“I know. I’ll become an independent consultant.”

Consultants, corporate staff people, or executives came to this career epiphany before asking my advice. I gave them these five things to think about.

#1 Why?

The first question I asked was “Why?” because it helped me shape the advice.

Consultants felt limited at their firm. Maybe they missed a promotion and in “up or out” world, were headed OUT. Maybe they groused about compensation and said, “if I worked for myself  I could keep all the money.” Maybe they chafed at the power structure and wanted autonomy. These folks understood the work of consulting, but not sales, or how to consult without a team.

Staff people often wanted to be listened to like external consultants. These folks how to do a project, but not how to find one. They had few contacts outside of their firm.

Executives had reached a pension vesting plateau, or their firm downsized and they took a package “you’d have to be stupid not to take.” These folks were often the least realistic about the actual work of consulting, but they did have contacts.

When they articulated “Why” some realized they were being unrealistic; some didn’t.

#2 Who is your first client?

Almost no one wanted to start the conversation here. Very few had a client already. The worst had an eight-page website, six service offerings, had been “in business” for six months, and burned through their severance and called me weeks days before total desperation set in.

I broke through fog with the statement:

“Consulting is about serving clients. If you don’t have a client, no matter what your business card says, you are not a consultant; you are unemployed.”

We discussed how to find a client. Some staff and execs had work with their previous employer; some consultants had subcontract work with a small firm. Getting paid enough was a challenge. Subcontract consultants have even less autonomy than those on staff and when a company hires back ex-employees they often want more work without paying benefits.

I recommended everyone make a list of everyone they knew who might hire them and start making calls.

#3 What are you selling?

In my experience this question was either over or under thought. Consultants and some staff people crafted service offerings encompassing multiple issues. I encouraged these folks to focus. As an independent you’ll be remembered for one or two things.

Executives often expected to be “of counsel,” offering wise advice to other executives. I urged them to think of a business outcome where they have the greatest experience, i.e., new product development, new market entry, turnarounds, operations improvement, etc.

For some I expanded their definition of how they might work. I explained the difference between content consultants who sell advice and process consultants who sell help with a process like continuous improvement, or organization development.

#4 What is your business plan?

Too many didn’t have a business plan. Some told me “I’m not really starting a business. It’s just a way to earn big money with no investment or expenses.” My response wasn’t always kind.

Revenue?

I saw spreadsheets where revenue magically rose at three months.  I asked:

• How will you generate revenue? – it takes three to twelve months to sell a new consulting project. Will you find clients through:
  • Direct sales? How are your sales skills and contact list?
  • Writing? You typically must have multiple publications (HBR articles, books) to make a dent.
  • Public speaking? You have to sell engagements and rigorously follow-up any interest.
  • Referrals? This is how I developed business. I was very disciplined about asking “Who else should I be talking with?”.

Expenses?

I encouraged people to think about:

• Home office or rent – If you are you easily distracted spend the money on rent or shared space (Regus, Industrios, Spaces, LiquidSpac).
• Structure – LLC, S-Corp, Inc, or sole proprietor?
• Phones – I suggest a work mobile phone (separate from personal) and an answering service.
• Printing – many don’t own a printer, and proposals aren’t all digital yet.
• Administration – billing, accounting, documentation, etc. I did my own, but if you hate it or aren’t good, hire to alleviate headaches.
• Travel and accommodations – executives used to traveling first class don’t understand that this is rare in consulting.

#5 Tactical stuff

This is often what aspiring independent consultants want to talk about. I save it for last because until you have designed your business (#s 1- 4) tactical stuff is a waste of energy. The most frequent questions were:

• What should I charge? Consulting day-rates range from $500/day to $20,000 or more. Most independent consultants charge between $1000 -$5000, depending on their experience and client demand. Start with what you need to earn (including benefits, and expenses) and divide by 150 billed days a year to allow for marketing time, vacations, and administration. Then test that figure for competitiveness with some clients and other independents.
•  How do I ensure I don’t just work all the time? Most people don’t ask this, but they should. Schedule downtime after crunches or you’ll burn out. Contract with the client to keep your weekends mostly free, schedule vacations and family time, and be disciplined about it.
• How do I manage project flow so when one project ends another begins? This will never be seamless. If you save 25% of your time to market during delivery you can minimize revenue dropping to zero. Put marketing time on your schedule and (this is hard) don’t cancel it for paid work.
• How do I make sure I get paid? In your initial interviews include accounts payable so you understand the process. Big corporations manage their cash flow on the backs of their suppliers, especially the little guys. Set terms and stick to them. Never let a client slide to two billing cycles without a face-to-face collection conversation.
• Doesn’t it get lonely? It can. Make time for family, friends and neighbors. Build a network of other independents. Partner with some, sharing leads for a finder’s fee, discussing articles or attending courses or conferences.

