Can I talk to you about making my proprietary content more open source?
Absolutely! Moving to a more open source model can open up huge opportunities for enhancing both your brand and profitability of your content. If you are the author or primary rights holder of your content, we’d be happy to speak with you. Click here for our contact information.
Every project we work on is unique to the company and its people, however our process is fairly straightforward.
We start by taking a snapshot of your company and quantifying what has typically been unquantifiable - the "soft", forward-looking metrics of your organization that deal with your Market Intelligence, Brand, Operations, and Talent and identify opportunities and barriers to growth. The results of this snapshot dictate the next steps, which may be looking closer at your manufacturing processes, your sales activities/performance, or your talent development, as examples, depending on what the data indicates.
We then work with your executive team in preparing a detailed strategy to remove any barriers and put your company in a position to fully capitalize on opportunities for growth. This strategy is directly linked to "hard" metrics through extensive discussions and 1:1 with your CFO.
Finally, we work with your organization to embed this knowledge into your company going forward and continously raise its "GrowthIQ" in the months and years to follow. Your company is then supported by our library of best practices, job aids, and direct access to our experts who can help answer those future questions that may come up from time to time.
How do you work with consultants who use your services?
We begin by getting a very detailed understanding of your offer from both a sales and an implementation perspective.
We will then link your best practices to those in our database (or add them, where required), and then begin the process of creating customized assessments and job aids for you. Once that step is completed, we will run a "beta test" online for a select group of your clients to test the new product. A second and possibly third pass is completed, and the products then become ready to go live.
It is important to note here that "customized" means completely customized to you and your brand. Nowhere is AKLabs mentioned or displayed in any collateral that your client may see, unless at your discretion.
If you are "open source", why do you have proprietary solutions?
There is great proprietary content out there; we just disagree with the model that many intellectual property owners use to distribute and manage it. More specific to the question, we have both proprietary and non-proprietary solutions for the following reasons:
Although all AKLabs products are free from copyright restriction (except where use of our own brand is concerned), we respect the right to pursue closed intellectual property and never infringe on it. We are not in business to imitate or duplicate proprietary products and instead just make it better.
Where we do have proprietary offerings, we only deal with them at the founder level – i.e. we have relationships with the thought leaders who invented the model, tool, or content. Any proprietary offering we work with must meet the other conditions of our business model, such as:
It must be affordable to all sizes of business.
It must be based on non-proprietary Best Practices.
It must be customizable and able to be integrated with other proprietary/non-proprietary models, tools, or content.
It must be able to exist as a stand-alone product.
Our products are designed to work with, not against, existing proprietary solutions. This takes into account many of our clients and partners have preferred materials and vendors. We also believe it is unrealistic to think that only one vendor would exist in any workplace. Even the biggest training and consulting firms have incomplete offers – it is impossible to do everything well. Because of this, we create and use products which are meant to complement and enhance what is in use and invite opportunities to be exposed to other proprietary beyond our offer.
If you say your products compete with those offered at the Fortune 500-level, why would you be selling them for such a low price?
Our passion is for small and mid-sized companies, the core of our economy and job creation. We believe the barrier to the best information, knowledge, and insight on how to grow is price and not available to those who need it the most – the small to medium-sized organization. We saw this irony and could have created yet another standardized, cookie-cutter offering, but instead decided to create a business model that would make customized, Fortune 500-level expertise affordable. By the same token, large organizations shouldn’t pay more just because of their size. Even at this low price, we are highly profitable and can provide exceptional returns to both our clients and our investors.
My company consults on best practices in a particular area and we have an assessment, how do I know that FORECAST won’t compete with it?
FORECAST was designed to inform, diagnose, and recommend, it does not continue into the implementation stage. If your assessment is focused on a particular area (such as technology or financials), your assessment and FORECAST can work together. FORECAST will expand on those other areas which impacts the success of your implementation. For instance, successfully installing a CRM/ERP solution requires alignment between market intelligence, operations, and talent. There is no CRM/ERP assessment we’ve found that effectively measures these three areas well enough to ensure a successful implementation.
If you have a specific assessment designed for a particular area, market, or industry, we invite an open discussion to see how the two assessments can work together. We are constantly improving our library of best practices and if yours are suitable, it could mean an additional royalty or revenue stream for you.
Our standard assessments start at $125USD (micro) and $250USD (macro) and then go down in price from there based on volume.
Our custom assessments start at $5,000USD for construction, testing, and administration. Pricing from there is then based on a mix between cost of services and volume.
All other services (ex: facilitation, executive coaching, instructional design, consulting services) are handled through our Script4Growth and CGO4Hire services and start at $2,500USD and $5,000USD, respectively.
Many best practice solutions out there are “conveniently” designed to identify (or worse, create) gaps in an organization so they can sell their real offer; a solution looking for a problem.
By “universal” best practices, we mean best practices which are not tied to any particular methodology or proprietary model and are applicable to any business regardless of age, size, or industry. Although no business is ever “perfect”, it is quite feasible that our assessments may identify no significant gaps in best practices to those organizations who are running near perfect which speaks a lot to the assessment’s validity.
You mention that you partner with local consultants, organizations, and universities. Do you ever sell direct?
If we are contacted by an organization where we have no local channel representation, we take the relationship as far as administering our FORECAST Assessment and then seek out like-minded practitioners in the local market to take over any on-site consulting or implementation work required. Our business model is to remain behind the scenes and keep our products non-proprietary, affordable, and easy to distribute. We never compete with our channel partners.
Your FORECAST Macro Assessment appears to cover four main areas: Market Intelligence, Brand & Strategy, Operations, and Talent, yet my consulting practice only deals with Talent. Why would I want to introduce an assessment that identifies areas of need that is outside my offer?
Two reasons. For one, success in an organization is always dependent upon everything working well together. The four constructs mentioned above are interconnected and yet stand alone. It helps someone focused strictly on Talent (either as a consultant or internal HR professional) to know whether there are Brand issues which affects the quality of candidates submitting themselves for hire, or Operations issues which affect their productivity, or Market issues which could affect retention. FORECAST does that for you.
For another, it can be of great service to your client to identify improvement areas they might not have otherwise foreseen. Example: if they thought they simply had a customer service or retention problem but it turned out to be more of an issue of congruency between corporate and personal values. Our experience has been that they will thank you for identifying those areas and increase their level of trust. It will also give you the opportunity to expand your own personal network by recommending or partnering with someone with a different area of expertise.
