Check Your Lenses to See Properly

Which lenses are you wearing right now? Come on, take a look. Are they the right ones?

No, this is not one of those cheesy Ray-Ban coupons that litter social media. This is about consulting.

Which lenses are you wearing right now?

I think it's a good question.

If you're like me, you've been wearing glasses or contact lenses for a long time in order to see more clearly. In my case, I wear progressive lenses (readers, mid-range, and distance all in one) for every day and work and I wear distance only lenses for sports. In case you're wondering, it's not easy to hit a tennis ball well when the size of the ball changes as you look through different parts of your lens.

But, back to consulting, did you check to see which lenses you are wearing?

Let's consider a simple example. I'm an actuary. A lot of the people I work with -- my peers -- are also actuaries. My clients generally are not.

If I am writing a memo for internal consumption by other actuaries, i can wear my actuarial lens. There is a high expectation that my readers will understand my position in the ways that I want them to understand it.

But, suppose I need to take that same memo and send it to a client. My client may not know the difference between a carryover balance and a prefunding balance. My client may not understand that PBO and ABO do not move necessarily in lockstep. My client may not even know what any of these things are.

So, when I write to my client, I explain things to them at the level that I perceive is right for them. Or, put differently, when going from my internal actuarial memo to my external consulting memo, I've changed lenses. In the first case, my lenses are thick and monocular. In the second case, they are gradual and at least binocular as I translate from that which is hard to see at a distance to something that my client can see easily close up.

My lenses have an emotional side to them as well. And, there's a fancy name for it, well not so fancy. Empathy. I try the best I can to put myself in my client's shoes -- to put myself in their position and to write for their benefit, not for anyone else's.

That's hard. When we write a consulting piece, we all want to seem brilliant to our clients. We take off that client lens and put on our own lens just dazzle from the keyboard with thoughts so profound and complex that we must truly be in a league of our own. But, who knows it? The poor client who reads it gets bored. They put it down. They call a competitor for a translation.

Uh oh, or if you are a fan of Scooby Doo, rutro.

So, let's take off our own lens and put the client lens back on. In doing so, we rewrite our masterpiece on the intricacies of an Internal Revenue Code section whose mere label fills up an entire line and simplify it. We make it so that our client can understand it. Yes, I know, we think we have dumbed it down. But, really, that client lens is the empathy lens. Done properly, our client doesn't find it dumbed down, but just right.

Now, our client thinks we are brilliant.

Cookie Cutter Doesn't Cut It

I was on the phone with a sophisticated client a few days ago. She remarked that the solution she was looking at was just pulled off the shelf and could equally apply to any [company]. She said that was bad consulting. I have to agree. Thankfully, that consulting was not ours.

When I started in the business, back in prehistoric times, the modus operandi that many of us were introduced to included answer the phone, do the work, record your time, and someone will bill the client for it. Complaints appeared to be limited.

Things got more complex. The booming economy in our business created by the Reagan-era bull markets and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was a veritable full employment act for consulting actuaries. Employers of those actuaries needed all the quality staff they could find and clients needed all the support they could get.

Things changed. As processes got automated and later, as companies began to exit the business of sponsoring pension plans, this once highly valued actuarial service became more of a commodity. Whether it was true or not, consulting actuaries who could deliver actuarial valuations were viewed as being a dime a dozen.

How did the best differentiate themselves? They began to provide more and more customized solutions. They began to understand the client's business needs. There was a sudden shift in the order of necessary skills. The key ability of being able to do things was replaced in the pecking order by the ability to listen and then to thoughtfully react.

Somewhere around the same time, our society seemed to become far more litigious. The answer to many problems became finding some other party who could be found to be at fault and exacting a price from that party. Some made the observation that in response to this, there were a number of consulting firms that developed solutions that everyone should bring to each of their clients. In fact, I can recall professional friends of mine complaining that they needed to be able to "check the box' for each of their clients even if they felt as if that meant they were providing less than the optimal answer. In other words, they were being encouraged, or even required to pull the answer off the shelf or some might say, to deliver a cookie cutter solution.

Put yourself in the corporate shoes. Your adviser that you have worked with for years brings you a solution that they label best-in-class. A few days later, you find yourself at a gathering with your peers from other local companies. Alas, they have all been brought the same solution.

How is that possible? The companies aren't the same. Their plans aren't the same.

