Work colleagues often enjoy tremendous camaraderie, but it's sometimes marred by a tinge of rivalry or one-upmanship. Yet the partners in one of South Africa's most unusual consultancies clown around like happy schoolboys, teasing each other without the jealousies and politics that taint adult life.
Ken Jarvis, Bruce MacLaren and Patrick Evans are the core of Grey Hair Consulting. It's a perfect description for them, although MacLaren jokes that if he gets any balder, it will soon become No Hair Consulting.
The three are familiar names in the IT industry. Jarvis worked at IBM and Nedbank, then held CIO positions with Momentum, Amplats, Multichoice and the Revenue Services.
MacLaren worked with Jarvis at IBM, then moved to Dimension Data, Smarthold, CCH and Nedbank. Evans spent years as the African regional manager for Symantec.
Now they work on ad hoc assignments for companies or parastatals with a business challenge to resolve. They parachute in for a few days, fix the problem and gracefully withdraw, after training the employees to carry on without them.
More and merrier
"I don't know many people who want to go to their grave with knowledge they haven't shared," says 63-year-old MacLaren. "You only go through this life once and it's about making a difference in people's lives."
For that reason, they don't always charge for the work they do, or charge a minimal fee for a project or a person they believe in and want to help.
Jarvis, 57, first hatched the idea seven years ago. "I retired and wanted to give something back. So much consultancy work came in that when Bruce started weaning himself off Nedbank, I started giving some work to him, and Bruce said there's a business here. Our careers are over, but we all want to have fun and get paid for what we do."
Once Evans and IT veteran Steven Sidley came on board, the group had a strong IT flavour, but the team has now expanded to about 20 consultants with expertise in financial, legal, marketing, human resources and mergers and acquisitions.
Jarvis and MacLaren have a veto over who is invited to join. "We're quite snobbish. We've turned down a couple of people whose reputations should let them walk in, but there has to be a cultural fit," says Jarvis.
"Some would want to be chairman and it's not about who's running the business," adds MacLaren. "We have five inviolate principals: I never want to fill in a leave form ever again. I never want to watch my back again, which you tend to do in corporate life. Then there are three really important ones: have fun, play to your strengths and work with people you like and trust." Not surprisingly, almost everyone who hears those rules wants to join.
Their projects are very varied. Jarvis has served as an interim CIO for two state owned enterprises, while MacLaren saved a private company about R150 million by sitting in on procurement negotiations with technology vendors. Before he left, he trained the incumbent to carry on the tough negotiations without him. Sometimes the Grey Hairs go out on sales pitches with salespeople who aren't very good at selling yet.
They can tell horror stories about the way corporations and government entities do business, but they're too professional to name names. They just roll their eyes and swap some remembered chuckles.
Got the scars
"The beauty of the Grey Hairs is that you're not hiring someone who's read the book, you're hiring someone who has been out and done it and got the scars," says Jarvis. "People approach us because they can see the benefit of having two or three people come in to fix something and walk away. There's tons in my head - it's their job to use my time and get the most out of my head."
The consultancy makes a small mark-up on each job to keep ticking over, but it's not designed to make a profit. The fees go to the consultants who do the actual work.
"The idea is to have some fun by working together and saying, if you have a problem, here are some really senior people who can solve it quickly and do some mentoring and then move on. It's a group of people over 50 wanting to pay something back," Jarvis says.
You only go through this life once and it's about making a difference in people's lives.
Bruce MacLaren, Grey Hair Consulting
The team stays abreast of the latest technologies partly through Evans, a social media fanatic. "He's one of the most wired people I know in keeping up-to-date with things," MacLaren says.
"Patrick is a pain in the arse," counters Jarvis. "Before I go to bed, I make sure my e-mail is clear and when I wake up, there are 12 e-mails from him overnight!"
Evans says it's easy to keep the team informed. "If you look at the people involved, all of them are curious, and they challenge the norms and question conventional wisdom because the corporate world doesn't always work in today's world."
Like all the other Grey Hairs, Evans, 57, is too intelligent and too motivated to be happy frittering his retirement away by fishing. "On the day I left Symantec, I jumped in the swimming pool at 9.30am and by 10am, I was bored. I can't live in a world where my mind doesn't get stimulated every day," he says.
He also missed the workplace camaraderie and collaboration. But it's better at Grey Hair because there are no office politics as nobody is competing for a salary increase or a promotion. There's just friendship and mutual respect.
There's some philanthropy too, adds MacLaren. "If you do the right things, the right things will happen to you. I hope everyone in the world has that attitude and it's not unique to us."
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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