the absolute key. You have to find something you can be best at. And actually, you don't need to be best in the world, but it's what you can be best at. I was trying to find the name, and it was escaping me, which is why I was stuttering Marshall Goldsmith. My friend Marshall Goldsmith said that what can you be best at? Okay, so I get that. That's focus. Second thing you said was we cast about. We look beyond our own narrow world for other technologies, approaches, tactics that we can borrow, that we can use and apply in our world.

Speaker B: Absolutely correct.

Speaker A: So that's pretty interesting. How so? If I'm right, if I'm running another kind of consulting firm. That sounds really neat, Charles, but how do you do that? How are you finding other approaches that you could apply in your world?

Speaker B: Great question. Well, there's two primary answers to that problem. First is, if you want to develop a consulting firm that embodies this type of thinking, you have to constantly be reading the research literature. Constantly. You know, my staff does that. I do that. We subscribe to at least 50 journals. I would say something like that. We have a very robust Twitter feed and LinkedIn feeds. We subscribe to all of the major psychological, uh, and psychophysical research databases.

Speaker A: And when you say you have a robust Twitter feed, meaning you're following tons of people who might be giving you information.

Speaker B: Exactly right. We just, we'll go in there and say, you know, for example, microfacial expression analysis, MFEA is a new research methodology. So there are about six researchers in the world who are leaders in that category right now. We follow all of them religiously. One thing that we do use extensively, strictly as a practical matter, is we use Google's alerts. Yeah, and we have hundreds of Google alerts set across all different categories of research. And so basically what we're doing is we're looking at either high level trends or we're looking at increasingly deeper levels of specific applied research. And also the other thing you find too is that let's say for example, we're interested in uh, measuring the force exerted by uh, patients as they utilize an auto injector, for example, to deliver a diabetes drug. That's a uh, particular problem that turns out to be a uh, complex problem to study. So we would say, okay, force measurement. How are we going to build a system around force measurement? So if you go out and you simply look on the web under the term force measurement, you get dozens of manufacturers with all kinds of force measurement technology and then gradually you just look through it until you get to the point where you say, okay, there's a sensor here, there's an analog to converter, a digital converter there, there's some software here and we, you know, frankly we just go buy the parts and we put it together and start to work through the problem. And we do a lot, a tremendous amount of bench testing, uh, before we ever apply these methods on our client projects. So yes, we're small, but uh, the type of employee that I hire is always one who's incredibly curious and has a history of seeking information beyond their own domain. That would, might even be the most important, you know, screening criteria for employees.

Speaker A: Okay, we're going to come back to that. Okay, because. So I want to come back to the employee thing because that's really important. I still have some questions though. You're doing all of this researching, you're looking, you've got just information flooding in 50 journals of, you know, some of those, since they're academic journals, maybe they're only quarterlies, but you know, probably some of them are monthlies, you know, filled with Content, Um, how do you sort through all of this information? How do you find the wheat and quickly discard the chaff? Yeah, and I have two more questions, so I'll give you all three and we'll come back hopefully. How do you avoid constantly becoming distracted? We have an article which by the time people listen to this, uh, will probably have been published and not published now, about that whole topic of not allowing yourself to constantly get distracted by the next new shiny object. So how do you stop yourself from constantly getting distracted if you're getting this feed. And then my third question, and then we'll go back, is if you're constantly developing something new, how do you actually become expert at it? How do you become effective at it and efficient at it so that you're valuable for clients? Okay, so those are my three questions. Now we can go back. How do you sort through it?