It's then that you remember that you had agreed, based on a referral, to a meeting the next day with some consultant you had never heard of. You wondered if she would try to sell you on the same best-in-class solution.

She didn't. After the initial niceties, she asked you a bunch of questions. And after each question, she listened to your answer and reacted accordingly by asking a follow-up, more probing question. She remarked that she was surprised that you weren't pursuing [pick your favorite strategy to fill in the blank] instead of the not best-in-class one that your longtime adviser had brought you.

You wanted to to business with her, didn't you?

Suppose You Didn't Have to Ask All the Right Pension Questions

Think about it. Oftentimes, your consulting services are only as good as the questions you knew to ask. Suppose you didn't have to ask them.

I think back to some of my earlier days as a consultant. Leaving a meeting, one of my mentors said to me that I had answered all of the client's questions that they needed to have answered, but didn't know it. In other words, I delivered optimal consulting to my client.

In the actuarial consulting world, what plan sponsors are frequently encountering is something short of optimal consulting. We can refer to it as suboptimal consulting.

I'm not going to give away exactly what goes into suboptimal consulting. What I will do though is to tell you a little bit about it, how damaging it might be to not avoid it, that it can be identified, and what a better solution looks like.

To paraphrase the old TV show "Dragnet" -- the tales of suboptimal consulting you are about to encounter are true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent. And, by the way, the innocent are the clients. They have businesses to run. With the exception of those big enough to have full-time, in-house pension consultants, they can't be expected to know all this stuff on their own.

Surprisingly enough, National Widget Company (NWC) is in the business of manufacturing and distributing widgets. NWC currently sponsors two frozen pension plans. Their actuarial firm, Too Big For the Mid-Market (TBFM) has assigned a litany of what it views internally as mediocre consultants to NWC for the last 15 years or so. Here is some of what we know about this relationship.

• There have actually been six separate Enrolled Actuaries from TBFM assigned to NWC over the last 15 years. Only one of the six has ever met NWC management. None has worried about learning NWC's corporate goals, needs, or points of pain. All simply assumed that NWC was pretty much the same as the rest of TBFM's clients.
• The two NWC pension plans, in total, have about $100 million in plan assets.
• NWC pays TBFM about $250 thousand per year in actuarial fees.
• NWC has been laying out an average of slightly more than $100 thousand in cash every year (either to the plan or on behalf of the plan) that it didn't need to and for which there is no real benefit to the company or to plan participants. This is wasted money that could have been saved.

How do I know all of this? Suboptimal actuarial consulting can be identified. Deficiencies can be pointed out. Solutions can be found going forward. No, we can't turn back time, but we could ensure that NWC doesn't make the same mistakes over and over again. 

That NWC sponsors two frozen pension plans implies to me that they would like to terminate them. In other words, they'd like to get out of the pension business. Currently, however, there is no path to those plan terminations. They live in a world of hope and despair. That is, their strategy is that they hope that everything will go right and that these pension plans go away yet they are faced with the despair of knowing that this is not very likely to happen. 

Suppose NWC had a real strategy. Suppose that strategy included solutions with more upside potential and with less downside risk. Suppose every dollar that NWC spent on the plan was optimal. Suppose someone answered NWC's questions that their lack of pension expertise made them unequipped to ask. 

Are you responsible for a pension plan? Do you know if you are getting optimal actuarial consulting? Wouldn't you like to know? Wouldn't you like to get that optimal consulting?

Are You Getting the Best Ideas For Your Money?

How about it? Is your [fill in the blank with attorney, accountant, actuary, adviser, consultant] bringing you their best ideas? I had  a few conversations yesterday with people who might be in a position to know. What they told me in a nutshell is that if you are not a key client for whoever it is that you filled in the blank with, the answer is probably not.

One person related to me that when she was in the corporate world, the people sent to audit their 401(k) plan were first-years who asked exactly what a 401(k) plan is. The bill for those services was large. Another told me that he went to a client conference sponsored by a large actuarial firm (conference was his term, but I'm not convinced it was the term I would have used). He found that the larger clients that were there had been getting different and more proactive advice from the firm's national experts, but all he got were answers to the questions that he specifically asked. But he did note to me that the billing rates of the team that services him had gone up by about 1/3 in the last 2 years.A third person said that her adviser (defined benefit investment) seemed to be pawning off the investments that he couldn't dump elsewhere on her. Each of these three people said that they were paying top dollar for substandard services.

Why?

