Cost Savings
Outsourcing OD can potentially reduce costs in many ways. In practice, paying one full time “OD” professional to do the variety of tasks required for your organization’s success would be very costly. If we were to estimate the base salary of such a professional at approximately $120,000, plus benefits of roughly $30,000 as well as the immeasurable liability associated with any FTE (full-time employee), we could state that the cost to the organization is at least $150,000 annually. To get this person up to speed, provide resources, and to then hire a staff around this person simply adds to the cost. Additionally, a single consultant cannot possibly provide the diversity of thought, breadth of knowledge, or bandwidth that our firm could bring. It is our experience that with a retainer fee model, you will reduce your fixed cost far below $150,000 per year, acquire talent with a wealth of our firm’s resources, and benefit the organization far greater than with just one FTE.

Consulting Expertise and Diversity in Thought
Our team is made up of senior consultants and experienced business professionals, who have passion in bringing resources to clients to create positive changes in organizations, teams, and individuals. We are executives, managers, PhD’s, MBA’s, and seasoned professionals with specific areas of technical expertise from our varied backgrounds. (See the Biographical Sketches of Brainard Strategy Consultants).

We bring business savvy and consultation to you in a creative and practical way to create sustainable change. We do this by assisting our clients:

• Define : Frame the right issues.
• Diagnose : Identify practical, focused, robust methodology.
• Analyze : Evaluate with you to interpret the best course of action.
• Implement : Create change using “best-in-class” and in some cases “proprietary” methods and tools in creative and practical ways. Our implementation steps will be catered to your organization’s situation, culture, context, and maturational cycle.
• Measure : Create “success metrics” as a part of our project planning and be held accountable for performance on the agreed upon metrics in all cases. Why create change or improvement if it is not measurable?
• Reinforce : Sustain the organization’s team or individually improved performance. While this is often a challenge, our “systems thinking” approach is influential in identifying ways to reinforce and maintain performance improvement.

Intellectual Property
Our vision is to be a resource for businesses determined to improve performance, while maintaining a focus on bottom-line results. Like any premier service provider, we have a combination of proprietary methods and tools, and we obtain what is needed to meet the business challenge. Our clientele share ownership of our intellectual capital , and unlike many other consulting firms, you own that intellectual content far beyond your partnership with Brainard Strategy.

Administrative Efficiencies
A primary and senior “lead” OD practitioner from our firm will partner with you. This person’s role is to dispatch the vast resources of our firm to your organization whenever and wherever those resources are needed. In most cases, we will assign multiple consultants at different times to ensure the success of implementation; however, in all cases we are seeking to leverage internal resources to ensure successful implementation of a given initiative.

Testimonial
Richard Swartzbaugh
VP Human Resource, Goal Financial
San Diego, California

“Our organization wanted a more effective, diverse, and capable OD department as our company continued to expand. We discovered that with Brainard Strategy, we could outsource our OD work and get everything that we wanted… Plus, it was significantly more cost effective.”

SUCCESS STORY:

Challenge: A mid-size financial services organization was struggling to provide the day-to-day organizational development functions they needed to create a more effective and efficient organization. Some examples of these organizational functions include leadership development, selection methodology, and performance management

Action: The Brainard Strategy team worked with the client to create and implement programs relevant to the overall needs of the organization. One example would be the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard was implemented to help increase the structure and objectivity of their performance management system. The Balanced Scorecard was implemented through training across the organization. Then the new performance management system was integrated into the current performance review process by updating documents and conducting performance review training.

Result: A team of six consultants worked on many different Organizational Development functions that have been created and implemented within the organization. The diversity of thought and expertise of the consultants have resulted in programs that specifically use best practices while understanding what will address the organization’s needs. The biggest impact is the quality of the implementation and integration of a new program into the organization’s current systems. All new programs are linked and integrated into the current systems. This has resulted in dramatically reducing the learning curve while increasing the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the organization.