ALL CHAPTERS
| How We Got Started 1 |
| What it Takes to Succeed 2 |
| Rating the Clients 3 |
| Dealing With Clients 4 |
| Presentations & Meetings 5 |
| The Matter of Ethics 6 |
| On the Road Again: Travel 7 |
| International Business 8 |
| The Home Front 9 |
| Story Tellers |
Chapter Three
Rating the Client
“I Loved All of MY Clients. It’s Just That I Loved Some More Than Others”
- Richard Metzler
Consulting is ultimately about the clients. Our senior consultants clearly understand that without the client there wouldn’t be a business – that without them, consultants wouldn’t exist. And so they love them all, deeply. But it doesn’t mean that they love them all equally.
In this chapter, our veteran consultants highlight some of the traits and characteristics of their favorite clients. Most highly valued and remembered are those who are smart, educated and knowledgeable; who have vision and direction; who want to do well; and who set high standards for themselves and their organizations. Consultants also highly regard those clients who are realistic; who are open to change; who love their jobs and work hard; and who possess a sense of integrity. And lest we forget, consultants really love those clients who have large budgets and who pay their bills on time.
In contrast, our contributors were equally clear about those clients who they did not like or respect. Cited are those who are dictatorial, who are not accessible, or who lack courage. Many also talked about clients who use consultants as alibis, or who are fraudulent or prejudiced. Many were clear that working in the public sector was at the bottom of their preferences. We can see that there are many red flags that say, “Stay Away.” Sometimes, however, turning away work can be hard.
Defining the Good Client
“A Client Who Is Focused”
A good client relationship begins with a client who is focused in terms of their objectives. When I think back over the years, the projects I had difficulty with were usually the ones that weren’t properly defined. In many cases, the client wasn’t quite sure what they were looking for. So a good client has some clarity about what their needs are. Your deliverables are more easily defined. They’re open to what you have to say.
The worst clients are the ones that don't want any criticism. Or they only want criticism of others. They make terrible clients because invariably they will fight you on your recommendations. It’s not likely they’re going to implement anything. But then, when nothing changes, the scapegoat of course is going to be the outside consultant.
Let's face it. If you're saying change from A to B, this implies that A had issues, that something was wrong. Obviously, the nature of our work is that our analysis and recommendations may be critical of the company we’re working with. So it’s always best if you have clients who are confident in themselves. You know they can handle criticism or more readily accept your recommendations. That’s what I look for in terms of a good client.
It also helps if they pay their bills promptly.
“A High Degree of Trust”
I think a good client is a client where there's a high degree of trust. The client has issues to address and you know you can make an impact. There’s enough trust to take risks and make things happen. Those to me are the best clients. One of our largest clients today is Goldman Sachs and that’s the kind of relationship we have with them. We have a number of relationships like that.
In some cases, our clients become business partners. So, it's a different way of operation, and one that requires that level of trust.
The big red flag is when there's that lack of trust. When you really can’t have an impact, no matter how hard you may work. That's why I won't do government work anymore. They tend not to be trusting of the private sector. The civil service people and even the political appointees often have the attitude that they have virtually nothing at stake. They don't have the same incentives or context. You can't operate in environments like that. I know this is generalizing, but government work in general is just hard to deal with.
“Wasn’t Jaded or Cynical”
The best individual client I ever worked for was a vice president at Allegheny Power. He had visibility within the corporation so by association, I did too. He was a smart guy who wanted to do well. Until then he hadn't dealt with consultants in his entire career so he wasn't jaded or cynical like some other clients. And as a result, we did a good job for him.
We had a great team there. They felt we moved the company forward. I think we moved the company forward. We even got recognition in their annual report. It was just a straight-up assignment where it was a hell of a lot of fun and we did some good.
Sometimes with other clients there were so many consultants involved that it was chaos. Consultants were running the company but not in name, and so different projects were competing and vying for attention and direction and emphasis. It could be kind of a joke sometimes. But Allegheny wasn't like that. That was the only time in my career when we had a client who had never worked with consultants before. We were positioned to do a strategic project that senior management took seriously and they gave us the latitude to make it happen. And it was great.
“A Client Who Is Committed”
A good client has a clear understanding of what kind of help they need. They also have a realistic sense of what the likely outcomes will be. So a good client is usually an educated client. There is also trust. They trust their consultant. There’s also probably some flexibility.