In the late 80s (that's last century for people who don't recall), I was with one of those large firms. I recall a discussion with an internal IT person who was lamenting the high cost of putting IBM personal computers on every one's desk. He said that he thought Compaqs that were less expensive were better. Naive me asked me why then was he buying IBMs. The answer that he gave me struck me as odd then, but wouldn't now. He said something to the effect of "They're IBMs. If I buy Compaqs and something goes wrong, I lose my job; if I buy IBMs and everything goes wrong, I can say I bought IBMs."

The world has changed, but has that part of it? Is it okay to take a risk on getting great advice from people who want your business and want to give you their best advice, but don't have the big name? I don't know what the answer is at your company, but it should be a resounding yes.

The business world has gotten too complex. There are great advisers of all sorts out there who are not charging top dollar. If you're using one of the big firms in whichever field you're thinking about and you're getting their best people -- their national experts -- then you probably are getting their best thinking. If that's the case, then they likely view that you have the money to spend that justifies bringing those people in. But, suppose you're not in New York (this is not intended to imply that all the best people are in New York, but that experts will travel to New York, for example, but perhaps not to Wichita, Kansas). Suppose you're not a Fortune 100 company. Then, you might not be getting the best ideas that your adviser's firm has to offer.

What should you do differently?

Find out who are the strong players that may be less well known, but really want your business. Trust me -- if they think that you are interested in hearing what they have to say, they'll bring you their best ideas. And, they might charge less for them than the bigger companies will.

On that note, if your company sponsors retirement plans and most do, I'd like to talk to you about some of our ideas. You may not hear anything like them from anyone else.

Are You Missing Out Because Your Company Uses an actuary not an ACTUARY?

Okay, your company sponsors a defined benefit (DB) plan and you have an actuary and of course, your actuary is the best. Having been in this profession for 30 years, I've learned that most companies and their actuaries develop a mutual trust.

The reason is not as obvious as you think. How do I know that? It's because I have seen it in action. You see, actuaries produce numbers and results that most people don't understand. It seems magical. And because those numbers and results are often important to plan sponsors and the people who work for them, they develop a trust for the people who bring them those numbers.

Are those numbers correct? Almost always, they are.

So, tell us, John, what's your point? We should trust those actuaries, right?

In short, you should trust the numbers that they produce. Today, with sophisticated actuarial valuation software that is relatively uniform in the industry, most actuaries produce about the same bottom line numbers in an actuarial valuation.

So, what's the problem? It's just a commodity, isn't it?

Frankly, the problem may be in what your actuary doesn't tell you that an ACTUARY would. What I'm not being specific about here are things that would take up far too much space for this blog. But, how well do you understand the true financial effects of your plan? Are there opportunities that you are missing out on because your actuary hasn't told you? Is the problem that your actuary just hasn't thought about these things?

Honestly, it doesn't matter why you're not getting that kind of information, but just that you're not getting it.

An ACTUARY could show you what you're missing out on.

Contact me here or after January 1, contact me here.

It couldn't hurt, not even a little bit.

Connecting Executive Rewards

After all these years, I find it amazing. Consideration of executive rewards is still split up into pieces. And, those pieces are handled by different internal functions and by different consulting constituencies.

In a fairly typical case, cash, long-term incentives and equity are handled by the executive compensation function and by the executive compensation consultants. Executive retirement programs are typically handled by the retirement function and by the retirement consultants (frequently actuaries).

This is not a problem. The problem lies in the fact that the left hand and the right hand don't communicate with each other. And, they don't have compatible methodologies.

Let's look at retirement first. Traditionally, executive retirement packages have been designed to replace some targeted percentage of the executive's base plus bonus in their last few years before retirement. That methodology is not wrong. In the typical executive retirement study, consultants are asked to benchmark the plan design. Does it align with current trends and practices?

Consider executive compensation. Here, consultants look at such this as total cash compensation and total direct compensation. They benchmark this against the organization's peer group regressing (adjusting) for differences in size (and sometimes complexity). They develop medians and percentiles. That methodology is not wrong.

Suppose a Board chooses to pay its CEO at the 60th percentile. Perhaps they feel that their is complexity to their organization that belies its size. Suppose they also have an executive retirement program that their consultants say is pretty mainstream. I am going to tell you that almost to a degree of certainty, the retirement consultants have not considered the level of the CEO's pay in determining that the retirement program is mainstream. Isn't deferred compensation a part of compensation?

