The specialists | Profiles of three Maine consultants whose specialties are off the beaten path

Sam Bishop rattles off the typical disciplines in which businesses might seek consultants ˆ— human resources, accounting, information technology ˆ— noting that Maine has plenty of consultants experienced in those niches. But Bishop, president of the Maine Association of Professional Consultants, also says that unique specialties are developing as consultants respond to community needs. As a result, he says, the business of consulting is really growing. In just the past couple of years, for example, MAPC's membership has grown from 40 to 75 members.

Among those members are a handful of consultants who've chosen to specialize in unique ˆ— and often narrow ˆ— niches. Tom Wales, for example, dubs himself TelCom Guy, and provides companies with advice on cutting utility costs. Alison Freeman of AL Freeman DocumentationWorks specializes in disaster planning and preparation, and Charles Sidman's Evolutionary Management concentrates on change management for businesses large and small. Mainebiz talked to each of them to learn why they started their consultancies, how they convince businesses to use their services and what their clients can gain in the process.

Tom Wales
TelCom Guy, New Harbor
Specialty: Evaluation and optimization of utilities expenditures
Motivation: "Deregulation has opened the door to many cost-savings opportunities for the savvy consumer."
Contact: 677-3855
www.telcomguy.com

Wales, 58, has been consulting in business utility costs since 1989. What started as a service to evaluate whether companies were overpaying for phone service quickly spread to encompass other utilities, as well. For example, two years ago he put together several businesses to aggregate their electricity usage and come up with a group buying plan. With this arrangement, Wales says the businesses were able to lock in a significantly lower rate.
Originally, Wales targeted companies with revenues of $5 million-$50 million; those were large enough for utility bills to impact the bottom line, but not so large that they would have a full-time person managing those costs. Once he moved to Maine from Connecticut in 1995, his target changed somewhat to include smaller organizations, such as a local dress shop and various not-for-profits.

The change resulted in part from the simple fact that there are a lot more small businesses in Maine than there are in, say, Boston. In addition, being at the end of the line for things like natural gas means that utilities are more expensive here than they are for companies in other parts of the country. Deciding whether to purchase gas from a local company or a third party, for example, can be confusing for a business that's trying to save money but perhaps not savvy in commodities markets.

For non-telecom utility work, Wales calls on his own network of consultants. "I talk to people who are a lot smarter than I am in their industry ˆ— people who've been in the oil or electric business for many years, and know the markets really well," he says. "[Then] we analyze the usage patterns of an organization and solicit bids from various providers. We provide the information to help them make an intelligent decision."

The bulk of TelCom Guy's work is still in telecom, however. Wales starts with phone bills themselves. Customer service records itemize charges, but in an archaic format. Wales claims that 80% of those bills contain billing errors. He cites a favorite example, in which he discovered that a school system had been paying for years on an alarm channel that went between a defunct school location and a former police station that was now a hardware store. "They'd disconnected the circuit," he says, "but they never stopped the billing!" The client ended up receiving a rebate of about $4,000 from the phone company.

Next, he says, he asks clients questions like, "Do you need 13 phone lines?" Sometimes he can analyze a company's usage and recommend it knock a line or two off of its service, at a typical savings of $50 per line per month.

Wales chuckles as he reveals that companies that implement a call-accounting program (a tracking system that links each dialed call to the employee who made it) will see a savings on the monthly bill ˆ— even if no one checks the logs, since the very idea of being held accountable means employees tend to curb their personal calls. "In one instance we saw a savings of 30% once we instituted call accounting," he says.

The cost of Wales' advice for any utility audit and subsequent change implementation is 50% of a company's savings over the term of the contract (usually a year). Every quarter, clients send copies of their bills to Wales. He does an analysis of costs prior to implementing his recommendations versus the actual cost afterwards. Half of the savings go to him. "If we can save 10% on a $5,000 bill [which a mid-sized company might be paying for electricity], that's $500," he says. "That's real money."

While there are other companies that offer similar services, Wales says many continue to extract fees for three to five times longer than his typical term. Also, since his fees are based upon savings, no savings equals no fees. "It lets the client rest assured they're not being overcharged," he says.

Alison Freeman
AL Freeman DocumentationWorks, Georgetown
Specialty: Disaster recovery planning
Motivation: "According to the American Red Cross, 40% of small businesses do not recover from catastrophic loss."
Contact: 371-2404
www.alfreeman.com

Alison Freeman, 45, says she's always been an obsessive planner. "People always say, 'That'll never happen!' and I say, 'Yes, it will. Let me tell you a story about the time thatˆ….'" The things that will "never happen" actually happen all the time, she says. Disaster recovery, Freeman's specialty, is all about disaster preparation.

"Error chains, a series of little disasters, become catastrophic loss," she says. "Most disasters aren't a single event." And for the last 25 years, Freeman has made herself a business of saying "What if?" and then helping companies prepare the answer to that question.

Years of experience as a network administrator taught Freeman that documentation is crucial to recovery after a disaster. Going to the insurance company after a theft without the model and serial numbers of your missing equipment, for example, isn't going to get your business up and running very quickly. And if the relevant information was written down but stored in an office that was just destroyed in a fire, it's useless.

