Welcome to the Everyday PM Podcasts, the podcast where we discuss project management principles for your everyday life. My name is Anne Campia, I'm the host and founder of the Everyday PM, and I'm so excited to welcome our very special guest, Rachel Losser, who is the founder and managing partner over at Losser Consulting Solutions. We're going to get into exactly what you do there, but I know it is project management driven and I don't want to give away any of the questions I have for you
today. So Rachel, welcome to the podcast. And for those who have not met you yet, please take a brief moment to introduce yourself to our audience. OK, yes, and thank you. Hello. Thank you so much for having me again. So excited to be here. And you know, we've been going back and forth, so I'm so excited we can make this happen. So I've been doing project
management my entire career. I've worked in a lot of different segments and industries, worked with a lot of different teams, and really that was kind of the driving force behind wanting to start the company in the 1st place is I have this wealth of experience and every time I walk into a room of project managers, it seems like there were still basic things or think things that I consider to be very intuitive that weren't always happening.
So I just kind of implemented and took from my career and started the firm and it's been really great. So we do project management kind of across the board in a lot of different scale, but primarily working with large corporations for like big mission critical projects. I I can't wait to dig in there. You're the absolute perfect fit for our audience and I'm very grateful for your time. Today we're going to talk about cutting through the fluff.
And I know your team, especially on it's, it's definitely publicized on your website as well, but you, you call yourselves the get Shit done group. And I love that about you and, and the group that you have there in terms of just a very real way of saying that's what we do as project managers, right?
So it's super refreshing to hear that in terms of, you know, we always hear the corporate jargon of like, I don't know how we're described where the project management service, a group or agency or the project management office, but the get shit done group, I freaking love that. So can you walk us through what this philosophy actually looks like in practice? I mean, and start with, how did you even come up with it? Yeah, I mean, I kind of love get shit done because that's kind of
my personality. I'm very like impatient when it comes to results and getting things done and, you know, waiting for things to happen. I think that's why I've really loved having our own firm, our own organization, because we can just move as fast as we want to. So that's been really, really nice and positive when it comes to getting shit done. To me, it's less project management and what we've kind of been referring to as total project delivery.
So it's more than just managing the project. It's really like rolling up your sleeves and doing whatever it's going to take to get the project over the finish line. And you know, when it comes to doing that in practice, that can be a variety of different things, you know, when it's
actually being implemented. But my favorite thing to say that we don't do as part of kind of get shit done mentality is we don't do death by PowerPoint. Like if you're going to, if we're going to share slides, you know, those are kind of a standard part of projects and updates and things like that. But if we're going to share slides, it's going to just be the information that you need and it's going to be pretty
straightforward. We don't need to like write up novel, you know, on the slides kind of thing. So those are just like it's just little, it's little things in what we do that I think help kind of stack up and make the impact. Rachel's funny because I think it's a total giveaway of what generation you grew up in, in
terms of project management. Because I heard if you use PowerPoint deck now, then people automatically know what PM generation age you kind of fall into where I've been told I need to start calling it slides or slide decks or something like that. So it's funny that you, you, you call out, you know, death by PowerPoint and you really get through in terms of what we do as project managers.
So I'm curious in terms of, and I warned you that I would probably divert from what I sent you in terms of our outline. But you know, the fact that you're a female project manager who has decided to kind of go off on your own, create this consulting firm, it is highly commendable, especially for somebody like me who sits in a very similar role as a female in project management. So why don't we just take a step
back? What led you to wanting to do this on your own instead of, you know, kind of joining corporate America? Yeah, thank you. I mean, I did, I spent a lot of time in corporate America and I, I honestly fell in love with consulting from just kind of doing a small consulting project kind of before I started the
firm. And I really fell in love with the difference in the power dynamic as sort of being like a citizen project manager in a company versus being sort of the expert that got called upon to help solve this problem.
And some of the things that I really love about it is, you know, as a citizen project manager, I was spent a lot of time sort of building business cases and trying to convince people that the projects actually have to even happen in the 1st place versus as a consultant most of the time that all that decision has been made. And sometimes, you know, I'm walking and there's two years of thinking about it to the moment that they've actually decided to pull the trigger and do the
project. So I've loved it from the sense that, you know, we can really just kind of run and help drive results and help, yeah, get shit done, if you will, you know, So I really loved that side of it. That's awesome. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I was, I was genuinely curious and also like I said, in admiration of what you do. So can, can you share an, a specific example that your firm has worked on?