What would happen if we used the same approach for retirement benefits as we do for other forms of executive compensation? Suppose we calculate an annual value for such benefits and add it to other forms of compensation before doing that regression. Something tells me that the results might be surprising. In some cases, it might justify that rich SERP for which the proxy analysts have such disdain. In other cases, we might find that the company is perhaps inappropriately inflating TOTAL compensation -- the sum of the value of the entire rewards package.

In order to make this work, the executive compensation people need to talk to the retirement people and conversely. They need to speak each other's languages. Today, there are many gaps. There just aren't enough of us who are bilingual in this regard.

Perhaps we need to be.

The RFP Process -- Full Disclosure or Not?

Some people send out lots of requests for proposals whether it's in their business life or in their personal life. Others respond to a lot of them. Recently, I was in that first category for a change, but far more often, I am one of the people responding to a request for proposal (RFP).

My most recent endeavor in requesting a proposal was in my personal life. My wife and I needed to engage a painting contractor for our home. We sought bids from several firms.

In each case, we told the salesperson or proprietor what type of paint we planned to use. In this case, it was a particularly high end paint that is designed to last, even in the hot and humid Atlanta weather where torrential summer thunderstorms are the norm. A keen observer should have learned something from that. We also told each potential bidder which contractors we were talking to. In my opinion, the smartest contractors took the opportunity to compare and contrast their own services with those of their competitors. Obviously, they slanted the analysis in their own favor, but we learned things about each potential vendor in the process that we would not have learned had we not been honest and open on our side.

I also get my fair share of RFPs that I have to respond to. Usually, I will ask for a lot of information. I want to know who I am bidding against.

Why?

Here are a few reasons:

• The group of potential consultants from whom the prospect has chosen to request a proposal tells me something about the company's mindset. It may even tell me that I don't want to bid because it's clear that I have no shot at winning, but have simply received the RFP as a courtesy.
• Ultimately, if I win the bid, I want my client to be happy with the services they receive. For this to happen, it's helpful if I can compare what I have to offer to what my competitors likely have to offer. Of course, I am going to try to use this to my advantage, but my competitors can and should as well. But, from the client's standpoint, this should help them to make a better and more informed choice of consultants.
• I may even make a statement to the prospect to the effect that if they are looking for what I am going to refer to here as style #1, they would be best off with Consultant X, but if style #2 is a better fit for them, then we would have a very good relationship with each other.

The client wins as well. The eventual successful bidder knows things about their client up front. They don't have to burn time and money on the learning process. Because of that and because consultants will be able to make more educated selling decisions, something else important happens that is of benefit to the client.

What's that?

If the consultants who are bidding think they understand the process and really go after the opportunities that they think are the right ones, they will price them more aggressively. That's right; consultants want the work where they know they are the right fit and they will bid more aggressively.

So, with full disclosure, the consultants (or other vendors) win and the clients win. Everybody wins. Isn't that the best result?

Boilerplate Burns -- Why The Low Bidder May Not be the Right One

How do you choose your consultants? Your attorneys? Your accountants? Your other advisers? Price matters, doesn't it? In fact, if you are in the public sector, price is likely the single most important component in your buying decision.

Now put yourself on the other side of the equation. Suppose you are the potential vendor, be it consultant, attorney, accountant, or other adviser. You understand the importance of price in your potential client's buying decision. Therefore, you strive to make one of the lowest bids. Now that you have made that low bid and gotten the work, how are you ever going to make money on the assignment?

Frequently, the answer lies in the dreaded boilerplate. If your prefer, pull something off the shelf. For those of you who abhor consultant-speak, what I'm saying is that the consultant will re-use a document that was already used for another client. Or, worse yet, that consultant will provide you with the same solution that they or a colleague used for another client.

Why would they do this? It saves money. Suppose you have two possible ways to produce a presentation. In the first method, you think long and hard about your client and about your assignment and develop a document that is customized to your client. In the second method, you use one that you used six months ago and change a bullet point here or there to justify your assignment. Which do you think costs more?

Which delivers a better value to your client?

In most cases, I think that the customized solution is the winner from a value standpoint. No two sets of circumstances are the same. And, it's rare that a well-done assignment has cost anywhere near the value of what the vendor is consulting on.