Independent consulting is not for everyone and, despite what some books on Amazon say, few get investment banker or tech entrepreneur rich. I was an independent consultant for more than twenty years. I enjoyed the autonomy, constant learning, and challenge. Perhaps, with a little planning, you will too.

More about me

“Consultant, eh? Good money for old rope!”

It was my first day on-site, at my first consulting project. I was still in business school. Angus, this sixty-year-old Cheshire truck manufacturing manager was communicating his experience with consultants.

I wasn’t completely oblivious. I did know it wasn’t positive experience. I may have asked him to explain or maybe he just did. In his view consultants came up with solutions that had been thought of and tried before and that if management was serious about solving the problem they should ask the workforce. Now I agree with him. Then I probably said something like, “Well, let’s see.”

In the end our little team of London Business School students and two Harbridge House consultants recommended that ERF, a builder of heavy-duty tractor-trailer cabs, expand into eight-wheel 32 ton trucks (fire engines and big dump trucks), but not build 16 ton box vans, because box vans were used in distribution where the extra weight was a disadvantage. They successfully implemented our recommendations.

Going back to Angus’s experience, someone inside ERF shared our point of view. We just gave the CEO data to be sure of the decision. Could they have done that on their own?. Probably. We just had no ax to grind.

Did we change Angus’s point of view? I doubt it, but we carefully listened and accurately represented his expertise about manufacturing capacity, new assembly lines, lead times, and volumes. He signed onto our plan when asked.

So in this instance, Consultant-osis, disease of the consultant, was mitigated, if not cured.

One disease of the consultant is arrogance. Some consultants have lived their whole life being told how smart they are and lord over mid-level managers. Are they insecure and feel the need to act confident? Maybe, but whatever the reason, consultant-osis, can be fatal. Humility and pleasant behavior are the only known cure.

“Here comes the flavor of the month.”

This pathology may be consultant-osis or executive-osis. When you hear this, people are telling you the company over-uses consultants. Perhaps there is executive turnover and each new manager wants to leave his or her mark with a big initiative. Maybe the hiring client is susceptible to pitches for the latest management fad. Or maybe the company has failed at implementing a change framework (Lean or Agile) and rather than fix what they were working on, they hire another consultant and start over with a new methodology.

Find out what people mean by ‘flavor of the month” so you can help. Find out the reasons for previous failures from the people involved, but advocate for organizational learning, and focus on actually achieving results. Identify “quick wins,” but extra careful of the unintended consequences of intervening in a system before you truly understand it. Clearly delineate implementation obstacles, and how to overcome them. Be careful about rewarding milestones or declaring victory too soon. Confront initiative-itis or change-itis in projects with long timelines by breaking the project into a series pilots, to achieve quicker results and keep energy up. If the “best way” is unclear run pilots in pairs to try different approaches.

“Not again! How many times? I know . . . until we get it right.”

I’ve heard people describe continuous improvement initiatives as “continuous change.” I’ve started innovation projects and been greeted with, “So we’ll brainstorm a bunch of ideas we won’t do because they cost money?”

Change fatigue is real. Change is hard –  create the “why change” case, and a vision, and plan the how, measure progress, measure results and control backsliding. Jeesh! That’s a lot of work and management may change their minds about if the quarterly numbers tank.

When fatigue leads to inflammation, infection, and failure to thrive

Initiative-itis or change-itis is worse and more of it. The medical suffix “itis” means “inflammation” – change or initiative failure so severe that people are inflamed. Did a continuous improvement project increase efficiency, but people lost their jobs? Did innovation produce a new product, that failed and the people involved were labelled “unpromotable losers?”

Such chronic inflammation is tough to overcome. Who would sign up for a consultant project team? It causes good people to look for another job. Hostility to consultants is not uncommon, but it can get scary.

I wasn’t on the project of the most extreme case I heard about.  At a reengineering project someone fired a rifle through a window into the team room. Fortunately no one was hurt. The project was cancelled. I talked with the team manager later and she said, “There were warnings. People were assigned to our client team, but didn’t show up. We’d come into work and find notes that accused us of “genocide.” I just thought it was resistance, but It was worse than usual. Later we learned that the company had used what they called ‘rightsizing’ in an ugly, violent campaign to bust a union. We never should have taken the project.”

The plant was later sold to a competitor and closed down.

I did see other change-itis. My approach was to explain the severity to my client and work with as many “friendlies” as I could. I ensured that my work didn’t harm people and focused on achieving results. For the most part I succeeded.

I worked to avoid consultant-osis. I coached clients with client-osis to do one thing at a time, focus on results, and create processes to sustain those results. When I encountered change fatigue, or initiative-itis, I took it slow and empowered those who overcame inertia and cynicism. Cynics and sceptics make the best project teammates; they are often discouraged idealists, who achieve great things when reenergized and supported.

Someone once flattered me with the nickname “country doctor.” I don’t have a medical model of consulting, but I do believe consultants should adopt the first part of the Hippocratic oath:

“First, do no harm.”