What often happens in consulting projects is that initially you go in to solve a certain kind of problem. And then you realize that the identified problem is not really the main problem, or is just symptomatic of a bigger, underlying problem. A good client understands this and learns to be flexible and willing to make adjustments in mid-process.
What is probably most important is a client who is committed to providing the support to execute the recommendations. So many consulting projects are just left on the shelf. They’re not executed and end up having no value to the client organization. A good client gets involved enough during the course of the process so they retain ownership of the project, they’re committed to making things happen, and they don't wait until the end to either accept or reject the consultant’s recommendations. If there is a problem along the way, they jump in and get involved early on. After all, they want the final outcome to be useful to them.
”Absolutely Loved Their Work”
I can share one story that was particularly memorable. I had been working with AT&T for years. On one occasion in the ‘70s, they brought me in and sent me to the Bell Laboratories. Now, at that time, Bell Labs was perhaps the greatest scientific research institution in the world. I had never had any contact with science before. I had no education in the field of science and actually had no interest in it at the time. All of a sudden, I'm meeting these great scientists. I mean, two of them were Nobel Prize winners.
These men were probably in their 50s or 60s at the time. You could still see the excitement, the intellectual excitement of these men, even after a whole career. They couldn't wait to come to work in the morning. They absolutely loved their work.
I don't mean just those two Nobel Prize winners, either. All of them were like this. These scientists were so excited by what they were doing. It opened to me, for the first time in my entire life, an interest in science that has grown ever since. So the variety of consulting work has really stretched me to acquire new interests, and to learn new things. It’s a continual learning process.
“A Willingness To Partner”
You can have all the talent in the world, but if the people in the client organization do not want to work with the consultant, it's not going to work. If the client doesn’t feel a sense of engagement with your company, then you're going to have to either fix the relationship, or you may as well not be having the engagement. There has to be that sense of purpose and a willingness to partner. To work together well also entails honesty and openness and a responsibility on the part of the client to be constantly monitoring the quality of the relationship.
The other side is that the consultant shouldn’t want to take over. You know the old saying, give someone a meal and feed them for a day. Teach them to fish and feed them for a lifetime. Being a good consultant means being an enabler. It means creating, maintaining, and fostering initiative and competency on the client’s part.
Of course, in the immediate sense, you may want to just teach them what fishing is about, letting them know that for now you'll do the actual fishing. But your client certainly has to learn what fishing is about. They need to know what they're buying. Good clients understand this.
“Who Will Willingly Speak On Your Behalf”
How I define a good client would depend on the mission and the number of repeat assignments we have. Referring us to their friends would also be nice. I guess perhaps the ultimate client is the one who will willingly speak on your behalf.
We used to sponsor seminars on particular topics and invite interested companies in the area to attend. These seminars might cover some new, unique technique one of our staff people had developed, which we were trying to publicize. Sometimes we would ask someone from one of our client companies to speak, which we found a great way of telling others about our methods of doing business. Let the clients testify on our behalf, so to speak. It usually proved to be a good source of business.
“Who Is Realistic”
A good client is one who is realistic about what they can or cannot do. They’re willing to work with you within whatever limitations they have. They have reasonable expectations and live up to their end of providing whatever resource or data or opportunity we need to work with their people. They’re also willing to discuss and come to agreement about the changes that have to happen. And then live up to those agreements. Basically, what makes a good client is someone who is reasonable and who is knowledgeable.
Of course, many of our clients we’ve worked with for years. When they call you they often already know what the problem is. Most of them already know generally what the solution is. They just need help in zeroing in on it and putting it together. On the other hand, you have difficulty with those who think you can do a $50,000 job with $300. Or make statements like, “I could do that in a week.” The temptation is to say, “Well, you’ve been here five years, why haven’t you done it?”
“Clients You Like, Clients You Respect”
There are clients you like and there are clients you respect and they are two different things. The clients you like are the ones who give you a lot of latitude. They’re not telling you what to do all the time. They say, “Here's the problem, you guys go solve it.” How exactly we do that, how we allocate our resources or time, is pretty much left to us. The client takes a hands-off approach, limited only by some broad parameters. They also don't question your invoices.