I remember a scandal at one of the large consulting firms back in about 1994 or 1995. It broke when someone internally notified the Wall Street Journal that its consultants in a particular practice were delivering the same work product (with just minor modifications) to every client. It made front page news. If you were on the client side and you hired that firm because the price was right, do you think it was a wise buying decision?

How about the law firm that gave you the lowest bid on drafting plan documents? Don't you think that they have a template that they start from? Suppose what you need is a creative solution and that solution doesn't fit the template? Will the attorney advise you to stick with a solution that fits the template? Or, will they work with you despite their low bid?

Finally, I consider M&A due diligence. That's the process during which a company uses many of its internal resources and engages many outsiders as well at significant expense to ensure that there are no gotchas (at least none for which they are not reasonably compensated) in the company they are buying. How would you choose someone to help you with that process?

To help answer, consider a home buying decision. In some regards, that is like a corporate acquisition. You are negotiating a deal and you are hoping nothing is wrong. To assist you in ensuring that nothing is wrong, you probably engage a home inspector. In the process of deciding which inspector to use, you have some key questions that you want to ask each prospective home inspector.

While not quite a question, here is one that I personally like: "Tell me about deals that you have killed in your home inspection career."

Killing deals takes guts. It doesn't necessarily make either party happy. But, that person is much more likely worth their fee, even if they are not the low bidder.

Tunnel Vision Doesn't Always Work

I've been a consultant for a long time now. While I probably don't read as much of it as I once did, I still read a lot of IRS guidance (I know, that makes me a boring person, but somebody has to do it). In fact, in this business, a lot of us read a lot of IRS guidance, so I guess we are all boring people. But, the point of this post has nothing to do with being boring, it's about solving problems.

You see, lots of IRS guidance is extremely complex. So, there are two ways of reading that guidance -- you can either know the 20% that applies to 80% of the problems, or you can learn the other 80% as well that might apply to the other 20% of the problems.

We get accustomed to solving problems using that first 20% and that's what I am referring to as that tunnel vision. But, for those of us who have learned the rest of the guidance, sometimes we have to look outside that tunnel for a solution.

I've faced such a situation in the last day or two and for obvious reasons, I can't disclose the details. But, without going into any detail, I'll provide an overview.

Client X is reviewing certain of its benefits and compensation programs. They have a very specific problem and they have a pretty good idea what the optimal solution looks like. So, I went back to the law and thought about what its original purpose was. From there, I concluded that if the regulations matched at all with that original intent, then while we might not hit the optimal solution, there should be a big improvement.

Voila, there in the regulations, it looks like there was an answer. But, it wasn't in the 20% that lots of people know. It was in the other 80%. In fact, it was buried about as deeply in the other 80% as one could put it.

Not all of us take the time to read and understand the other 80%. But, if you do, you might as well take the opportunity to use that additional expertise. Perhaps we might say it's where we get by taking a different route -- outside of the tunnel.

HR People and Consultants Can Learn From the Casey Anthony Trial

I know. You read the subject line of this post and the only reason that you made it into the body of the post is you were curious to see just how I have lost my mind. 

I'm not nuts. I swear to you that I have, in fact, not lost my mind. This trial was an exercise in communications. Two teams of attorneys and their various witnesses were communications consultants. They were each communicating to twelve people. And, unlike, you, me, and tens or hundreds of millions of other Americans, those twelve people didn't have any additional communications consultants -- all the talking head attorneys and attorney-wannabes on the various television and radio networks. These twelve clients, if you will, were held captive, largely in front of the communications consultants, for six weeks. They literally lived and breathed this trial.

Let's get back to benefits and compensation -- human resources issues. If you look at the HR press these days, you can find survey after survey about things like employee engagement, dissatisfaction with managers, cuts in benefits that are untenable to employees, workforce reductions, and many more. I say that the companies who score particularly low in these surveys suffer from the same malady as Linda Drane Burdick and Jeff Ashton, the two lead prosecutors in the Casey Anthony case.

Let's consider. [WARNING: There may be lots of cliches in here]

You only get one chance to make a first impression. In the Casey Anthony trial, there were lots of first impressions. There were the opening arguments. There were the beginnings of testimony by witnesses, both fact witnesses and expert witnesses. I heard a litany of legal experts say what a great job the prosecution did of wrapping up the case. I heard that Linda Drane Burdick put the nail in the coffin. Let's go from the courtroom back to the corporation. The jurors (the employees) were so disengaged by then that they already had one foot out the door. 