Speaker B: So great questions. So sorting through it. First of all, uh, our subscription to publications is not physical ever. It's always electronic.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And the key there, within each major publication, let's say Journal of Neuroscience or Nature, for example, you can, most, uh, folks don't realize this unless you're a scientist. You can go into each of these sites and you can set up alerts. And so for example, another area of research that we're very much involved in is the evaluation of the appearance design of products and how they impact purchase decisions. So we have formal scientific method for assessing the visual design of, uh, products and so called neuro aesthetics. So we would go into Nature, for example, the publication Nature, and we would set an alert for neuro aesthetics. So only when a paper comes up that's in neuro aesthetics will we get an alert on that. So, uh, by the time you've spent a couple of years, several years doing this, you end up with this massive funnel that you've customized on your own. And this is probably one of the most important things that a consulting firm can do is optimize their information funnel. And if you do that properly, you won't get overwhelmed. Now a more interesting question, which you didn't ask, but I, um, know you're thinking about knowing you, is how do you find those things that are outside that domain, you know?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Because those actually can be the most important. And that simply is just broad keeping your ears and eyes open all the time for things that are coming in through general media, New York Times, whatever. You know, you see something that's particular interest and you dive for it, or you send a staff member to go look for it.

Speaker A: Can I mention something we do? I'd be interested in your feedback.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: Um, and whether this fits the model or doesn't fit the model. So as a firm, every week when we have our team meeting, there's a part of it where we talk about our takeaways and learnings from the week. And because we use a Miro board, we literally paste it up there and we discuss it. And part of the idea is to live the value of being a learning organization. And so if everybody's constantly thinking, well, we're going to be talking about our learnings, they're more likely to say, well, I saw something and I think it might apply to us. Does that approach fit with what you're saying? Is it complimentary? Do you do something similar or is that off the wall?

Speaker B: No, I think that's, uh, that's totally complementary and, you know, is a great, uh, you know, way to proceed. In fact, we've, we've done that off and on for, you know, three or four decades. Uh, currently my business runs entirely virtually, uh, except for our testing labs, which are in New York. And we probably get together as a team maybe once a month and we'll do something like you described there, which is sort of a free information exchange. But we have another methodology that, that I developed, which is. Which I've found is very helpful. It sounds, it sounds ridiculous, but it's really simple.

Speaker A: You couldn't have m me, uh, closer to the edge of my seat?

Speaker B: Okay, well, it's not that profound, but it's interesting. So let's say that an article comes across my desk in the Journal of Neuroscience and relates to Neuro aesthetics. And I think it's very interesting. So I'll scan it and I'll find the original article very easy to do, and then I'll copy the link and I'll put the link in the subject line of an email. And we have a code word, and it's four letters, prtz, all caps. We put that in front of the link and then I send that to my entire staff and that link goes out. And one member of my staff is responsible for taking any article that I have marked as prtz in the subject line. They put it into our Zotero database. We have a database. So they just copy it and they paste it in, in the proper category. But all the rest of the staff get. Gets this, this email and they'll click on it and they'll look at it and say, ah, uh, Charles, it's not, I don't think it's that interesting. Or somebody will say, and you said, right.

Speaker A: And you're including the link to the article so they can all look and go, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, it's a short. It's a shortcut, but it's got it. It's a way of using your email system as a, As a coding methodology for your information database. Just put those four letters in the beginning of your, of your email, uh, subject line, separate it from the, from the link itself, and then you can search your entire email system for information that you've gathered, you know, over the last. Well, I haven't gone back 20 years, so, um, but it does another thing. It alerts the other staff to, okay, this is something Charles thinks is really interesting. And most important, it alerts that one member of my staff who puts everything into the database to categorize it and put it in the database.

Speaker A: Got it. Okay, so. And, um, just because I can't imagine someone won't ask. PRTZ stands for. For anything.

Speaker B: It stands for. I don't remember what it stands for.

Speaker A: That's great.

Speaker B: I made it up.

Speaker A: It's even better. It's a legacy acronym. We don't know what it means anymore, but we could still, we can still hang on to the usefulness of it.

Speaker B: I can guarantee you that. I can look that up, but it wouldn't be impressive. But what makes it work is PRTZ is nothing you'll ever search for in your email system except. Except that content.

Speaker A: Exactly. This is reminding me a little bit of the Zettelkasten approach to storing information. And I don't know if you're familiar with Zettelkasten or not.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, fundamentally I'm familiar with. Yeah, not in a detailed way.

