Real Data, Assertiveness, and the Night Trader Joe’s Almost Lost Everything | Consulting Guest Lecture 2019

This is the complete recording of Richard Lowe’s annual guest appearance, via video call, as consulting expert for Professor Makadok’s university business class on September 30, 2019, lightly edited for readability. The class’s ten student teams, each consulting for a real entrepreneur and having read Richard’s book on consulting, submitted questions about the actual challenges they were facing; classroom logistics are omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction and the credentials

Professor Makadok: Richard Lowe Jr. served six years as Vice President of Consulting at Software Techniques and seven years as Vice President of Consulting at Beck, then twenty years as director of technical services, leaving in 2013 to pursue his dream of becoming a professional author. Since then he has ghostwritten, I’ll have to update these numbers, 28 books and authored 63 under his own name [54+ ghostwritten and 113+ authored as of 2026]. Please join me in welcoming Richard Lowe. What gives you the level of expertise in consulting to write a book about it?

Richard Lowe: You can add three artificial intelligence books to that list, one of which was published by a traditional publisher. On the expertise: I managed a team of eight consultants at Software Techniques for six years, then teams of eight to fifteen consultants at Beck Computer Systems for fifteen years. And at Trader Joe’s, I was on the other side of the fence, hiring consultants, sometimes as many as fifty at a time, and managing the consulting managers who managed them. I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and both sides are interesting. That’s where the expertise comes from: real-world knowledge.

When the client pivots

Professor Makadok: One team’s entrepreneur has pivoted from one product to a different one right at the project’s start. The team believes it’s a good idea but needs research in an area they don’t know. How do you pivot with a client?

Richard Lowe: Meet with them and find out what they really want, and you’ll probably find they’re vague on goals and objectives, because somebody had an idea and just changed. Then create a research project to find out more, and in the real world, charge for it: a smaller time-and-materials project, because you don’t have enough information to even estimate the main work yet. If somebody demands a ballpark right now, give them a ballpark, make something up, and make sure it’s not in the contract. And ask what happens to the old project: dropped, continued, what? Then make the research good, because in areas like artificial intelligence there is enormous hype, and a lot of it is false. That’s the Gartner hype cycle I wrote about: as soon as a technology makes it into the airline magazines, every CEO needs it, terrified the other CEOs will get the next Uber first.

Target markets: the telemedicine lesson

Professor Makadok: Another team’s client has a product with many potential markets, and they can’t determine the target demographic.

Richard Lowe: For anything significant, get real marketing expertise involved, because you must make sure there is a market. I worked on a telemedicine application: call a doctor from your house. They developed the product, and it didn’t sell, for two reasons nobody accounted for. First, people want that for free. Second, when a mom’s kid is sick, she’s not calling to make a phone appointment; she’s going to urgent care. They built the product because it sounded good, and it’s been a million bucks. They didn’t know their target demographic at all.

And for a technology too complex to understand: the technology is irrelevant. Understand what it’s supposed to do and who it’s for. Who’s the market for Alexa? It talks to me; I ask it the time, it tells me the time; I tell it to turn on the TV so I don’t have to get my lazy butt off the chair. How it works internally, and I know a guy who worked on it, is mind-bogglingly complex, and who cares? It’s a personal assistant. Focus on that. If the client thinks the product has applications A, B, C, and D: first ask whether they have the money to explore multiple options with multiple teams. If not, and they usually don’t, pick one or two markets now; there’s always later. Spread too wide without a big budget and you fail. Prioritize with market data: market size, competition, growth rate, price sensitivity, which customers are most willing to pay. Real data. Not your gut, because your gut is going to be wrong.

The micromanaging client, and who taught Richard the lesson

Professor Makadok: One client is micromanaging: working on all the tasks with the team instead of delegating. The team wonders if that’s positive.

Richard Lowe: It’s not positive. It implies trust issues: maybe because they’re young, maybe because somebody burned him before, and you don’t know which. Sit down and explain: you hired me to do this job. You can manage me, but you can’t bypass me to manage the team, because multiple managers means chaos, and if he’s competent at all, he knows that. Have the heart-to-heart, and accept you might lose the project, because a project with multiple hands in it will not work.

And I know this because I was the one micromanaging, at Trader Joe’s. My consultant gave me the heart-to-heart. It took two or three discussions, and he actually slammed his hand down on the table and said: back off, I’ve got it. And I said okay. We had that kind of relationship, so it was fine. But it was bold.

Money trails, contradictions, and the confusion technique

Richard Lowe: On the client who can’t say where investor money will go: that should be more than worrisome. If investors want to know where their money went and there’s no answer, they’ll want the million back, and if the company ever goes public, the SEC will be all over it. First evaluate whether tracking it is your role; if the client lacks the skill, he hires an accountant or even a virtual assistant. It has to be done, and the earlier the better; catch it now, while nothing bad has happened yet.

On the client who contradicts herself: that’s actually pretty normal. Keep notes, and here’s the technique. Don’t say: you said X and now you’re saying Y. Say: I’m confused. Last meeting I understood X, and this meeting I’m understanding Y. Which one is it? Can you help me? Make it about your confusion, not theirs. Make it about them and they get defensive, especially in front of other people; make it about you and they say: oh, here, let me help you. They’re happy to help, believe me, and it prompts them toward clarity they didn’t have. Just don’t overuse it, or you might appear stupid.

The same move works on the client who’s two steps ahead of you. I just wrote my first blog article for a client: 4,000 words on cloud technology I knew nothing about. Here’s the lead weights, here’s the deep end of the pool, and by the way, there are a couple of sharks; don’t worry about the piranhas. You ignore the feelings and look for facts. Tell the client: I’m falling behind, can you help me? Where should I read? Can you give me an expert I can debrief, somebody who can sit with me for an hour and bring me up to speed? Then go where he says, and repeat until done. Feeling overwhelmed at the start of a high-tech project is so common that not feeling it is the uncommon part. I write AI books, and I run into AI engineers who are out at Alpha Centauri compared to me, and I have to write the book. You find the right people and talk to them.

Meetings, scheduling, and assertiveness

Richard Lowe: On coordinating meetings, remote or not, the problems are identical, and don’t think face-to-face is easier; it’s really frustrating to drive three hours, or fly in, and have nobody show up. I’ve had clients fly in to Trader Joe’s for meetings that weren’t scheduled. So: put one person in charge of coordination. Have an agenda, sent in advance. Mark each person required or optional based on their role, and keep meetings as small and short as you can; you probably don’t need the CEO there, since he hired you precisely so he wouldn’t have to be. In the real world, no-show meetings are billable, and being billed regardless of attendance really makes people show up.

To keep a meeting on track: start at the stated time whether or not everyone’s there, and end at the stated limit. We got to 40 minutes; I’ve got to go do work now; we can schedule a second meeting for this afternoon. After one or two of those, it’s fixed. And use the agenda as the enforcement tool: that’s not on the agenda; let’s add it and discuss it if we have time. On the client who’s slow to respond to scheduling: ask if there’s a secretary you can schedule with; be creative with times, over lunch, before work, 7 p.m. if needed; and be assertive: the project isn’t moving forward without you, so when can we talk? You’re looking to them for leadership, and here’s the thing about consulting: they’re looking to you for leadership, and if you don’t provide it, they’ll take it from you. Don’t be intimidated. They will sense fear; they will smell it, and they will be all over it. The worst that can happen is you lose the project, which is why, in the real world, you keep two or three projects in your pocket.

On the too-agreeable know-nothing client: ask narrowing questions. Men or women? Children or adults? Schools or homes? Control the conversation and pin them down, and if necessary: I can’t get anywhere unless you give me real information. Again, made about yourself: I’m not understanding where you want me to go; can you help me? The word help works super well.

And on regulated industries changing fast: get the legal team involved, and if there isn’t one, make sure the client gets one. I wrote a book on the changes to the medical system under Obamacare, and even as the writer, there had to be a lawyer involved, because it was over my head. You’re not that kind of lawyer either.

The meltdown: Trader Joe’s, one consultant, and a table rebuilt from memory

Professor Makadok: What was your most impactful consulting project?

Richard Lowe: The one where I was the client. At Trader Joe’s I was in charge of all the corporate computer systems, about 1,200 computers, and we had a total meltdown. A 15-minute power outage in the area, and then the perfect storm: the generator failed, the UPS failed, the battery backing the disk cache failed, the backups on disk were toast, the DR site didn’t work, and the tape backups failed. Bang, bang, bang, with some bad engineering in the mix. No recovery path at all. On a $15-billion-a-year business, we had no data, and my earliest usable backups were almost a month old: roughly 500 million transactions that would have been gone. A company-destroying event, and I don’t think my boss ever really understood how close we came.

I was 200 miles away in Fresno, managing the disaster by phone; I’d gone up there to photograph three models, so I was really annoyed at the interruption. My consultant had been working it all day, and he says: there’s one thing I can try. What’s that? I’m not going to tell you. What do you mean? He says: can it get any worse? I said no. He said: good. I’ll call you back. An hour later: it’s fixed. What did you do? The array was 500 disks, totally destroyed, and there’s a table on the disks that maps where everything lives. He rebuilt that table from memory. Something like a thousand lines, from memory, because he was the one who built it the first time. And we came up clean. I told him: you earned your pay this time. And what he said stuck with me ever since: I don’t charge people when their house is on fire. You can guess he was my consultant until my last day there.

Professor Makadok: And which piece of consulting wisdom was earned with the greatest difficulty?

Richard Lowe: That I don’t know it all. When I started hiring consultants at Trader Joe’s, I knew it all: I was down at the bit level, I could do disk drives, I was technical, a manager, a leader, and how dare you tell me what’s right. Until I got into a situation I couldn’t get out of, and that same consultant, John, finally said: you need to leave the room. Why? Because you’re in the way. I said, I don’t know whether I should be mad or not. He said: get over it. I don’t hire yes-people, and if you don’t get out of the room, I’m going to leave, and you’ll be down. So I said okay. And I super trusted him after that.

Early warning signs

Professor Makadok: What are early signs a project is heading for trouble?

Richard Lowe: Number one, for entrepreneurial projects: lack of real market data. When you start hearing feelings, “I think,” “we believe,” that’s not data. Real is: we interviewed 37,000 people, and this is the market. The number one sign an entrepreneurial project will fail is that it’s not based on real information. In client relationships: finding out you’re the white knight. When I was brought in as the white knight, I knew immediately I was in trouble, because I’m not going to wave a magic wand; I need their help. I’ve had a client tell me I didn’t live up to expectations. Why not? You were my white knight; you were going to rescue me. That wasn’t in the contract. White knight is not a clause in the statement of work. Other signs: frantic meetings multiplying, money running out, the client spending on weird things, or a second consulting group hired to work alongside you.

Professor Makadok: Richard, we’re out of time. Is the offer still open for students to email you questions?

Richard Lowe: That offer is still open. And if any of you liked the book, an Amazon review would be awesome.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

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