Consider this. The prosecution put forth more than 400 items of circumstantial evidence. The jury deliberated for about 11 hours. In reality, though, the jury deliberated for less than 6 hours. I say this because they all returned for the second day of deliberation dressed differently. They had their verdicts. They just wanted to be sure.

Let's reconsider. 400 items. 349 minutes of deliberation. That is less than 53 seconds per item of circumstantial evidence. 

Their minds were made up long before the closing arguments. The fact is that once a manager or consultant (prosecuting attorney) has failed to keep an employee (juror) engaged (on their side), that employee (juror) is likely lost.

The defense did not have a great case. The prosecution told us so. They told us that their experts were more believable. They told us that only Casey Anthony had a motive to kill Caylee. But, the case was lost by then.

If you didn't follow the trial at all, you may get a bit lost now, but I will try to tie it together (for all I know, you may be lost already, but I hope not).

The prosecution delivered a long and eloquent opening statement. Nobody quotes from it. Nobody remembers it. Whatever they said, they didn't link everything to their opening statement.

Jose Baez, the lead defense attorney, is not experienced. He began practicing law in 2005. To my understanding, this was his first murder case. His opening statement was not eloquent. But, as hokey as this is going to sound, Jose Baez did something different and, in my opinion, it stuck with the jury because, ultimately, he built his defense around it. He said. "Follow the duct tape."

From a communications/HR/marketing perspective, do you know what he did, on Day One, and thereafter, and constantly? He branded the defense. The defense's brand was simple: Follow the duct tape. The jury could understand this.

The prosecution case was all-encompassing, or overarching if your game of choice is Buzzword Bingo. It went from here to there to everywhere. They presented evidence upon evidence, all sadly circumstantial. But, they didn't have a theme. They didn't have a brand. Their first impression got lost and they didn't reinforce it. 

Much like many modern managers, they knew they were right, and therefore, the messages they were delivering didn't matter. The facts were so compelling that during the defense's closing, prosecutor Jeff Ashton could assuredly snicker.

A friend of mine went through an acquisition recently. Her company was acquired by another company. And, as she told me, right from the get-go, it was all about the new company. It was never about her ... or her colleagues from the old company. That was all ancient history. She got lost on the first impression ... and so did the acquisition.

OK, smart guy. You've written paragraph on paragraph, what would you have done differently [speaking to self]?

This was a circumstantial case. Everybody knows this. So, of the 400+ pieces of evidence, many (let's say 100) pointed to Casey Anthony as the killer with a very high degree of certainty -- for the sake of argument, let's say 95%. Frankly, though, a 95% likelihood that Casey Anthony murdered her daughter probably should constitute reasonable doubt.

So, what should the prosecution have done differently? I have an opinion, but you already knew that, didn't you. The prosecution needed to brand it's case as "The Sum of All Parts." In their opening statement, they should have said that this was a circumstantial case (I think they did). They should have said that the jurors (employees) were about to hear 400+ pieces of evidence that each, with a high degree of certainty, tie the murder to Casey. Of them, maybe 100 of those 400+ would each tie to Casey with about 95% certainty.

So, let's explain, in our opening statement, to the jurors how the Sum of All Parts works. 95%. That's 1 in 20. That is the same as me asking you to pick a number that I have in my head between 1 and 20 and guessing correctly. That's reasonable, isn't it? It might happen.

OK. So you got the first number correct. Now do it again. Hmm. That's pretty tough, isn't it? Now, let's see you do it 100 times in a row. Is it reasonable to think that you could do that 100 times in a row. We're going to bring on an expert later to show you just how difficult it is to do that 100 times in a row. That means that the likelihood that someone else could have done this is so small (it's a number with a decimal point followed by approximately 130 zeroes before you get a non-zero digit) that it fails to constitute reasonable doubt.

Back to my brand -- the Sum of All Parts. 

So, you start out with a brand, or a message, if you prefer. You explain in the beginning how it is going to work. And, you enforce it. And, you reinforce it. And, you make it believable.

If your brand relates to a wellness program, sell it on Day One. And, keep the message going. Don't let it leave the minds of your employees (jurors). Don't confuse them with a can of stink (if you're not familiar with the trial, that won't make sense) or with the pay raises that you plan to give when the company returns to profitability. 

Look at all the most powerful brands. They never leave their messages. Coke has been "the real thing" for years. UPS asked us "what can Brown do for you?". In it's most golden years, FedEx told us "if it absolutely positively has to be there overnight." Nike just gave us its swoosh.

