If you’re paying attention to the national political scene these days (it’s certainly hard to avoid it) you probably know that Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25th. I confess I didn’t listen to any of it, but something popped up on my LinkedIn feed from the interview—a snippet of Rogan and Trump discussing how environmental consultants “…profit off of dragging out (the permitting) process…” For a roughly one-minute bit of the discussion, head here:
The type of environmental business line they were discussing is the world of Phase I Environmental Site Assessments (ESAs), which is very prominent in the real estate lending world (thus coming up in a discussion with Trump). While it’s not what I do today, about two years into my career I took my first job in consulting—with a company that did Phase I ESAs. What I do now is air dispersion modeling.
Seeing this clip and reading some posts about it got me thinking. First, as a consultant it probably comes as no surprise to anybody that I’m in business to make money. The way I make money is by helping my clients—and sometimes that means steering them in a direction that means less work for me in the short term (e.g., recommending they make a change that avoids needing to conduct modeling, or tweaking my modeling analysis such that they don’t have to do a larger/more expensive analysis). To do otherwise would be unethical, and while I’m not trying to brag that’s just not who I am. But even if you wanted to put the ethics aside I still think that’s a dumb way to do business—okay, maybe I could squeeze a bit more money out of a client in the here and now by “tricking them” into unnecessary modeling, but once the word got out that I did that sort of thing I’d be (deservedly so) blackballed. Being known as a consultant that doesn’t look out for his client’s interests is a reputation I don’t want.
All that said, sadly I’ve certainly seen instances in which modelers have “dragged things out” for their own short-term benefit. Sometimes there can be a choice of a shorter/cheaper option and a longer/more expensive option, and a consultant will choose the longer/more expensive approach. Not “wrong” per se, but not in the client’s best interest. But perhaps the most common way I’ve seen to drag out a modeling analysis is to put a team of modelers on a project when it’s just not necessary. You end up with some senior modelers tacking on billable hours for unnecessary meetings, but the worst offense is you can get entry-level modelers charging a bunch of time to basically get paid for on-the-job training at the expense of a client. I’ve got no problem with young modelers doing work (heck, I was one once up on a time), but they need to be carefully supervised so that they don’t go down an unnecessary path that ultimately gets billed to a client—or, in the worst case scenario, submit an analysis to a regulator that ends up being exposed as wrong.
However, I should add a postscript to this: when it comes to dragging out the permitting process I think the worst offender is not consultants but rather an unnecessarily burdensome regulatory process. But that is a topic for another day…
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