The clients you respect are the ones who really manage the process and you as a consultant. They clearly demonstrate that you work for them and they seek to get the best and the brightest out of you. But they also give you that same latitude. By contrast, some clients can get lazy with consultants and just expect us to do all the work; they kind of give the problem to us. Then, when you make the presentation the client will, so to speak, just say grace around the table, in terms of either yea or nay. They don't usually outsource the decision-making process per se. But they will outsource much of the work that leads up to a decision.
The reality of things is that if clients are not involved in the process of formulating and working through the problem and solution, then it's hard for them to make an informed decision. They're just being steered by a presentation.
“Very Good Business People”
A good client is one characterized by interaction with very good business people. I’ve especially liked working with middle market companies, small companies. Maybe it was just my style, but I never worked well with big bureaucracies and procedural things. I liked to deal directly with top management. In our business, you can get stuck in the middle manager level where if they say they want a certain thing done and you discover the problem is really something else, they think you’re just trying to sell them more. But with the smaller clients there was no disconnect between what really needed to be done and what they told you needed to be done. When you can deal directly with CEO’s who are close to their business, in a hands-on way, they know what has to be done and they can respond more effectively.
One of our best clients was Dwyers Ice Cream on the west coast. Two McKinsey consultants had bought out this little one-store ice cream place that had great flavors and turned it into a national brand. They were delightful to work with. One of their rules was that there would be no personnel department, no HR, none of that kind of bureaucratic overhead. The poor CFO, who was my primary contact there, had to get the HR stuff done without calling it HR. But those kinds of clients were the best I ever had. They were the types of clients who were usually very good friends and good to work with.
“Their Guy Stood Up”
The best clients know what they want and are willing to listen to your expertise. They’re also willing to push back when they think you're going too far. As I’ve said, they have a clear understanding that they’re looking after the best interests of the firm and the stockholders, as opposed to some self-serving agenda. They also understand they've bought you for your opinion.
I’ve had a lot of good clients over the years. I remember a project we did for United Technologies’ aircraft group. We were locating an aircraft parts plant and they hired us to look at, among other things, the labor market implications of the decision. There was a town in Maine under consideration and in the course of our fieldwork, the head of the town planning department mentioned that this particular site was next to a trout stream with very strict environmental implications. You basically couldn’t put anything into that stream.
I did mention this to the client, being concerned that they might not be aware of it. But somehow the ball got dropped and they ended up locating there. Later, when they realized they couldn’t put anything into the stream but would have to cart stuff away in trucks, which had cost implications, they never blamed us for it. Of course, we had mentioned the environmental restrictions, but in a very casual way. I think it could have been easy for them to put the blame on us. I mean, one reason you get hired as a consultant is to bear the brunt if something goes wrong.
But their guy stood up and said, no, we were told. That took a certain amount of courage on his part. You have to respect that. They could have taken the easy way out and made it hard on the consultant. You know, we're getting a fair amount of money for this work. It would be easy for them to justify laying it on us.
So that kind of honesty and integrity in a client can only be appreciated. It helps if they're smart, too.
“Give Me A Strong Leader”
It is easy to identify a good client. Above all, I think the best clients have integrity. They know what they want and there's strong leadership at the top. That's the key to success. They tell you this is what I expect, this is what I'm looking for. You give them a proposal and you ask them, are you willing to go through with this? You understand what this is going to do to your organization? The pain involved? That we're perhaps going to organize some of your people out of a job and all those things. The best clients will say yes. And show the leadership to make sure that it gets done.
With a good client, there are no hidden agendas. We’ve had a couple of engagements where we were integrating different cultures after a merger. Everybody had their own agenda. Those are the engagements that can be difficult. People are not always acting with integrity. Instead everybody's trying to push their team, as opposed to choosing the right solution for the entire organization. I always say that creates smoke in the room. You can't see clear what it is you want to do. How can you when you don't know what the real agenda is?
I will say this, give me a strong leader and I'll take the project everyday. Most people are looking for signals from the boss. If you’re doing a project, for example, and the guy running the business says, okay, I'll put this guy in charge of it, the first thing I ask is, what’s his position in the organization? Is he someone who failed on the lines so now you're giving him this project to run? If that's what you're doing, guess what? I don't want the project because it's not going to work. They're going to say the boss isn't serious about this or he wouldn't have put that dip in charge. Isn't that the truth?