Speaker A: You know, this idea of sort of collecting information from a lot of different places, encoding in a way and not worrying about how it's going to fit together yet, but letting the information accumulate and almost speak to you on its own. So rather than going in, and that sounds like a little bit, what you're doing is you're letting, you're letting the wider world tell you, um, is there a lot of research in a certain area or something coming, uh, mature enough that we could use it? Is that fair or not fair?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And you know, you and I were talking briefly before we started, uh, about tools. There's one tool that I would recommend to any other consulting firm, large or small, and that's, uh, a shareware information storage database online. It's called Zotero. Z O T E R O And it's used by all leading academic institutions. Mit, Stanford, Harvard. Uh, it's the way that academics store their citations and their reference articles. It's quite inexpensive. Few hundred dollars a year. Um, but we have probably 10,000 articles in our Zotero database. And you can search through that database for almost anything you can imagine, and you can store anything in it you like. If you happen to be a graphic design firm, you could take a screenshot of something and you could put it into Zotero, and you could save everything visually. So it's a wonderful tool. Most, you know, smaller firms are not. Not aware of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I've heard of Zotero, but I don't know of any of my clients that are using it at the moment. That's fascinating. Okay, you know, so how do you sort through this? How do you find the stuff you want? Part of it is you're. You're staying open to things, but you're also setting up alerts. So there's a little bit of. Of this filter, as you said, is super important, which also sounds like a little bit of the answer to question number two, which is, how do you not constantly get distracted? I'm not completely there on that answer because it sounds like you're distracting your staff, constantly saying, ooh, look at this, look at that. So how do you stop yourself and your firm from becoming distracted?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a derivation of focus, because if you set your alerts properly, you don't get overwhelmed. And I would say that I probably send my staff one prtz reference a day at the most, because, being very focused, we know what areas we're really interested in. We're interested in neurosthetics, we're interested in medical products, we're interested in intellectual property and design, patent litigation, utility patents. You know, other more general technology is also of serious interest to us if it's suitably complex. So we have a. We have actually a narrow palette of what I would characterize as silos of interest. So if you're watching the data coming in, it is to fit one of those silos, or I don't pass it on unless it's something that's really unusual. Like ChatGPT3. Right. Okay. That came in over the transom, and I couldn't get my staff to stop fooling with it. So things happen like that. But those are profound and unusual.

Speaker A: Okay, got it. Yeah, boy. And that kind of took over everyone. All right, so third question was, how do you become m. How do you become expert at something if you're constantly learning these new things, bringing in new technologies, new approaches, how can you go to a client, look them in the eye and say we've developed real depth of expertise here, we've applied this, we're effective. And I did hear you say you do bench testing, so maybe that's part of it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, what's the full answer? How do you, if you're constantly innovating, how do you become good and efficient?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. We are constantly innovating, but we're not innovating in an uh, extremely wild wide field. So for example, in terms of usability testing, we set our goals to acquiring world class expertise in 10 methodologies. Only 10? There's hundreds. But we looked very objectively at what's out there in terms of methodologies from other fields and we said, okay, uh, microfacial expression, Newtonian force, 3D spatial tracking, cognitive modeling, information foraging theory, there's 10. And that's all, uh, we focus on. And we work on each one of those methodologies until we have it to the level where we are totally confident that it is technically reliable, that the vendors who provide the technology for us that we're going to use are telling us the truth, that it works. Right. Because they don't always do that. Right. That it's, we tested it statistically and it produces the data that we think.

Speaker A: So it's valid.

Speaker B: It's valid. And then the fourth measure, believe it or not, David, is sort of counterintuitive. But we only choose methodologies that we can objectively link up with other methods. Methodologies easily. By that what I mean is that uh, if we have a 3D spatial tracker and we have a force measurement device, we need to be able to have those two data streams come together in one view. Sometimes we have many views. And also, don't forget in our studies we also have subjective data which is gathered through surveys that are on screen. How does somebody feel about this emotionally? Then we have all the psychophysical data as well. The point I make here is that a criteria for being one of our primary methodologies is that we can hook it together with all the other methodologies into a view that we can look at directly and relatively simply, because otherwise it's not cost effective.

