What my father taught me …
To all those just visiting this website for the first time welcome!
As I have said in my website in a few places I would like to use this section not only to share my experiences in The Industry but my life experiences as well. I want to show my potential clients who the man is behind the experience. I also hope that my experiences will inspire and encourage everyone who reads these posts. Even my competitors! We’re all in it together even though we compete for business.
The first thing I would like to share is my inspiration. The Industry was not something I fell into. I chose this industry. Being in it was a dream come true because instead of doing something for the few I had potential to help the masses. This is not a job, it is a career and a passion for me.
Consulting was a choice that I eventually came to for many different reasons. Primarily, it is to carry on a legacy of sorts. Thus far in my career I have followed in my father’s foot steps. He was a Biochemist by training (which is actually how he introduced himself when someone asked him what he did for a living … I always had to laugh a little bit at that) who worked in many quality roles in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
When downsizing hit in the 80’s, he became one of the masses that had a really hard time finding a job in the middle of one of the worst recessions since the mid-70’s. This was until he had a conversation with one of my school friend’s fathers who worked in the jewelry district in New York City. He knew my father was a chemist and wanted some advice on electroplating.
He gave such a good explanation that Gary, the friend’s father, suggested that he help out some of his people, who ran into similar problems. After a bit of reading he decided to stick his neck out and start George A. Ben, Consulting Chemist.
Gary gave him a couple of names to start with, but there was a lot of door pounding and long days trying to get clients. It was hard trying to get a business going in such a tight-knit group of businesses. My father then got his first break with a gentleman called Vrej. Vrej was a client of my father until he retired and got him many leads since.
It was all history after that. Five clients became twenty. Twenty became a hundred. By the time my father retired, he had a large client base ranging from two-employee mom and pop shops to establishments with forty-plus employees that supplied such well-known names as Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany’s. All were loyal customers until the day he retired.
Aside from supplying electroplating solutions, setting up operations for electroplating, and general maintenance of those systems, his real business started one day when a client called him frantic and afraid. The client was from one of the former Soviet Republics (I’m going to say Armenia for the sake of argument. Many of his customers were Armenian).
Apparently, an inspector from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection stormed into their very small establishment and issued a ticket for discharging Mercury into the waste water. Mercury??? The only substance they discharged was gold sweeps, and the occasional trace of Cyanide as a by product of gold bombing.
He calmed the customer down and (as always) read more into the regulations. Apparently they require that these small shops set up a testing program and submit the results to the DEP on a regular basis. VERY expensive. This meant hiring expensive engineering consultants and performing very expensive heavy metals testing. These engineers charged anywhere between $400 and $600 an hour.
Long story short, he helped them set up the testing for his usual fee of $120 and hour. Not only that, he followed through and went to court for these people. This brought him some steady business until he effectively eliminated his job by helping pass federal regulation excluding requirements for testing for these jewelry shops.
That is just a short list of accomplishments for him. One thing he always said to me was “Michael, you will NEVER inherit this business. This business is done when I retire.”
In recent time my thoughts have wandered to my father as my boys grow older, and what he did for these clients. I remember all of the times we had going to visit his clients. Catching the Shortline at 7 am, when I was barely awake and having him drag me at least 20 city blocks to see his clients. I went because it was a good time. I got to know all of his clients and admittedly, he liked to show me off and say “My son is graduating RPI”. This sounds bad, but most of his clients had sons and daughters that were going to Brown, Coopers Union, NYU, and Yale. He was proud of me.
I was never able to appreciate any of it until I had some bad experiences with consultants in my former jobs. Experiences that brought me within an inch of my sanity. It was because my father taught me too well as to what a good consultant was. Let’s back up a bit.
First thing my father told me was this: these guys could buy their Rhodium from about five other suppliers that sold it cheaper. They didn’t buy his Rhodium, they bought him. Most of those suppliers dropped the Rhodium off and ran. There was no one that would stick around and actually set up the bath and teach everyone how to use it and maintain it. On top of that, he would check on them every once in a while even if they weren’t going to buy anything. He went so far as to learn some Spanish to be able to communicate with some of the workers that didn’t speak a word of English.
He also knew everything about his customers. How many kids they had, all their employees’ names, what they did for a hobby, what their politics were, where they were from … everything. It was effortless to him, and amazing to me everytime I saw it.
He was also fair when it came to charging his customers. It was $120 an hour, no matter what needed to be done. Phone calls and surprise visits were free. Even his time to go to Flushing, Queens to plead their case to the DEP was also free. If anyone knows NYC, that 7 Train is a long ride, and kind of risky to be in after the meetings were over at 11 pm. But he did it.
He wasn’t even too disappointed when the federal legislation was passed. It was almost as if he persued what was right, not what made him money. Integrity and ethical practice was something that was important.
As my thoughts turned to him, I wanted to do the same thing. To help that guy who has an idea their product to market by having them start at the beginning. To help someone who inherited a mess make sense about it.
So here I am.
Tags: Consulting, ethics, Uncategorized