Maybe it's a project or an experience where you had to cut through the fluff and basically drag a mission critical project across the finish line, because it sounds like that's ultimately where you come in. Yeah, I jokingly say that I get called into a lot of like SOS cases, if you will, where there's already been some work that's done and they can't really find their way out of it. And they, you know, through my network or just through other work that we've done, you know,
I might get tapped on the shoulder of someone on my team to go help save the situation. And that is the number one instance I'll say of cut the fluff because I don't have time nor does the client for me to sit there and go back through all of the history. I have to be have a really, really discerning eye to what is important. What do I need to dig into? What do I need to just say the past is the past and kind of let that go. So that's kind of cutting through the fluff for me.
And then same thing when it comes to cutting through the fluff of a client. Oftentimes, you know, everyone I think is guilty of this, that your own situation feels very complex and feels really complicated.
And it can be hard to imagine that someone could come in and just completely simplify, you know, something that you're working on. So I think a good example of this is we have a client where the project managers are responsible for a lot of the work being divvied out and they really couldn't get to a reasonable list of, of departments and request types, you know, to even like start the conversation and get that process up and running.
And it just took a couple calls of us sitting down and digging into it and explaining or, you know, sharing our philosophy about why it is. And we seriously, I mean, we took, we, they had spent probably a year and a half trying to figure this out and had a list of like 50 request types. And after a couple calls with us, we got it done to like, you know, a core 7 or 8. And then like this, there's like a second step of triage to get like the other details they were looking for, you know?
And that's what I mean when it's like, cut through the fluff, just simplify it and try to put some strict structure and systems you know in place for even just the way you think about doing things. Gosh, it's just, yes, that's such a great example of where the kind of the people side of the business and the technology side of the business kind of
merge. And then it becomes this maybe ambiguous grey space that people, once you're kind of in there and in the way that you're describing it, it just becomes, I don't even know what the right word is insurmountable sometimes because it has kind of compounded into this big thing that you can't figure out what direction to go in.
And the way that you described it was was really well said in terms of just wade through and get through back to the point of the core of what the project was supposed to be, right? And it sounds that easy. But of course that's the reason why you're consulting firm exist, I'm sure is because a lot of organizations find themselves in that place where they've kind of essentially lost control and let the fluff kind of take over
the project. So let's talk a little bit about building processes that scale because you know, we're talking about example where you have the people side of the business and the technology side and where consultants can come in and literally clear out some of that fluff that's come in. So in terms of an example of building processes at scale, how are you helping organizations do that?
Do you have an example where you've really helped somebody in that space as well as, you know, problem solving kind of maybe there's a framework or something that you can share with us that you've used to help organizations even after you're done with the work that you've you've come in to do? Yeah, I mean definitely when it comes to building processes that scale, First off, I'll say we're doing it for ourselves.
So we're kind of living and testing things out in our own firm and we've only, you know, we're we're coming up on the two year mark pretty soon. But just in terms of, you know, thank you, thank you. But just in terms of being able to test things out ourselves, you know, I think it really helps to have a team that lives and practices what we preach when it comes to actually creating scalability for
organizations that we work with. We're always thinking about how do we marry up processes and enabling tools and making sure that they're both in harmony and sustainable and really thinking a lot about, you know, I would say like a lot of traditional process folks will just say, hey, this is the process, this is what you have to follow kind of sign seal delivered. And we really take a different approach to say, what is the history here? How do these people normally
interact? What is everyone's skill level? You know, there's like so many considerations that go into building something that is scalable and something that can be maintained. So, you know, we're thinking about how do we get, you know, some kind of processes and structure in place? And then we're also thinking about, OK, if they were two 3X or 5X, you know, go through the thought exercise, would this still be something that's feasible? Is this still how I would do the
setup? You know, and so it just takes being really thoughtful and intentional upfront to be able to go forth and kind of put in the scalable systems that you want. And often times people want to skip that step and just go right to doing something cool or, you know, making an improvement. And so there's always, I think, a little bit of a balance of how do I make a quick improvement now, but then how do I set myself up for success in the
long term. And and what I love about what you said is you are looking at it really as an integrated concept, right? And that every situation you're brought into is, is different and unique in its own way.
So a lot of these larger consulting firms, they come in and they have a prescribed methodology or framework and say, this is what we do. And they do that over and over and over again, where it sounds like you come in with that intention to learn what's going on, understand that it's going to be unique in that situation. And I think that's, that's awesome because a lot of consulting firms don't do that.
They don't take the people side, the tech side and whatever other elements exist within the organization and, and look at them. They typically look at them in isolation of each other or they only look at one part, whether it's the people side, the change management side, or the tech side. And it sounds like you do it all and you kind of come in there with that that frame of mind. 100% thank you for noticing and for saying that.
And I cannot tell you the amount of times I have come in to help clean up whatever copy paste activity happened from another Consulting Group. Like there's a difference between applying what I would consider to be kind of a tool kit, you know, and and bringing our tool kit with us and learnings from one organization to another versus kind of just blatant copy paste. I'm going to ignore any tailoring or anything that's specific to the nuance of that
organization. You know, if you want to be successful and if you want to do right by that group, you have to take it all into account. That's that's beautiful. Have you and you don't have to give away any identifiable information. You don't even have to answer this because this is just a question just came up in my mind. Is it sounds like just like a doctor comes in and prescribes their patient, right.
Every patient's unique. Have you had a situation you've been asked to come into and said, I don't know. I don't know that I have a solution for this, This is not going to work. Has there been anything that you've looked at and said? I just, you guys have tangled yourself so much so that I don't even know what to prescribe first. Well, what I will say is we're pretty selective about what clients we choose to work with.
There's a lot of lower cost, you know, consultants all over the place that can help organizations. We're not going to be the Super high volume, you know, kind of like I was saying, kind of copy paste house. So because of that, we're very, very selective in who we choose
to work with. And so I wouldn't say there's ever been sort of an unsolvable problem, if you will, but there's definitely been clients where I just don't think their mindset is right to work with us and they think that they're ready for the change. But maybe we start a little bit down that path or, you know, we start to ask questions about what it would look like to work together and they're just not really ready to hear expertise or be a part of the solution
together. So yeah, there's definitely been times where I say not every client is for us and that is completely OK. That totally makes sense. Thank you for sharing that. And are there any, I hate using the word mistakes, but perhaps that's the best word here. But are there any common trends or mistakes that you've seen in terms of companies, organizations that have tried to
build processes at scale? And what are you picking up on in terms of the the clients that you have worked with so far? Yeah, I would echo that. I would hate to call it a mistake because I just feel like there's common challenges that everyone is struggling with and everyone's navigating it as best
they can. I think I would say some common, you know, mistakes or things that could happen that send folks down the wrong path is not being intentional and thoughtful about, you know, who they're choosing to work with or what tools they're choosing to work with. I think a common, really common example that we come across is some executive three years ago sat in a sales pitch and thought that this tool was really flashy. And, you know, they've been making it work.
You know, they implemented it. They've been making it work for a while. And then we're being brought in sort of, you know, a couple years later and everybody's saying, I don't really know why we did this. It hasn't really been working for us. Maybe we want to look at something else, you know, So I definitely would say as much as it's, it can be difficult, you know, try to avoid the flashy sales pitch and, you know, really think about what you what you need out of a tool.
Another, you know, common mistake I think is there is definitely sometimes a philosophy that if I hire a consultant, they're just going to come in and fix everything for me and I don't need to do anything right. And especially when it comes to building processes there, there really is no substitute. You know, I'm kind of talking to department heads, I'm talking to founders, I'm talking to executives. Like the ownership still is
going to lie with you. Now, my team operates with a very high degree of accountability, and we are happy to make a lot of decisions. But at the end of the day, you know, this is your process, it's your thing that we're implementing, you know, and there's really no shortcut to just being involved in kind of doing the work with us. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's awesome.
And, and you know, when I look across the, the plethora of services that loss or consulting solutions provides for organizations, I mean, you're, it's across the board, you know, it's not just project management, but it's areas that we touch as project managers, right? So obviously I didn't bring you on to do a pitch of the firm. I would love to highlight what you guys do there because there are, like you mentioned, project management consulting solutions
out there. But can you talk a little bit about some of your, your favorite services that you guys provide? Or maybe there's a use case that you would be willing to share in terms of success? Yeah. You know, I feel like a lot of the services that we offer are kind of all saying the same thing in different ways, which is like creating structure and
accountability. And genuinely, even though we are doing all these things, like my favorite thing is still just kind of true project management and running projects. So I would say when it comes to creating accountability in a project or a project management office or any kind of business transformation, that's probably my favorite just because there's so many different ways that you can do it. There's so many people that are usually involved.
I just really enjoy those kind of big messy projects, if you will, that get, you know, kind of complicated and there's a lot of stakeholders involved. Like I just that's my happy place. I really like it and my team has grown to appreciate it as well. Though I guess kind of going back to the other question you just asked to another common mistake or the thing that I see really commonly is trying to out hire or like implement new tools to go around kind of poor
performers or bad processes. Yeah, you know, and I see that all the time too when I'm creating a new project, you know, set up or putting some kind of new structure in place. Really, most problems get solved pretty quickly by just being really clear on expectations and holding everyone accountable. And that actually actually usually starts with us.
If we are accountable and we do all the things we say we're going to do, and we set up the project and send the meeting notes and set up the action tracker and like all the kind of nitty gritty of running a project, it just makes it easier to hold everyone accountable. I love that, I love that and and and back to you know, I could truly feel the passion in terms of what you you as an individual enjoy doing it. It really does take Rachel. It takes like a certain.
Personality type to really love what we do as project managers. I'll put that out there and I can, I can feel it as you're describing what you love doing as part of your role at the firm. So 2026, you're going on your two year anniversary. What are the things you're looking forward to as an individual, as a project manager? As the founder of Lost Their consulting solutions, What's in store for you this year? Yeah, I'm super excited about everything that's in our
pipeline in terms of projects. Like I'm really ready to kind of like sink, sink my teeth into something else. We have a ton of other things that we're doing that are sort of auxiliary to our project management. Like we're talking internally about so many things. We want to host a conference. We want to set up some kind of knowledge community. We know for sure we're launching our own podcast. I'm really excited about that. I'll, I'll keep you in the loop on the details of that.
But we know our first episode is going to come out this spring. So we just have a lot of other things cooking on our end, and we're super excited to just be able to take some of the learnings and kind of share some of that. And if you don't work with us directly, that you still get a chance to kind of benefit from a lot of our expertise.
And right now, we're primarily focused on working with organizations, but it would be nice to be able to put some things out for individual project management contributors just to be able to soak it in. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's the beauty of our community is, is the sharing and the knowledge and just the conversations, right, The battle stories we get to share and that sort of thing. I was. Just gonna say that more stories. Yes, yes, exactly.
I'm looking forward to your podcast because I'm hoping that you'll be able to highlight some of those that you see as part of your journey through the consulting pathway for project management. So, Rachel, any last parting thoughts in terms of anything you want to impart on the everyday PM community? Again, it's been an honor and a privilege to have you on here as our guest and a lot of fun as well. Thank you so, so much.
I really appreciate it. I would say the one thing that I want to impart is you could be working on something as an official project manager or not. And things could be as simple of a project as you know, we just need to implement some of this small thing or you know, work on this little task and that is still important. Or you could be working on something really big and mission critical.
Like, for instance, we have one where if we don't hit the end of the timeline time, the company's gonna have to pay millions of dollars in fines every month. Oh boy. Right. And so you get projects that are all over the spectrum. You get kind of titles that are
all over the spectrum. But at the end of the day, I guess if I could impart one thing is that just sharpen your skills and, you know, create those frameworks for yourself that, you know, you're able to succeed and deliver results and operate with a high degree of accountability for yourself. And if you can position yourself as a problem solver and somebody who has the scope and everything wrangled, then you're gonna set yourself up to be successful. Awesome, awesome.
Thank you so much for those words. And if folks wanna continue the conversation with you, where's the best place to find you online? Yeah, please feel free to reach out to us through our website, lossorconsultingsolutions.com. Also, you could connect with me on LinkedIn and we also have a presence on Instagram and TikTok, so lots of different ways you can connect with us.
Well, as soon as we, you know, end the recording today, I'm going to get on there, do all the follows, likes and all the things that I need to do to make sure I stay in touch with you as well. I'm looking forward to your podcast and all the other things that your group is doing in 2026. And make sure that you also follow the everyday PM podcasts like and subscribe to this. You can find us on all of your podcasting platforms.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well, and I'll drop all the appropriate links in the description of this podcast episode. So Rachel, again, thank you for giving of your time and your expertise. This has been a such a fun conversation and I look forward to what's in store for you and the consulting firm in the future. So thank you again. Thank you so much. That will do it for Rachel and I in this installment of the Everyday PM Podcast. And until next time, take care.