-: My name is Rylan Grady,
and I am a consultant.
I run my own management consulting business.
We provide consulting solutions
in HR and Sales.
So that's stuff related to your sales organization,
compensation, talent planning, that kind of thing.
I work with 3 or 4 clients right now,
some large companies,
a large asset management firm doing compensation design
for some of their investment professionals.
I'm working with one of the largest oil and gas companies,
working on their sales organization as well.
There's usually a interview process
with some of the stakeholders
or the manager that brings me on.
I typically work with people who have titles
like Senior Manager or Director,
so probably not the C-suite,
but folks who have particular scopes or projects
where they know something is wrong,
and they're hiring me to both evaluate that,
make a recommendation, and start to try to work on
implementing a solution.
Consultants are often...
You think of them as player-coaches, right?
You coach them, and you do a little bit of the work.
Show them how it's done,
and then you continue on.
I do project-based work,
so it tends to be anywhere from two to six months,
and then a lot of that ends up just rolling into retainers.
One of the things about consulting
is you've already invested a certain amount of time,
and it's easy to scale up or down
how much services you want,
so you're able to just keep someone
on a retainer or an hourly rate and say,
"Oh, I want you to come in for this week,"
and that's kind of how the projects go.
Again, I do a couple of different things.
In the compensation area,
some of the key workflows involved in that are,
first of all, understanding how your overall total rewards,
so pay, benefits, compares to your competitors,
so generally, you have a sense
for what you bring to the table
in terms of for your employees,
and compensation consulting involves
getting a sense just for...
in terms of pay levels where we're at
and then, the mechanics of actually compensating people.
How much is in bonus?
How are you setting goals for that bonus?
How much differentiation
between superstars and mediocre performers do you want?
That kind of thing.