Linda Drane Burdick and Jeff Ashton gave the jurors lots of powerful evidence, but it wasn't tied together. Jose Baez didn't give the jurors a whole lot, but he did give them a brand. In my opinion, that brand sat in their subconscious and he didn't let it go. Way back in May, he asked them to "follow the duct tape" and that was his case. It planted reasonable doubt that the prosecution, having the means to overcome, unwittingly chose not to.

So, Casey Anthony walks. And, if you (the employer) don't communicate any better to your jurors (employees), so will they.

Something to do During the Lazy Hazy Crazy Benefits Days of Summer

In my experience as a consultant, summer tends to be a time for corporate HR departments to regroup. There are lots of vacations. Government filings aren't due yet. It's not quite time to panic to prepare next year's budget. Open enrollment is far enough away that you may not have started your communications process. And, in this economy, most companies aren't doing a whole lot of hiring, so there is not much new employee orientation to do.

So, this is your opportunity to sit back and chill, right?

Well, it could be, but I have another idea. If my war stories are anything like yours, then this will resonate. Assuming all plans and fiscal years are calendar year, you may have these deadlines (among others) on the retirement side coming up:

• FY 2012 budgets in July or August
• Forms 5500 by October 15
• Nondiscrimination testing by the time Form 5500 is filed

Consider this. Most every company has the same deadlines. And, most every company gets their requests in to their consultants at about the same time -- at the last minute. Now, that's fine for you, as you are a really important client (everybody knows they are, though), but think about the other side of it. If your consultant is doing 10 tests at once, helping with 10 budgets at once, and assisting with 50 Forms 5500 at once, here is a likely outcome:

• They work less efficiently as they are jumping from one assignment to another
• Staffing is not ideal, and unwittingly, you might be the one who gets the inexperienced person assigned to your account
• The outcome may not be as you hope, but you don't really leave time to fix it

Kudos to a company whose VP-Finance and Administration called me yesterday. Their qualified plan nondiscrimination testing is due October 15. They want to start next week. Past history tells us that their process is complex, Hopefully, they will pass, but you never know with this particular company. If they do not pass, though, they will have time to evaluate their options and develop the optimal solution, instead of panicking and grabbing any old solution.

It's not just testing, though, it could relate to all of these projects. If you start now, you will have eager consultants. They will jump on the work. They will let you know right away if something is missing, or if there are any complications. Your life, ultimately, will be easier.

You think I am wrong that your consultants will jump on this work? If that's the case, call us; we'll work with you to make your life easier.

Are Your Consultants Getting It Right? Ask Another Consultant to Check for You.

Are your retirement plan consultants doing a good job? How do you know? Are the fees they are charging you fair? How do you know?

The answers to those questions, in reality, for most companies, are probably a consistent "I don't know", or "I hope so." The fact is that much like relationships with audit firms prior to Sarbanes-Oxley, the typical company has no way of knowing. Oh, they know if there is a disaster, but beyond that, they really don't know if they are getting quality service or high value for the fees that they pay.

Do you? I didn't think so. I bet that you would like to know how to find out.

Perhaps, in the long run, you will save money and get better value from your consulting relationship by engaging a consultant to monitor, or at least review your consultants. Sounds counterintuitive, huh? It is, but if you really think about it, it makes sense.

Essentially what you are doing is finding a consultant who will agree to not seek your ongoing work, but whose purpose is to review the quality and the value of the work that you are actually getting from your actual consultants. If done properly, such a review should be able to answer these questions:

• Are your consultants following accepted professional standards of practice?
• Are they holding to their fee agreements with you?
• Are their fees fair?
• Is the work that they do for you accurate and complete?
• Is the work technically sound? Have any consulting letters explored all the issues, or simply given you the same solution, packaged very slightly differently, that they give to all their clients?
• Are appropriate levels of consultants servicing your account? In other words, is the team too top-heavy, too bottom-heavy, or about right?
• Is the relationship still fresh? Often times, teams that have seen no change do not bring you new ideas?
• What are their other clients saying about them that is particularly good or bad? Would you agree with the good things? Have you seen the bad things? If not, are they not present on your account, or are they just doing a good job of hiding them?

Based on feedback from clients, you see much more variability with the larger firms. Are you getting the A team or the C team? Don't you think it's time you found out?