“Do They Need a Consultant?”
Some of my best clients are those people about whom I initially think, why for heavens sake do they need a consultant? But they are the people who know exactly what they want from a consultant. They are absolutely clear in their assignment, in the way they conduct or ask you to deliver your work. It becomes a pleasure to work with them.
One of the members of the board of a certain company in the Netherlands was one of my absolute top clients. I’ve done two assignments for him. One was about ten years ago and involved restructuring the human resource policy for the whole plant, which in those days was a huge assignment for me. I was surprised that he used consultants for the work; there was so much talent in his own organization. But actually that’s why he brought consultants in, to more or less overcome any possible resistance to restructuring, which in a talented organization could be something to contend with. He was absolutely clear about what had to happen, a good sport, and a pleasure to work with.
“Everybody Was Envious”
I’ve worked for 200 clients at least, and is almost every possible industry. And Playboy Magazine was one of those. I never met Hefner, he spent all of this time in his bedroom, and he really didn’t know what was going on in the office. I think that all he did was edit and airbrush the photographs. But Playboy was very good a client, mostly because everybody in the Cresap, McCormick, Paget office was envious of me.
“No Bad Clients”
Overall, I don’t think that I’ve had any real bad clients. All my clients have always paid their bills. I mean even the worst guy in the world, you work with them, so to speak. You try to get them to see things your way and to depend on you.
“A Vision of Something Big”
I think a good client is a challenging client, one with a direction and a vision of something big. A good client would like to accomplish something and demands excellence.
Clients who have the consultants around because of politics, or try to leverage the consultants to cause things to happen that are in the individual’s interests as opposed to the company’s interest – those are bad clients.
“He Put the A-Team On It”
As a consultant, you look for signs of leadership. The toughest engagement is when someone brings us in and says, go help this guy who works for me and the guy is doing the project only because he’s afraid not to. He doesn’t really want to do the project. That’s when things get tough.
For example, my partner recently called me to express concern about a potential project with a finance company. The company had told us they wanted to do the project. But we we're having a hard time getting through to the chairman. We made it clear we wouldn't do this until we met with the chairman. My partner was concerned that because he was having such a hard time getting through, the chairman was probably not going to show much commitment.
Well, we finally did meet with him and actually it turned out wonderfully. He told us, “Listen, I'm putting my A-team on this project.” My partner was in and out of there in 40 minutes, for a $1.2 million deal. That’s what I mean by leadership. He put the A team on it and sent a message to the company that we’re serious about this. What a difference that makes. But we had to wait for that sign of commitment.
I can relate one other experience with a bank where the head of operations and systems had brought us in, and a senior vice president didn't want us there. Before we even got there, he was cutting every tree he could to block our path. I said to their operations head, “We’ll try to work with this guy. It's going to be difficult, but we'll work with him. We'll try and convert him.” So he arranged for me have lunch with the vice chairman of the bank. At the lunch the vice-chairman asked me what was going to be the biggest obstacle? I told him, your senior vice president of operations doesn't want us here. His only response was, “Okay, anything else?” 10
Well, two weeks later we showed up on a Monday to start the job, and this senior VP was gone. They had fired him! The vice chairman said this project was too important to have one person get in the way of our success. Frankly, in my opinion, this guy had cut his own throat. I mean, he was irrational, claiming there couldn’t be anything wrong with his operating area. That was just stupid. He should have just said yes, I can use the help. We would have made a hero out of him.
We gained so much from their willingness to not let him interfere. About half way through the project we found ourselves eight or nine weeks ahead of schedule, so I told them we would, if they liked, do the corporate loan division for free. This had not been part of the original agreement. But they had done us a great favor by removing the leadership obstacle we faced. They had shown leadership and integrity. Consequently, I felt it was appropriate that we reciprocate.
“A Friend and a Partner”
When people say, put it in the contract, write it down so we know you’re re going to deliver this, this, this and this, it’s like you’re just another supplier. But a great client doesn’t make you a supplier. A great client makes you a friend and partner in the effort. And you just can’t imagine disappointing them. That’s when consulting is at its best. It becomes about friendship and trust.
“A Big Budget”
The criteria can evolve over time, but a good client is definitely one with a big budget.
