Why would a consulting company prevent its clients from hiring its consultants?

The cover art for Apprenticeship Patterns

As we approached the end of the writing process for our book, Apprenticeship Patterns, my co-author and I were given many different choices for our cover art. We must have reviewed dozens, maybe hundreds, of ideas before I finally found the above photo of a winding path on a hill. The moment I saw it, I knew it was the right fit. To me, it represented the winding path of a person’s career, and even more importantly, their life. Our paths climb and descend, they curve around blind corners, and sometimes there are roadblocks. I love our cover because it is green, winding, and misty, but also because it lacks roadblocks. The path is tumultuous, but the path is clear.

The foundation of my company, Red Squirrel Technologies, is a passion for human potential. We want our software developers and our clients to live up to their greatest possibilities. This is why we would never deliberately put a roadblock along the paths that our developers and clients are walking. These paths are arduous enough as it is. The reason Red Squirrel exists is to help our developers and our clients make progress along the paths that they have each chosen.

Why do so many consultancies create this roadblock between their consultants and their consultants’ next step along their chosen path? They do this for a very good reason: their people are their biggest asset. They must do their best to retain their people, or they risk the survival of their company.

At Red Squirrel, we make the radical assumption that our people are not an asset to be protected. We believe that our greatest asset is our reputation with talented software developers across the United States and around the world.

This reputation and our value proposition has given us a sustained influx of software developers who want to work remotely with us on challenging projects. We believe that if we keep living our values and providing value to our developers then we will always have software developers who want to work with us.

I am excited to see how our assumptions and values hold up as we walk this curvy green path into 2019!