There are some things that are unique to a specific business in terms of what makes it a good one. Then there are a much larger number of things which are common to all good businesses. Rather like Tolstoy's comments about happy families: there are vastly more ways to be an unhappy one than there are not.

All good businesses, whether they are engineering consultancies or hot dog stands need to have certain things in common. The first and most obvious is the reason for the business at all. No, it isn't to serve the public, to be nice to children or to save the planet. It's to make a profit. Without that most basic underlying reasoning no business will ever survive.

Having said that, good companies don't usually go and rob banks, despite that being where all the money is. There's usually a rather longer term view of what makes profits: serving customers for example. Specifically, serving customers well, so that they come back again: it's a great deal cheaper to do the second contract for someone than attract them in the first place.

But aside from those trivially simple sorts of points a consultancy of any type also needs to have the expertise in it's specific field. There's little point in selling say engineering services if you're staffed with hot dog stand salesmen. Which leads us to the most important thing about services businesses like a consultancy. The value of the company is tied up in the human capital of the staff themselves. That's actually what is being sold, the knowledge they possess. So the method of managing, recruiting and retaining such staff is crucial to the success of the whole venture. As the investment banks found in the 1980s, things rather change when all of the value of the company goes down in the lifts at the end of each working day.

There are actually well respected (no, not the usual Marxist ranting maniacs) economic commentators who muse that this move to a purely knowledge based economy will in fact lead to the death of capitalism. Not to the death of the liberal market economy, but to the current method of corporate ownership.

But given that it is the quality of the staff that is so important this of course means that recruitment consultants like Talisman are vital to such a company's success. If they don't get the best employees, those with the most and most up to date knowledge, then they won't in fact be a very good engineering consultancy.