“I Hate Consultants. Nice to Meet You.”

If you've ever seen the 1999 classic Office Space, about weary white-collar workers sentenced to a windowless room full of cubicles, then you know about The Bobs. They're the consultants brought in to help make operations run more efficiently while maximizing profits (translation: lay off a ton of people).

Now, Office Space is a dark comedy. But the film does pinpoint why so many folks dislike consultants. Which makes it tricky if people put you into the Consultancy bucket, without a second thought.

Here is how Mach49's CEO David Charpie, MBA solved this conundrum while working with a manufacturer.

The time to start is now. Enjoy.

By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor

“I Hate Consultants. Nice to Meet You.”

By David Charpie, CEO Mach49

How do you use startup techniques to breathe new life into a century-old company? Not by hiring expensive strategy consultants, that’s for sure.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: every company must be placed in a category. Drop-down menus, event organizers, databases, even LinkedIn wants to put companies into a niche. And the company I lead – Mach49, a team of founders, operators, board members, and venture capitalists – is inevitably pigeon-holed as “consultants.” 

We don’t view ourselves as consultants. And for a lot of our clients, running the largest companies in the world, the impact we make is what they care about. Not the label. 

But for others, who don’t know us yet, that label can be a real barrier. 

“I hate consultants. Nice to meet you.”

That is how an executive of one of the largest material science companies in the US greeted me at our first face-to-face meeting. We’d been working with his teams for several months by that time, but it was the first time we were in the Board Room together. 

Ouch. I cannot overemphasize how much this C-suite leader hated consultants. Two things ran through my brain. One: with his organization, he’s not wrong. He’d seen how strategy consultants left behind decks and reports – not operational impact on the business. They didn’t help his company hit their stride and knock it out of the park. His team had just spent millions of bleeping dollars with no results to show for it – and he was concerned Mach49 would do the same. 

Two: Even when your objective is 100% operating impact on a client’s business, like Mach49, a certain amount of strategy and growth planning needs to happen.  Saying there is no consulting involved would be misleading.

It’s just that we also execute on those strategy and growth plans together with clients, helping to develop new capability (not dependency) within organizations – a task that most consultants either don’t do at all, or do very poorly. 

So, back to the leader in question. He leads a family-owned manufacturer that’s been around for over a century. But their growth? Stagnating. They needed renewal – right away.

They operate a flow manufacturing environment where sustainable materials will likely be the next wave. But what should they do? Buy a new venture to immediately get into this new area? Is now the right time? Is another scientific breakthrough on the horizon? Perhaps it won’t be sustainable materials at all but reclaiming carbon and turning that into final product. Or a new policy on reuse. 

One thing was for sure: they could no longer stand around and wait for the market to turn. 

They'd be caught flat-footed. They'd never be able to catch up. A conundrum. 

I had and have nothing but respect for this company’s leadership. They wanted something significant: to protect the future of the company. There was an existential threat to the future of their business, and the CEO didn't want to misstep. Incubating a venture here or there? Investing in a few startups? And all while he dealt with a core business that was overwhelmed and misaligned? 

The head of operations thought Sales was responsible for the business’ lackluster growth. Sales were struggling with who to sell to, and what they were given to sell, in a market that had moved on. There was distrust and finger-pointing within the executive ranks. 

It was a chaotic environment; no one could get aligned on how to solve the problem – causing stagnation. 

They didn't do anything because they didn't know what to do.

The Mach49 team, and a group of talented people from within the manufacturer, started by incubating a corporate startup that they’d been thinking about building for a while. And that set the stage for us to not be consultants. Ultimately, the venture got what we call “a well-earned no.” In other words, after listening to their potential customers for weeks and weeks to identify pain, their idea for a venture was not actually helping to solve what their customers needed. The venture was deemed not viable enough to keep pouring money, time, and energy into. Pulling the plug was clearly the right thing to do. 

And it showed Mach49 in a different light. 

