I’ve been off the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been adjusting to working full time and finally finishing this business plan consulting project which has been eating up my free time.

So here’s an update:

After a lot of powerpointing we got our division approved. My two partners and I are now officially a strategic consulting team. We’re hiring four more people who will come in over the summer, and we have our work cut out for us.

We are stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Large Vietnamese firms and international firms operating in Vietnam already have have a bunch of consultants from the big law firms, funds, and international consulting agencies running around. Plus, most of their staff have a lot more experience than we do. Small and medium sized Vietnamese firms on the other hand often don’t really understand what consulting is and whatever it is they don’t have much interest in paying for it.

This leaves us with a very narrow band of potential clients: up-and-coming mid sized Vietnamese firms that are hip to the idea of consulting and aspire to be a bit more up to international standards, but don’t really have the resources to pay for fancy real consultants and are willing to give a chance to a couple of white kids in their early 20s.

This all begs the question of “what exactly do we do anyway?”, and we’re still in the process of answering that for ourselves. From our point of view it’s  basically anything we can get people to pay us for and actually do a good job on.

externally the answer is going to be something like:

“[Our division] works together with top management teams, boards, and investors to create the detailed analysis, long term strategies, and practical plans needed by firms to survive and to thrive in Vietnam. We provide external, objective advice offered from an independent perspective that successful firms rely on to help direct and validate their strategy.

Our international team brings the tools and best practices used by the world’s leading organizations to tackle the specific objectives of our clients. Then, by combining the resources of Thang Long Securities and Military Bank with our network of partners, we facilitate the implementation of these new plans, ensuring that they translate into real world results.”

What I wish we could just say is “Look, if your firm is having some sort of a problem that you’re not sure how to deal with, why not let us come in and take a crack at it? We’re relatively cheap, we’re smart, and we might have a different approach than you.”

Once we get good enough at making this argument we’ll have to deal with what happens when it actually works. It’s not that we’re useless, far from it, it’s just that most of our skills are very direct and analytical. We’re good at economics, which is to say that we’re good at running big sets of numbers through excel, pulling out some key ratios, running a a couple of regressions, and figuring out what causes what.

I’ve been doing the opposite kind of research lately. I’ve just been running around and meeting with everyone who will take the time to see me at funds, law firms, commercial organizations, and every company we have any sort of relationship with, and just having lunch with people and picking their brains about business in Vietnam.

What I’m figuring out about Vietnam is that solid, reliable data to analyze and to base your decisions on is very hard to come by. Because of this, and just because of the culture, a lot of decision making is very informal. Deals get made because of who knows who and on the whims of whoever owns the company

What I’m learning is that while in a place like Vietnam, because there aren’t as many qualified people, it’s more easy to jump right into doing something at a high level. The counterbalance to that is because there is so much informality it takes a really long time to actually figure out what’s going on and how to get things done.

All of the macroeconomic reports and estimates these days are guessing that Vietnam will snap out of its economic funk around the end of 2009, which should also be right about when we can expect to really get this consulting thing off the ground, and right about when I expect to really get a good sense of how to operate in this environment.

The end of 2009 is also about the very latest possible time that I plan to be leaving Vietnam.

Still, by that time I probably will have learned a lot about informal and intuitive information gathering and how to navigate through subtle social and political constructs to get stuff done as an outsider.

I figure that will be a valuable skill set when doing business back in the developed world where everyone else is just running the numbers.

Hopefully. Or maybe I’ll just get fat.

Woo!

Until then, here’s a sneak preview of Vietnam’s hottest new strategic consulting team: