A soil scientist once walked into my office with a pot of dirt. As I studied the sapling in his pot, unsure of what I should say, he bluntly asked me, “What’s it worth?” While I later learned he had a wonderful transplant medium for a very popular pine tree of interest to the world’s paper companies, I found the exchange rather illuminating: this gentleman was really asking if our consultants could help him to understand and appropriate the full commercial promise of his new technology. He and his partner had a one-year-old company, a promising technology and a long list of questions!

Many new companies seek outside help as they stumble or grow, and it’s important to remember what outside consultants often can – and cannot – do to improve the effectiveness of these organizations. This is especially important as many management consulting firms reinvent themselves and move away from the traditional pyramid staffing structure (the old “up or out”) toward a diamond pattern with partners overseeing a burgeoning roster of professionals with deep scientific and other technical expertise who, in turn, manage a relatively small pool of junior generalists. Consulting firms increasingly want to work with technology companies and start-ups.

Do the start-up ventures need much help, though?

With even a few months of operating experience, many learn very quickly how to modify their strategies to enhance their performance. They learn how to position themselves in the market and where to invest scarce resources for maximum effect. They also learn how to do things quickly out of necessity.

Experience also helps these technology-based start-ups to re-envision and reaffirm their aspirations over time. One Madison entrepreneur confided that he didn’t really set out to build a well-known IT company serving hundreds of businesses and nonprofit agencies. He built his first computers for customers on his dining room table, and his very notions of what might be achievable evolved and expanded with every sale – and each fumbled opportunity.

All of this experiential learning, however, is deeply rooted in a company’s specific situation: all of the unique conditions it faced from the prevailing economic winds to humongous clouds of regulatory uncertainty that it may have dealt with constitute a rich stew of factors that ultimately affected its performance. The historical context that drove the company’s learning and the policies (often unwritten, mind you) that captured its new knowledge are almost always inaccessible to an outside consultant.

Because of the tangled nature of influences bearing down on many technology start-ups, it’s nearly impossible for an outside consultant or even the entrepreneurs themselves to fully understand just what and to what degree a start-up’s business processes and market knowledge contributed to its successes or failures. Prediction becomes a delicate effort, and the consultant’s best efforts very often disappoint expectations. Against this complicated backdrop, it is increasingly difficult for a consultant to make intelligent recommendations for action after scrutinizing a start-up for merely a few weeks or a few months.

Just what then is the role of a consultant in a technology start-up where a company is learning so much so fast?

For managers of start-ups who learn primarily through their own experience, research in management and decision sciences points to one important potential weakness: learning by doing makes a company less likely to experiment with new initiatives as it tends to stick to what it knows, afraid to rock an unsteady boat that appears to be headed in the right direction.

Herein lies the value of a consultant as a good conversation partner for a technology start-up. Management consultants may not be able to precisely tease out the factors contributing to a start-up’s success in any one instance, but they may look across many projects within an industry and sometimes see helpful patterns and opportunities that would be inaccessible to any one client. Sometimes consultants may also help a start-up understand what was happening to a business model in a fast-paced emerging industry because it didn’t know (or believe in) the conventional justifications for doing business the “old way”…or the new way.

Through serious inquiry, disciplined imagination and a little serendipity, an outside consultant can be a wonderful resource for a technology-based start-up that desires to grow beyond the limits of its own experience. While a new company can learn many things independently in watching others or experimenting itself, it can sometimes develop an important edge by learning a little more with a great conversation partner.

John Surdyk is Director of INSITE, a research institute at UW-Madison supporting leading edge research by faculty on the mechanisms and forces shaping technology entrepreneurship. He has advised start-up organizations and Fortune 500s while at Navigant Consulting (NYSE:NCI) and SRI International, and he is a board member for several organizations including the Wisconsin Business Alumni Advisory Board.

If you would like to submit a short article for the "Viewpoint" section of Wisconsin Business Alumni's electronic newsletter, please contact WBA at 608.262.3828 or alumni@bus.wisc.edu. The information appearing in this column is the opinion of the author, and is not endorsed by Wisconsin Business Alumni or the School of Business.