Many companies are starting to have a healthy skepticism about the benefits of engaging consulting firms rather than hiring and developing internal staff. When fees run high, communication is strained, and problems persist, something about the arrangement is obviously not working.

Pat Lynes, a business transformation consultant who interviewed over 100 executives for his latest book, The Interim Revolution, recently wrote an article highlighting the reasons why organizational leaders are losing faith in management consulting. Many cited the challenge of working with a third party that doesn’t necessarily align with their company culture or values. Others shared fears of consultancies failing to fix problems in a timely manner in order to drag out the length – and increase the profit – of the partnership.

While reading this article, we were reminded of why we started Harmony in the first place. We wanted to offer our clients the proficiency of a large industry expert with the agility and lower cost of a smaller company. The reality of hiring tier one consultant groups is that they tend to send their lower-level employees to the majority of their clients. At Harmony, we are able to bring Fortune 100 C-level business and technology expertise to all of our clients and have someone on-site in hours rather than weeks.

We’re experts at assembling teams to solve complex issues and showing results far more quickly than an internal team could. We can also do it with more flexibility. Not too long ago, we had an executive call us on a Friday night after finding issues with a complicated IT program. They asked us to have three people on the ground to tackle the crisis on Monday morning. We delivered. That team is still there, our client loves them, and they’ve had positive feedback from their own customers as well. Few consulting firms could pull that off, and that example isn’t the first time we’ve done that for a client.

Harmony’s mission has always been to support our clients’ business goals, and we approach every project with the goal of being done at some point. We always ask for team members to work alongside so we can teach them everything they need to know to manage the program better in the long-term – without us.

Incidentally, our business model is the one that Lynes foresees as the future of management consulting: all-hands-on-deck problem-solving, project-focused, and results-driven. To us, it’s just the right way to serve our clients. At the end of the day, our work is about bringing harmony to your business. We do that by working in harmony with your team to solve the complex business challenges that come your way.

We believe healthy skepticism is good for any business to have. It also presents us with an opportunity to show you the Harmony difference.