Rosenzweig, a former Price Waterhouse consultant, came up with the idea after realizing there might be a more efficient way to deliver information to the business community. In a large consulting firm, consultants are paid a salary whether they're working on a project or are between assignments. In addition, client fee have to go to help pay for on-the-job training for all those recent college graduates or MBAs who work as analysts.

Round Table Group's business model was a kind of SWAT team of professors who would answer questions based on their expertise. A team might consist of one ortwo professors communicating with the client via e-mail, phone or video conferencing on projects that might involve a few hours or a few weeks of input. In the traditional management-consulting model, work on a project can last as long as a couple of years and the team consists of a group of junior analysts, managers and partners.

RTG assembled a database made up mainly of 3,000 university professors available to consult on an as-needed basis. The firm's fixed costs would be low because the professors would be paid only when they did billable work. Interestingly, among RTG's first batch of clients were a couple of management-consulting firms that wanted to enhance the credibility of their reports by including some of the research of the RTG professors.

But an unexpected wrinkle soon emerged. RTG's customers wanted the small company to start acting like a more traditional consulting firm. Business executives wanted face-to-face contact with the professors giving the information. They also wanted numbercrunching and follow-up analysis. And they wanted current, customized research.

That has left RTG at a crossroads. Should it try to become a more traditional management-consulting firm or continue to pursue its original mission of providing advice through Internet content and virtual links?Taking the first path would mean providing support to clients, adding infrastructure and formalizing its operation by dividing it into distinct specialties. That would have the downside of making RTG's competitive point of differentiation murky. But the second path risks putting off clients who say they want more.

Where should RTG go from here?
Become a better middleman

Evan I. Schwartz, author of two books about electronic commerce: "Digital Darwinism" and "Webonomics". "The concept is a good idea but the original business model was fundamentally flawed, partly because of the way the Internet works and partly because of the way consulting works.

"Working by e-mail, it's difficult to have a good back andforth. With e-mail you talk at each other instead of to each other.

"And you know the way professors are. These guys are juggling so many things, they're doing research, they may have a consulting business on the side, all the political stuff that happens at a university -- and they have students.

"To really put their creative energy into it is a really tough thing to do when they don't have their ego tied into it.

"If you're doing a face-to-face with the professor and he's enhancing his own consulting business, he is going to give it his all. If it's just e-mail, I can't see him giving it top priority.

"The Web has existed in this parallel universe for the past few years, and what companies really need to do is create a hybrid of what traditional business does best and what the Web does best. I think this company at the crossroads should also develop a hybrid biz model. Do traditional consulting tied in with this 'just in time' advice through the Internet.

"RTG could have a staff of face-to-face[full-time] consultants and also have a Web site where you could ask a natural-language query and they send the questions out to the database of professors. Part of this service would be a follow-up service for 90 days.

"But if you want to be a middle-man, you've got to add value to the customer experience and to the professor experience. Maybe you tell the professors that if you work on this client for a certain amount of time, afterwards you can be free to pursue the client on your own. Maybe that could be part of their matchmaking. All the great middlemen on the Web are adding value to both the buyer and seller experience.

"The Web is not good for people who putter along. It's probably good [for RTG] to get on to whatever is next as quickly as possible."

The Asian Wall Street Journal