How Consultant-friendly are your clients?

Dealing with this client made the reasons behind French automobile industry's mediocrity quite obvious..

My client was very easy to deal with being that we recommended changing their entire patient management system.

Between my best clients ever.
Innovative and very open-minded approach.
Very demanding, but aware of contribution and value given... and able to reward it!

No doubt they are very in troubles for the Concordia disaster, but they are preparing plans and actions - and I'm here, as I can, to assist them.

Participating in their calls for tenders is tempting because they are big. But most of the time, the competition is already decided in advance. They will love your ideas, but at the end of the day, they buy the cheapest provider based on daily rate. They often work with their existing suppliers who are mainstream consulting firms who make money on high volumes. However, participating in the contest is time consuming because of a high level of red tape since they have to follow public service's regulation.

Moreover, they don't have a clue regarding what they're talking about and you have to educate them (believe me, it's a long and painful process). Last but not least, they are notorious and shameless brainpickers which is not fair for such a big company living on a public monopoly.

We had agreed on a token fee for an initial assignment, but when the work was finished and delivered, Hansa Cequity refused to pay anything, saying, they "have not commissioned a project."

The case was very touchy but you could tell the client's team wanted to make it work. Sometimes, that's all you need!

This company was honestly the bane of my existence. I could not handle working with these people for longer than 10 hours. They refused to work with me on key pointers in improving their customer service. At the end of the day, I had to threaten them that the boss was not going to keep them on board if they continued in the same discipline. I later got their attention.

Working within the financial services industry was a lot was a lot more painful than I had imagined it to be. I had worked on the strategy of the firm, especially after the Financial Crisis of '08 where people did not trust the companies as a safe haven to store their money. With that being said, we were told that we needed to do x, y, z by the company's management. There was literally no leeway - they would not listen to anything that we would recommend even after coming up with conclusions that would drive the opposite.

In the end, we had to stick with the company management's decision. Miserable.

Nice guys and very cooperative, I had a great time working with these individuals.

I was brought in with a group of individuals to see where the overall university could be streamlined from the expansive bureaucratic state that it was in. The people with whom I was working were quite easy-going and laid back; however, their end goal was to streamline the process and they were very bureaucratic about it - it reminded me of a political game being handled by the upper levels of individuals.

In the end, we were able to work together instead of just me implementing their ideas.