I Was a Teen-Age Consultant

...He wanted me to charge my time to DOE...

...DOE paid for the full-time work of myself, another researcher, and a company vice president who was supposed to manage the project...

...After I returned from a workshop in Boston, the vice president called me into his office and asked if I had expense receipts for my meals...

...So while I was being paid $63 a day, the firm was charging the government $152 a day for my services...

...It was an effort for him to keep up this facade, but he did his best...

...Other firms where I've worked offer bonuses to employees who can write winning proposals...

...A friend of mine works for a firm that issues its employees t-shirts emblazoned with the corporation's name to arouse company spirit during proposal season...

...The memo also recommended full exploitation of the firm's existing government market, including use of contract overruns, follow-on proposals, and other tricks of the trade...

...The latter figure was calculated by government auditors, who discovered that the overhead charges had been bolstered by the rents on two townhouses and a long-term lease on a Cadillac for the firm's president...

...I asked if the firm billed the government for a 40-hour week...

...The agency will never know...

...Many lowerlevel employees leave the industry, to be replaced by the new, inexperienced recruits who make up most of the "experts" sold to the agencies...

...They did-but I quickly found out that the actual time worked on a project bore little relation to the amount of time billed to the government...

...He was preoccupied with what he called "Big Bucks"-his term for the new contracts then coming out of the antipoverty programs...

...In most consulting firms, time spent developing new business is routinely charged to government projects...

...The outstanding characteristic of almost all these proposals is that they oversell, presenting an exaggerated portrait of the organization, its past achievements, and the experience of its personnel...

...My initial employer was a 40-person firm with what looked like a secure future...

...1 did my job conscientiously, typing reports on Thai insurgency and a "feasibility study" on the economics of putting a motel in an Arkansas cave, assisting in one of the remaining civil defense projects by drawing circles on a map of Detroit to depict the damage radius from a hypothetical nuclear blast...

...The executives scurried about in closeddoor meetings, writing confidential memos to each other about the cash shortage...

...As one agency official told me, "We've already spent half a million dollars on the project, why stop now...

...There were always one or two more consultants brought along on these trips than were necessary-although the work was spread around so that everyone had a little bit to do...

...The idea, of course, is to promise everything the government wants to hear, and, especially in the rush before proposal deadlines, statements are made and certifications are signed with little regard for their truth...

...When I asked why, he said it was nothing for me to worry about, just an internal matter...

...For example, the government may ask the names ofa proposal's authors...

...It made the partners desperate for ways to generate cash to pay their debts and maintain their salaries...

...The company was paid for its work and continues to this day to consult for AID and other federal agencies...

...Despite AID's assistance, the company was unable to complete the study to the agency's satisfaction, and today AID does not like to acknowledge that the project ever existed...

...I would cull the resume for some trace of the target topic...

...Still, for a newcomer like me, consulting seemed like important, high-level work...

...Gradually 1 became immersed in the consultant's world of proposals and contracts, where you are valued if you keep yourself billable and sanctified if you develop new business...

...When we traveled to the workshops (where the DOE rep would give a short talk describing the government's energy program), we ate only at the best restaurants...

...In practice, ..ye two researchers did most of the work, while the VP spent most of his time writing proposals for new contracts and handling finances for a half-dozen other government projects...

...If the proposed staff for the project are different from the authors-a dilemma that last season confronted one firm I know of-it's easy to lie about who wrote the proposal...

...The DOE man, after all, had arranged the contract, and it was clear that he expected to enjoy his fair share of the expense funds...

...Everyone in the company understood that what mattered most was assuring that dollars would continue to flow our way...

...My first boss was a graduate of Harvard Business School and Georgetown Law who ran his own "profit center" of economists, engineers, and MBAs within the larger firm...

...Later the VP returned from a workshop I'd missed, complaining that all his free time had been spent chauffeuring the DOE rep and his consultant girlfriend to restaurants and discos in a rented car...

...When I refused, I was also dismissed...

...For this trip, he only submitted receipts to match meals I'd actually eaten -but I wondered if that was always the case...

...involved in a major project for HUD to assess housing needs of senior citizens in eight cities...

...It made me wonder about the quality of the financial advice and "economic feasibility studies" we provided to minority businesses...

...It's a frenzied time within the firms, with a strong competitive atmosphere...

...The company successfully milked it by assigning more staff to the project, destroying work that had already been done, repeating the work, and writing new reports...

...when I found it I would build the employee's professional career around it...

...DOE blessed the company with a follow-on contract the same year...

...I was told to pretend that the fired staff was stilI on board and even available for new assignments...

...In due course, AID agreed to an "amendment" to the contract, which had the simultaneous effect of reducing the project's scope while increasing its duration and cost...

...I have worked for consulting firms with effective overhead rates ranging from 35 percent to 170 percent of salary...

