This is the 83rdd in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has spoken to. Enterprise Times recently spoke to Alex Adamopoulos, Emergn’s Chairman and CEO, about the progress that Emergn had seen over the last year with Praxis. He also shared details of the product roadmap and what is likely to happen in 2026.
Adamopoulos recently wrote a blog post about the consultancy trap. Could you just explain a bit about that in terms of what the consultancy trap is?
“Since we started the company, we typically go into organisations with an exit strategy. We want to make them self-sufficient. We want to make them sustainable and deliver on their products and services using the skills and capabilities we employ.
“We live in a world where the word consultant or consulting sometimes has a negative connotation. We’re trying to explain to people that the trap is all about working with external companies that don’t want to leave or shouldn’t leave because, you know, they want to keep charging you.
“We’re really looking around that trap and saying we’re not that firm, right? We want to be, and have been the since we started, which enables clients to do the work themselves, and then we move out. That’s really what it’s about.”
How to avoid falling into the consultancy trap?
Adamopoulos replied, “It’s simple. Sell them the services they need, not always the services they want. Be able to articulate why you’re proposing, what you’re proposing, what the outcome would be from that, and what the timeline is. Instead of signing up for a longer-term generic contract.
“The only other tip I could say is to be authentic with clients. We live in a world where we have more immediate gratification than we’ve ever had. There’s a lot of noise around AI killing consulting, mostly on the analytics and research side, but not so much on the expertise side. It would just be authenticity and integrity in the conversation.
“We obviously are running a business. We want to be there as long as we can be effective and make revenue. We get that. But our big successes also come from repeat business, from existing clients, where we’ve solved a department, or we’ve solved an area, and then they keep coming back for more help, which has proven to be a good model for us.”
Why take the alternate strategy
Many consulting firms take the opposite approach: they aim to make engagements sticky and turn projects into perpetual ones. Why did you focus on avoiding the consultancy trap?
Adamopoulos replied,
“I will say it in a phrase that we use internally, and I’ve started sharing externally, which we think summarises our ethos. The most sustainable competitive advantage you have as a company is the way you work. That’s what we firmly believe as a business. It’s not that the tech doesn’t matter and everything else isn’t important, but the way you work is what will differentiate companies in the future. This is why we believe so much in the craft of Product Management.”