By then, we’d taught them invaluable Customer Development work, how to understand markets, and the practical skills you need to build a startup or renew a business like theirs. Their CEO saw this and said, “I need that in my core. That's the kind of behavior I need to see across my entire organization.” Highly attractive, but also dubious. Could behaviors such as founder mindset, risk-taking, placing small bets, and listening only to customers, disrupt a traditional manufacturer? 

To help, we did a two-day Impact Framing workshop – and they loved it. 

Through this session, senior leadership aligned on a roadmap of objectives and built a clear and common vision of what was going on with the company. 

Nearing the end of this process, they called us to say: “Hey, so we owe the Board a five-year strategic plan in six weeks. Can you help us turn these impacts into a plan?” And we said, sure. 

In building the plan, we were able to connect and orient the results of their Impact Framing into an overall five-year business strategy focused on execution and experimentation. There was nothing theoretical or high-level about it; they would be learning, adapting, and making progress daily. We also made ourselves available to executive team members – many of whom had real, existential fears – in person.

We were being ourselves: non-consultants, in their offices, demonstrating that we are not the Bobs from Office Space. 

When our five-year strategic plan was presented to the Board, it was, in everyone’s opinion, better and more operational than any they had seen. In their eyes, we really weren't consultants anymore. We became partners. 

Looking back, we wholeheartedly earned the trust of a rightfully jaded C-suite leader who could not stand consultants (and I’m putting it mildly). Here is how we did it: 

1. We gave them value immediately. We didn't drag them through planning and a bunch of hypothetical or theoretical exercises to get there.
2. We started by fixing what was broken before moving on to any sort of long-term vision. 
3. We asked ourselves, at every step: If we were the CEO, at this moment in time, what would we be doing? Knowing everything we know about what we, and everybody else, can do in this world. And we always stayed honest to that approach. 
4. Once that was settled, we discussed and discovered what needed doing from a perspective of growth and opportunity.

The last few months, we’ve strategized, designed, and executed on a corporate venture capital fund, to find and nurture startups and new initiatives that will propel growth. They are now building, investing in, and partnering with, state-of-the-art  ventures that synchronize with their mission and promise strong potential returns. These activities balance their need for short-term gains along with investments that should and will reshape the company’s future. 

Today, they’re not spending lots of money or resources, but experimenting with speed so they learn and adapt quickly to move forward and figure out what they want, and need, to do. Invest in some companies, partner with others, and do some R&D on their own. Where they feel too exposed and in need of a fallback, to protect themselves, they will invest via their corporate venture capital fund.

They’re starting to “play the game” with confidence, knowing that they will not get beaten up when the next wave comes through. 

Our next step? To work ourselves out of a job, something else a traditional consultant would never aspire to. 

As Mach49’s CEO, DAVID CHARPIE has extensive leadership experience in Global 2000 firms as well as multiple venture-backed, joint venture, and intrapreneurial startups. He's known for sparking disruptive growth and fostering an entrepreneurial culture within large companies, in industries including big data, cloud, risk management software, and healthcare informatics.

Before joining Mach49, David guided startups for four renowned information services companies: SAP, Partners Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet, and Healthcare Market Research (a joint venture between CVS and Pfizer). He designed and launched several first-of-their-kind solutions at these firms, including the precursor to the UN / SPSC commodity coding system — the international standard for trade.

At D&B, David founded a supplier information venture that became the company's 3rd-largest business unit, with revenues exceeding $100M. At SAP, he established Supplier InfoNet, a cloud supplier risk management business that positioned the firm as a leader in big data pooling and B2B predictive performance content. Later, David led the merger of InfoNet with Ariba and its $874B-worth of supply chain transaction data, further solidifying its industry-leading position.

David is one Mach49's first team members, and has guided the company through substantial growth, launching successful businesses, developing lasting client relationships, and establishing Mach49’s presence in EMEA

Outside of work, David is an avid sports fan, having played baseball and football, and is a keen theater enthusiast — especially musicals. Having met his wife through a high school show they both performed in, music and theater continue to be a core thread within his family, a connection now shared with their four children and eight grandchildren.

With a BS and MS in nuclear engineering from MIT and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, David continues to lead Mach49's Venture Building practice while staying true to his calling — changing lives through corporate startups.

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