Consultant Claims He Can Do ISO 9001 in One Hour

I have made it a rule, of sorts, not to insult competing consultants too much unless there was an overlap with the problems facing ISO standards development or certification body activities. It’s hard to have any conversation about those topics without coming back to one of the root causes, which is the dominance of consultants who muck up everything they touch.

But I typically don’t call out consultants for their actual consulting practices, since it’s somewhat bad form. In short, I have enough work and don’t need to generate leads by trashing the competition. If they want to be stupid, they can be stupid.

Joker’s Wild

Lately, however, it’s like someone broke open the gates of Arkham Asylum, and Gotham has been overrun with grinning, sweating whackos. Likely emboldened by ISO’s push to update ISO 9001 even though everyone told them not to, the consultants appear to be high on their own supply and are lacking all restraint.

In just the past week we saw an Italian consultant claiming to know everything that is appearing in the next revision of ISO 9001, only to have to admit later that he wrote the piece using Chat GPT, which just made up the entire story. Despite this, he still insists it’s factual, and hasn’t retracted it. Sure, buddy.

A few days later, another consultant — this one from Qatar — made even more ludicrous claims about the upcoming standard, in another piece that appears to have been written by AI. But in that case, he stole a copyrighted Oxebridge graphic to illustrate his article, and now faces losing his CQI and IRCA credentials.

But, again, the criticisms about these nutjobs were more about them making up stories about ISO 9001, to pretend they had some inside access. It wasn’t about their actual practices.

The last time (that I recall) I reported on some shady practices by a consultant was all the way back in 2015, when I challenged Scott Dawson’s claims that his Core Solutions could get companies “certified” to ISO 9001 for “less than $5,000.” I admitted that Dawson probably meant his consulting services cost $5,000, but that since they didn’t include the costs of third-party certification, his language was misleading. Behind the scenes, I asked him to correct his marketing. For years he refused to do so, while being awarded plum seats on the ISO standards committees, and slamming that speaker circuit like a horny rooster in a henhouse. Dawson eventually yielded, because the Core Solutions website now says something very, very different:

Back then, though, Dawson’s company was certified to ISO 9001 by ABQ-QE, who immediately jumped to his defense when I raised the problematic marketing. Because that’s all ISO 9001 is now, a protection racket. If you pay your fees, they will swat back any interlopers. If you don’t pay, they will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat.

ISO 9001 in An Hour

Before I go on, remember that since 2000, the late Marc Smith and the gang at Elsmar Cove had been beating me up for offering 40-Day Rapid ISO 9001 Implementation. The disgruntled (and largely unemployed) consulting gang over there was furious that I was sucking up market share by doing ISO implementations in real-time, rather than dragging out the work needlessly so I could turn each contract into a semi-permanent employment gig. This harassment continued until Smith died in 2022, meaning they were at it for twenty-two years.

(They’re probably still at it, but their rants are hidden behind moderator-only boards, so nobody outside their little group can see them.)

Now meet South African consultant Andre Barnarde, who is making the straight-face claim that he can implement ISO 9001 in one hour.

You didn’t read that wrong. Over at the LinkedIn ISO 9001 Group, Barnarde posted a video making this bold — and frankly impossible — claim.

In reality, what Barnarde probably means is that you can plan your QMS in an hour, but not actually do any of the work related to implementation. But the video gets pretty crazy, suggesting you can identify and map your processes in only five minutes. Later in the video, however, Barnarde says something about this just being the “initial hour,” somewhat debunking the entire point of his video. How many hours come after the initial one? He doesn’t say.

Barnarde appears to be a strange duck. His LinkedIn content includes cover graphics for books that don’t appear to actually be published anywhere, like “COVID Combat: Intelligent Strategies for Coping with the Covid-19 Challenge” and “Money Talks: To Move Ahead in the Financial Realm You Have to Gain the Skill of Selective Listening.” Some of his books do appear on Amazon, like his “Unveiling ISO 9001.”

(Yeah, consultants still use gerunds in the titles of their ISO 9001 books, because they’re a hivemind. This was literally why I called mine “Surviving ISO 9001,” to make fun of them. In fact, the working title for my next book is, literally, “Gerunding ISO 9001,” but I’m afraid no one will get the joke.)

Anyway, I called out Barnarde on his “one-hour” claim, but he hasn’t responded.

I’m sure what the excuse would be, if he offered one, is something about how it was just poor wording, and that of course he didn’t mean you can design an entire QMS in an hour. But that excuse gets pretty tired. Consultants are constantly invoking their poor English language skills to justify their scammy posts that are clearly fraudulent. When the consultants come from English-speaking countries, it gets even less believable.

And, let’s be honest: do you really want to hire a consultant to write your ISO documents if they mangle their own ad copy in such as way that it may violate the law? It’s not putting their best foot forward, for sure.

So, yes, it does seem that Scammer Season is upon us once again. Caveat emptor and all that.

To be very clear: Oxebridge is booked up for months. We don’t need the business, so this isn’t some secret ploy to get you to hire us. But please do your due diligence when hiring a consultant, and rely on the old maxim that if their claims sound too good to be true, maybe they are. Verify them first. There are a lot of good options out there.