Defining the Bad Client
“Essentially Fraud”
If you've worked in this business, there are always stories. I once worked for the CIO of a major client and got into a situation where he was trying to pressure me to use another firm as a subcontractor. Suddenly, I was getting bills for work that wasn't performed. So I went to this guy and said, okay, you sign this bill and I'll pay it. He wouldn't sign it. And that proved to be the end of our relationship.
We got rid of the subcontractor and lo and behold we were fired. And that was fine with me. Later, this fellow was fired for what was essentially fraud. I’m not sure how the money passed from the subcontractor to him, but it was clear to me at the time that we were in the middle of something we didn't want to be involved in. This was actually a Fortune 500 company. But you don't see much of that.
“Doesn’t Take Ownership”
I think a bad client is one that brings you in without the right preparation and the right mindset on their part. It's a client that says it's the consultants’ project, and doesn’t take ownership of it. It's a client that doesn't have again the fortitude and the will to really do the things that are necessary to make lasting change really happen.
“Addressing 30 Percent of the Problems”
Sometimes we would get hired because the contact’s arch-enemy somewhere else in the company had some project going. We would get hired so they had something to say at the next meeting. And while we were there to solve an issue, because of the way we were hired, we were only addressing 30 percent of the problems instead of 50 percent of the problems or 100 percent of the problems.
There are times, too, when you get hired because they don't have enough courage. To put it more nicely, when you’re working with utilities, a lot of times you’re working with companies that have been true monopolies in the past, and it’s hard for them to make decisions that would impact their friends and their neighbors and a lot of times their relatives. So we would get hired to come in and make those hard choices for them. Sometimes this was obvious, but that’s what we would do. With some clients we made a material difference. But with others even though they spent all that money, nothing came of it. Not because the work we did wasn't of high quality, but they didn't have any way to take that work and incorporate it into the business. The organizations were too large, or they didn’t have direction or leadership.
“You Will Cooperate!”
I had a situation where I was working for a client, and we talked to the client about our approach, the methodology we were going to use, who we had to interview and that sort of thing. We underscored the importance of cooperation from middle management. So we helped the client script his opening speech to the middle management team. The script was to say that this was an important project for the organization, and that we need your cooperation and value your input, and we need for you to work with the consultants and support them in what they’re trying to do.
Now, this guy was a real hard-driving type of executive. He got middle management in a room. He started off okay, talking about how important the project was, but pretty soon his real personality came out. He starts talking about how you will cooperate and the first time I see somebody not cooperating, they’re fired. Not in so many words, but that’s practically what he said. We just wanted to crawl under the chair. Now this is the environment under which we had to start working with these people.
So obviously they’re going to tell us everything we need to know, right? So, I had to circle the wagons. I had to go back and say, “Hey look, if you do that again, we're out of here, because it isn't going to work.” And then I had to really use those relationship skills, to be able to sit down with these middle managers and say, “What the CEO really meant to say was this, not that.” Fortunately, in that situation, everybody knew the CEO and knew his style. I think if he had done it any other way, they probably would have had more problems with that, thinking he was really spewing the BS then, because there's no way he ever normally talked like that.
“Not Prepared”
A bad client is a situation where the client's organization is not prepared to handle a job. They cannot carry out your recommendations successfully. You usually pick up on it pretty early. You sense the opportunities for success are not there, that you’d almost be better off not to take the assignment. Certainly in our experience we’ve had to give up on assignments, rather than continuing on something where there seemed little chance of really helping. I’m just talking about a basic failure on the part of the client's organization to respond to the help you're trying to give them.
“Inaccessible”
A bad client is one who is inaccessible. One who doesn’t want to sit down with the consultant during the course of a project to discuss where things are going, what the findings are leading toward. As I said, this can be important because if there is a disconnect of some kind during the project, they can help fix it before it gets too deep. They can also help navigate the political waters of their organization for the buy-in that’s needed to make change really happen.
“Hunger Spoiled Our Judgment”
There have been a lot of low points but the lowest was an occasion where I think we let hunger spoil our judgment. We were hired by E.F. Hutton, a big brokerage firm that no longer exists. Plenty has been written about its demise. The CEO had gotten them into serious trouble, basically through a real estate investment to build a big headquarters building. It was just insane. I mean, the whole top floor was going to be a huge office for him. He was basically tanking the company.