Speaker A: If I were to try to capture this and also broaden it a little bit, part of what I'm hearing is we realize that there's plenty of business for us, even if we're very, very narrow in what we address and how we address it, which is a message Uh, I feel like small consulting firm leaders can't hear enough. At the point where you want to be 50, uh, million or $100 million, you need to start broadening again.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: But up to 25 million, you can be very, very, very narrow. You can be very precise and choose a methodology or a very precise problem. So that stops, uh, you from being distracted and wandering everywhere.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And the other point I heard, which was quite interesting here, is at the same time we're doing that, we're making sure we are making that, that everything that comes out, everything that we do connects back to is usable, if you will, for the, our end user, our client, and perhaps ourselves in helping a client. Which means the data that come out need to be usable by the client. Recommendations, the methodology, whatever we do, it does have to connect back into the rest of our client's world Fair summary or not.

Speaker B: Yeah, such a good point. And I would say, other than our desire to be a leader in terms of, uh, testing technology, the other area that we're very well known for with our clients, because they tell us this, is that we listen very, very intently and we watch their projects, their complex research projects very closely. And once a year, we'll always go back to them and say, we've, uh, identified what we think is a core problem in this particular type of methodology. And we have the following recommended solution which will save time, save money, produce more higher quality results. Uh, I'll give you a perfect example. A lot of our clients retain us to do what's called summative, uh, usability testing studies for medical products. Those studies are utilized in submitting those products to the FDA for approval. And we are very skilled in this complex kind of usability testing. So what happens in a summative study? That's the last study that you do where the product is completely configured. You have the real packaging, the real product, and you bring in real users. And you do these large studies to determine whether or not the user, the patient, or the HCP will execute a critical error. That's essentially what you're looking for. It's a validation. So these studies are extremely expensive. Sometimes what happens is that these studies run and you get halfway through a study of 90 respondents, and errors start showing up where the engineering or the design team overlooks something. And it's clear that this study results are going to result in a failure of submission, because we know a lot about the fda. We've lectured at the fda. That happens to our clients every now and then. So this year, for example, we Developed a new methodology where we have a statistical analysis we apply during every study. And if errors start cropping up, then we do a model, a mathematical model of projection, and we say, okay, we're at 10 respondents and there's already this, this number of types of errors showing up. If we take that data out, by the time we get to 40, we're going to have too many errors and the study is going to fail. So we developed a methodology for our clients where we, we stop the study, go fix the problem, and then come back. It saves them hundreds of thousands of dollars and sometimes it saves them submission period, which is. Can be billions. Right. So that's an example of where, you know, as a consulting firm and a small firm, you can watch your clients suffer on a certain level and you can, you know, you can help them. And I guarantee you that that really, that binds you to the client in a way that's, you know, really satisfying for everyone involved.

Speaker A: Absolutely right. We are there to alleviate their pains and help them achieve their aspirations. And in order to do that, you need to know what those pains are and what they really are.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Exactly right. All right, so there's a whole nother rabbit hole we could go down and we might do it on another podcast on that, but there's some risk of making this a little long. There's one other topic you brought up. I want to at least cover it briefly. You mentioned that the type of employee you hire, the characteristics of the people you hire, are very important for staying on the. On the leading edge. So tell me just a little bit about that. What is it you're hiring for?