...For example, when I earned an annual salary of $16,500, my firm charged 125 percent for overhead, plus a five-to-ten percent fee on top of that...

...I Was a Teen-Age Consultant by Diane Cleemput 1 got my first job with a consulting firm in 1967, at the age of 19, and I've worked in the industry ever since...

...This was not so unusual...

...I didn't, so he pulled out a handy supply of blank restaurant receipts from his desk drawer, explaining that he liked to cover everything...

...It's not my glowing personality they wanted," he lamented, "but my credit cards...

...It seems the partners were making money at consulting, but were taking a bath on a series of bad investments...

...overheads, and selling them to Uncle Sam at prime rates is the key to high consulting profits...

...This particular VP was an introvert, but the company made sure he dressed in fashionable suits, drove a Porsche, and had the money and credit to entertain in style...

...Marketing training" sessions are held and pep talks given frequently...

...Proposal season comes at the end of the fiscal year, when consulting firms try to grab their share of the government's unused funds...

...Miscellaneous trinkets like health club memberships, and even a pair of Gucci shoes (to cope with those long HEW corridors) were also billed as overhead...

...My boss would tell me which resumes to include, and I had to rewrite each one to slant it toward the subject matter of the project...

...To replace these workers, management would sell themselves to the government at higher rates, along with a new staff composed of what they termed "goats," people with little or no government experience who could provide most of the daily labor and be molded into any type of "expert," as trends in federal spending dictated...

...The company falsified employee time records to back up its phony billings...

...responsible for managing a large data base on the demographic and social characteristics of older Americans...

...We have no working hours," I was told...

...Their coinoperated dry-cleaning chain in Italy was in ruins, and their canning factory in Cleveland was of questionable value,as were the sporting goods and music store chains...

...A recent college graduate who had spent three months coding data for a study of housing for the elderly, for example, might be transformed into a specialist on aging, emerging from my typewriter having "considerable experience in programs for the elderly...

...One such assignment was a contract my first employer had with AID to design a way of evaluating programs for feeding children in developing countries...

...The object of the game is simply to win as many contracts as possible by writing as many proposals as possible...

...On accepting the job, I asked about working hours...

...I worked on the study for several years, gathering data in three foreign nations, writing a comparison of the programs, and preparing a computer run to analyze the data...

...The executives developed a "retrenchment program," which involved the firing of about two thirds of the line employees, including "key personnel" promised to the government in the contracts...

...This meant they would charge clients three times salary...

...Nevertheless, he had swallowed his pride and done hisjob well...

...For example, I was asked by the vice president to revise my time sheet for a week that had been spent on a Small Bus\ness Administration contract...

...The vice president and the DOE rep would joke about who would pay for the meal, but the VP always paid...

...Eventually I received an offer to be a research associate with a management consulting firm in Georgetown...

...I also learned that one of the company's project managers had discovered time for several nonexistent employees on his monthly invoices to the Community Services Administration...

...This basic arithmetic explains the talk, at one firm where I worked, of searches for "warm bodies" to include in contract proposals, searches accompanied by the incessant reshuffling of employees...

...Higher level employees, eager to make the arithmetic work for them, often go into consulting for themselvesforming new firms, or, increasingly, becoming consultants to consultants...

...From its offices in downtown Washington, within sight of the White House, it viewed government solely as a vast market, and had successfully ridden the tide of federal spending from the space and civil defense programs of the late 50s to the War on Poverty in the 60s...

...Recently, both AID and the Department of Agriculture announced new projects worth several million dollars to "evaluate child feeding programs...

...One of my earliest jobs was writing the resumes to accompany the proposals...

...Budgets were made up and professional time was billed according to the needs of the firm...

...Despite these revenue-generating plans, expenses had to be cut...

...One of our projects for DOE was to conduct workshops on energy conservation for small businesses around the country...

...What of the nutrition contract that I was on the verge of finishing...

...His primary task as manager of our project was "client relations" -in this case catering to the travel and recreational needs of DOE's technical representative...

...It also explains why those employees, who perform most of the contract tasks, but who sense that the government may not be overly concerned with how it spends its money, tend to lose their initial idealism about their work and quit...

...The climax of these efforts was-and still is-''proposal season...

...Hiring employees cheap, tacking on bi8...

...After I was fired I decided to continue in consulting, more cautious this time about choosing an employer...

...One popular idea was to exploit new markets with Washington law firms, international agencies, and "the Arabs," a strategy one memo described as "the development of a major third business that has maximum synergy and a 3.0 multiple...

...Then my firm hit hard times...

...I warned the officials at AID who had funded the contract, but I was told that the company could not be told how to carry out its assignments...

...It was now 1978 and, appropriately, my assignment was to work on an energy conservation project for the Department of Energy...

...Although many of my consulting assignments have been frivolous, once in a while 28 a project comes along that seems worthwhile...