We were brought in after the fact to help decide on how to move certain operations to a lower cost environment so they could lease out additional space to help pay for the building. This required getting consensus from a lot of people in the organization. All the pieces of the company were very interrelated, so it was a matter of getting agreement on what parts could be operated at a distance without dropping the company in the process.
There was a new president who had been brought in from Merrill Lynch who was very highly regarded, but who ultimately failed at getting his arms around this situation. So he was canned. Part of the problem was every department operated as a little fiefdom and these guys hated each other and guarded their turf relentlessly. Basically, the concept of consensus didn't exist in this organization.
The CEO was also deliberately undercutting every decision the new president made. So then here we came marching into an environment where the person who had real power was trying to undercut everything we did, and it was very unpleasant. We also failed. That was one low point. If we had been wiser and less hungry, we never would have taken the work.
“Get Out of Government Consulting”
After trying to build our state government practice, I eventually made the decision to get out of government consulting. Over the years I had come to find it a very frustrating market. There are so many regulatory requirements to deal with, a lot of bureaucracy. It is basically a bid business. There isn’t the same urgency or focus on driving for a result that you normally find in the commercial markets. There isn’t the sense of being held accountable for bottom-line results.
Of course, there are also the political considerations, which are different from the usual corporate politics. It’s a different thing when people are worried about being in the press, worried about the public response. I remember a dispute we got into with one government agency over the scope of the work and the contract and other issues. There was a very tense meeting with the head of this agency, who said to us, in so many words, “By God, if you don’t agree to our terms, I’m going to call the press and tomorrow it will be all over the front pages how your firm caused problems for this state.” I told him, “If that’s what you needed to do, then so be it.” But I also told him how we looked at it. How some of what they wanted was out of our scope. And we were not going to do the work unless we could agree on a contract amendment.
Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion that the public sector is a very large market but also a very frustrating market. The new firm that came out of the merger decided we just weren’t going to pursue that market.
“Just Move On”
A difficult client would be someone who calls you in, but who really doesn't want to be working with you. I happen to like the saying, “Never do business with someone you don't want to do business with.” Quite categorically. When you're successful enough to work that way, that's absolutely right. You just move on. Next.
“Use You as an Alibi”
The only major problem with clients is when they use you as an alibi for their own problems. It can be very difficult to work with that type of client. A client who is uncertain or hesitant or just using you as an alibi, that is tough.
“Can’t Get Beyond Your Skin Color”
As far as low points go, one was a study I did for the state of New Jersey in 1988. It was a report on the issue of whether the state lottery exploits the poor. I gave some outstanding research evidence that it does. As a result, I was treated like crap and blocked from future business. After that I stopped doing business with all state government agencies. Frankly, I think they thought with an issue like this that only white researchers could do an objective analysis. But I had gone into all different types of poor neighborhoods, not just black, but Latino, white, Native American, all across my home state. The results were very representative of the population.
This was a low point because you want to believe as a researcher that you’re doing the best job possible, and that people trust that. But when people can’t get beyond your skin color, it’s a real problem. Unfortunately, that still exists today. I mean, it’s lessening but it’s still there. Interestingly, they found out later the recommendations I had made were right. It was just in the local newspapers, ten years later. It’s also been shown that the monies were not distributed as originally designed. More lottery money in our home state is going for prisons, rather than for schools and the elderly, which is what the law originally mandated. So now it’s becoming a little controversial
“Report Stayed on the Shelf”
Only a few times over the last 25 years can I say a report stayed on the shelf. Usually you know if that’s going to happen within the first week of the project. More often than not it’s because of some political struggle that’s taking place, as opposed to anything in the content of the report.
“That I Need You?”
I can remember one example. Our client was the Freedom Foundation in Valley Forge. It was a charitable organization best known for plaques and work in schools. The president was ineffective and had a lot of problems. We were asked to reorganize the place.
They then brought in a retired army general. He took over and we had our first progress report. And I’ll never forget it, I was so very young then. It is stuff from your early career that you remember to most vividly. The general looked at me and said, “I ran the (bleeping) U.S. Army and you’re telling me that I can’t run this (bleeping) candy store. That I need you?” I guess I knew I was in trouble right then.
Well, there was dead silence, the partners just kind of blended in with the woodwork. I said,”Sir, I guess that our assignment is over, isn’t it?”
“You betcha it is,” he said.
STORIES FROM READERS
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