Speaker B: Well, in our business, we're really hiring for three attributes. Curiosity, I would say, is maybe number one. Number two is, is competence. And number three is their ability to understand what they're going to gain by working for a small firm like ours. So in the first instance, curiosity, you know, how widely do they read? You know, what does their CV look like? What sports do they play? If they've got a dissertation, I look at their reference table in their dissertation and I see, uh, oh, okay, this is kind of interesting. You got a bunch of unusual stuff in the reference table. You know, I look at their papers. The second was expertise. I do not hire stars. I do. I never hire extraordinary expertise. I will always hire extraordinary competence. Big difference. I want someone who is confident in their skills, but is not, you know, going to be impatient if they're not lined up for a Nobel and can 10 years. You know, that sort of Thing and that comes from my work in collaborative decision making. I did a lot of work early in my career in team collaboration. So, you know, one of the key things with collaboration is, you know, you don't want, you know, a star on the, on your team unless you really, really need that exact expertise. And then the last one is, you know, one of the problems that small firms have is that, um, you know, someone coming right out of grad school, you know, really smart, fits all the criteria. They come and work for us, they don't understand the level of experience that they're getting compared to going to work for an Apple or a Meta or um. Right. So, and that's very important to us because we need, we like all small firms, we have key hires and when they leave, it's a, it's a very big deal for us. Yep. So I'd like to understand what the ultimate objectives might be even for someone recently, uh, graduating from college. Are they interested only in their vacation time? Uh, are they getting sushi for lunch? Uh, do they have a bus that's going to air conditioned bus that's going to take them to work every day? Those types of employees never work for me, ever. I'm looking for someone who comes in and said, I read your paper on the critique you did of the FDA human, uh, factors screening criteria and I had the following questions. I don't necessarily understand what you were saying or I didn't agree with you. Right. They're going to get hired. Yeah. Got it.

Speaker A: Perfect. So curiosity number one makes total sense given this whole model you've laid out of collecting information, staying on the forefront by being aware, by listening, by learning, by being curious. So get that competence not hiring stars. Years, uh, ago, we, before we only worked with consulting firms. We worked for hospitals. And boy, the role of rock star doctors is they're so disruptive. Um, you know, these surgeons who think well and they're right. I mean people go to a certain hospital for a surgeon that's known as, you know, was in US News as the best surgeon. Best thoracic surgeon. That's great. You don't necessarily want that on your team as a consultant.

Speaker B: Yeah, Occasionally, David, we get projects from clients and our job is to run new technology by that exact profile. The star surgeons.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That's another podcast.

Speaker A: Yeah, boy, isn't it? So we'll do that another time. And then as you said, you're also hiring from people who get it, who get why it can be valuable, rewarding to work for a small consulting firm because if they don't get that, it's. It's for all of us who run small firms is incredibly disruptive and expensive when we hire someone and then they. They disappear after year, two years, three years, four years even.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, so, I mean, don't.

Speaker B: Don't get me wrong. I have. I have staff who work for me over the last four decades who are working everywhere. You know, Apple Meta, you know, Amazon Portrait. They're like, everywhere.

Speaker A: Uh, but I would think that's the case if you were the person who says, I've had this firm for 45 years and the same employees have been there for the. That would be one hell of a story. We'll do that podcast. Charles, this has just been incredibly enlightening and fascinating. Thank you so much for being willing to share, for coming on and sharing your time and wisdom and experience. There's really no greater gift you could give to me and listeners. So thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you for inviting me. It's great, Great to talk to you.

Speaker A: You bite. Likewise. Bye.

Speaker B: Bye.

Speaker C: The Crackerjack Consulting podcast is produced by the David A. Fields Consulting Group, where you'll find everything you need to build a more successful consulting firm. We'd love to get your feedback and hear about any consulting firm leaders you think we should have on the show. If you'd like to appear on the show or know someone whose insights would be helpful to others in the consulting industry, please send us an email at, uh, infoavidafields, uh dot com. That's infoavidafields, uh.com. let a friend know about the show. And don't forget to leave a review on itunes or Google Play. And if you subscribe, you'll be notified about every new episode. Our next episode is our special karaoke episode. We'll provide the words and you read them in your voice. Oh, wait, that's called an article. Okay, fine. We'll provide the voices too. At any rate, I'm, um, Robin Epstein, and our host is David A. Fields. Thanks for listening.