"A large part of what I do," she says, "is teach companies how to make disaster avoidance and recovery plans a part of their business plans, part of their corporate philosophy [even if] that company is only two or five people." To Freeman, that means thinking through your business process one step at a time.

When a business comes to Freeman for help, the first thing she does is clarify its core business elements. "If you're an oil delivery company, you might think your core business element is oil. It's not. It's your customer database," she says. "You don't know who your customers are or when you're supposed to deliver? You're out of business." For many businesses, the key to their livelihood is found in their data storage.

When it comes to computer systems, Freeman's suggestions are simple but often overlooked. Data must be backed up daily; most companies know to do that. But those back-ups need to be stored offsite somewhere that wouldn't be affected by property damage at the office location, but that will be easily accessible. Also, "just because you have a tape backup running doesn't mean it's successful," she cautions. "Are you reading error logs, and doing restores? Those are some of the most common points of failure. Maybe you have a server and you think that all the data is being saved there, but some data is on someone's C drive and it's not being backed up."

Data isn't the only item on the "what if" menu. "You have to constantly be thinking, what would happen if this aspect of my business wasn't available right now? What's my workaround? If you know the area is [prone to] flooding, you don't store your inventory on the floor. You put it up on shelving," she says. "Little things like that can make a huge difference. You have to look at your lease. If my shop can't open due to damage to the building, where does that put me as the lessor?"

Freeman teaches disaster preparation planning workshops on a regular basis, often in association with MAPC or a local chamber of commerce, which run from $60-$89 per person for a half-day session. When consulting, she charges a flat fee per project, ranging from about $1,000 to $3,500.

"When you hire me, you are bringing me in to provide you with 25 years of experience creating disaster recovery plans and executing them," Freeman says. But the goal is to work herself out of a job by equipping a company to handle its own planning. "My philosophy is that I'm going to make your people do all the work. If I don't," she says, "all I'm giving you is a binder."

Charles Sidman
Evolutionary Management, Bar Harbor
Specialty: Shaping new organizations and helping established ones regain vitality
Motivation: "It's the old storyˆ… if you give someone a fish, it's okay; but if you teach them to fish, it's much better."
Contact: 288-0428
www.evolutionarymanagement.com

What do you get when you cross a biomedical Ph.D. with an MBA? The answer is Charles Sidman, a 55-year-old Bar Harbor resident who says that the convergence of his two degrees led him to the study of complexity science, a relatively new field. "Breaking systems down and studying the parts ˆ— which is what traditional research does ˆ— certainly has a great deal of value, but to really understand it, you have to understand all the parts working together," he says. "The story about any single [part] doesn't give you the whole answer."

This holistic view works when applied to any sort of system, whether in nature or business. "Nothing is new," Sidman insists. "The creation of new businesses is quite comparable to the evolution of new plants and animals. It can be modeled mathematically, and it looks pretty similar."

Sidman splits his time between his home and business in Bar Harbor, and a dual faculty position in the University of Cincinnati's College of Medicine (molecular genetics, biochemistry and microbiology) and College of Business Administration (management).

But what does he actually do? "I'm an integrator and a connection-maker. Sometimes it's training people. What's more effective is engineering the system and the processes," he says. "The key to getting a very fast automobile is not pressing the gas pedal to the floor. The key is designing the vehicle so that it has a big engine, so that it has an effective transmission, so that you can press the gas pedal to the floor."

Sidman works with two distinct types of clients. Large businesses, he says, come to him for assistance in figuring out how they can either continue to grow or repair existing problems. "A lot of times people know their product," he says. "They know the market or the technology, but they haven't learned how to run and nurture a business. That's what I try to help with ˆ— making a stable, legitimate, ethical business."

With established businesses, Sidman's work may take one or all of the following forms: Creativity and innovation training; organizational change advice, including culture and compensation evaluation; and corporate responsibility input and advocacy, which Sidman characterizes not as altruism but as "enlightened self-interest," as he says responsible organizations are typically more successful than their less socially involved counterparts.

The bulk of his involvement, however, is with startup companies. Sidman is one of the founders of Maine Angels, a combination mentoring and venture capital program for new businesses. With Evolutionary Management, he sometimes finds these two roles overlapping; in addition to modifying his payment structure for startup businesses (taking equity rather than money, for example), he has been known to write a check to a client whose venture he believes shows promise. Although he hasn't cashed out of any of these opportunities yet, he says, "I have some that are growing quite nicely."

Sidman quotes projects on a case-by-case basis, either as a fixed-cost project or an ongoing consultancy arrangement as needed. His fees range from $800 to $3,200 a day. He says he works on a variety of projects, which both keeps it interesting and adds to the value he brings to each one. The common thread: In every case, it's all about reaching a target destination, and being open to changes along the way. "If they need to get to a certain destination ˆ— a particular point ˆ— they have to make that clear and then let me choose the path that will get them there," he says. "If they want a growing business, or an innovative business, or a happy businessˆ… those are destinations. Then we can make some progress together."

Sidman says many people become frozen in the face of uncertainty. "You have to manage and use risk; you can't ignore it and pretend it's not there," he says. "That's the tie-in with evolution. You've got to have diversity. If you're hard-to-the-core results oriented, you need it. Diversity is a life-or-death necessity for a business."