Sell is a four-letter word

Salespeople get a bad rap. The salesperson stereotype, is a gladhanding mental lightweight with a “smile and a shoeshine,” the “gift of gab” and questionable ethics, who can talk anyone into anything, “sell a cape to Superman, hay to a farmer, or snowballs in Alaska.” New consultants are often told, “never say sell.” Sales euphemisms are common in the industry, “client development,” “being called to serve,”  or “having problem-centered discussions.”

A consultant who is between engagements, might say “I’m on the beach,” but that isn’t literally true. Being too often “on-the-beach,” being under-utilized or under-applied,” portends a “performance concerns” discussion. The next step is to “get on with the value-added part of your career,” (somewhere else).

Consulting firms do short term work, studies, engagements, or projects. Sure, there are some firms on retainer with some clients, some who sell repeat-buy products like yearly surveys. Some firms are always on-site because senior partners seem like executive staff. However, most consulting work, has a beginning, middle and END. That means consultants continually acquire new projects or clients, i.e., sell.

Therefore, in my view, every consultant is a salesperson, not the negative stereotype above, who is only qualified for criminal activity. No, I mean a person, who listens to a client describe something that isn’t happening as expected or is happening unexpectedly, and helps the client solve that problem.

Consulting firms have different client acquisition strategies. They may sell analysis or studies that lead to strategy, or operational projects, or they go looking for clients facing specific issues -innovation, continuous improvement, systems integration, among others.

What about the independent consultant? I encourage all consultants to think of themselves as the firm of one, even if you are just starting out and work for a very large firm. Thinking of yourself as the sole consultant,  your “personal brand,” focuses the mind.

I didn’t do that. I waited till I became an independent consultant to think this way, but I wish I’d started sooner. That first year, I learned a lot – religiously tracking time not just to bill clients but to more accurately estimate future projects, saving time to sell, even mid-project, so when a project ended, another was teeing up. I also learned what worked for me finding clients.

Who can hire you?

When I sold celebrity speaking engagements on college campuses, I would telephone the college and ask who ran the outside lecture program. Was it the student activities department? Sometimes there was a student; sometimes it was staff or faculty. That person was authorized to buy what I was selling.

When I sold packaged training programs for the Forum Corporation (now Achieve Forum, part of Korn Ferry), I called the corporation looking for the Training Manager, usually part of Human Resources. I also called on sales managers to talk about sales training and occasionally I called on senior executives who wanted a custom training program to accompany some change initiative.

There was always a decision hierarchy of gatekeepers, influencers, and decision makers. Knowing the decision structure was always helpful, not always required for the sale, but when I lost a sale it was often because I wasn’t talking to the decision maker, the one person who could say “yes” when all others said “no.”

In consulting, first, a client is a person, not a company. He or she should be acting in the interests of the company, but one client hires a consultant. Yes, there may be a review committee and there is a “client system” of influencers, but one person is responsible for the problem, and benefits from the results achieved.

Who will hire you?

I resisted the idea of an “ideal client” for too long. Eventually I got around to recognizing that those who hired me were often people who understood the importance of the “people stuff,” but recognized they weren’t good at it. A colleague with a PhD in quantitative methods was hired by “people-people” whose flat-side was math. One “ ideal client criterion” is skills match.

There is also an affinity component. Another colleague works for others of the same ethnicity. I know consultants whose client base are members of the same fraternity, or share the same hobbies (mountain climbing or sailing). Some consultants have broader range than others, but most have an “ideal client.” It is worth thinking about who will hire you.

How do you attract a clients attention?

Cold calling

I sucked at cold calling. Others are better at calling executives out of the blue, and making a sale. One explained. “It’s a numbers game, make 10 calls a week, get three first meetings, convert one to a second meeting. One in four becomes a third; convert every third meeting to a project. You can improve by making more first calls, or with better targeting or by improving your ratios. Easy-peasy,” (for some). This is easier if you are selling one easily understood service offering, as when I sold training.

Thought leadership, writing, speaking, and public relations

I am often approached by firms like Forbes books, Advantage Press to write “the one-pound-business-card.” These firms have ghost writers for a book and articles from your ideas. They arrange speaking engagements, websites, podcasts, or TedTalk videos. You don’t make any money from any of these media, in fact you pay them a hefty sum, but “your business grows.” I know consultants who built a profitable practice using these services. Some consultants, do multi-media extravaganzas themselves. Does it work?  Maybe, but it is time consuming to do yourself and expensive if you hire someone.

 Firm thought leaders do research, write articles and books, supported by the firm. Some ultimately go independent. One told me that writing never produced any clients until he got “over fifteen Harvard Business Review articles and six books, but now it is my best source of over-the-transom clients.”

Conversations and referrals

This produced 85-90% of my business as an independent consultant. I would regularly “keep in touch” with people I worked with in the past. I sent an interesting article, suggested a book or a movie, recommended a customer or potential new hire. Then I’d telephone them and arrange a face-to-face meeting. These meetings were short, often thirty minutes or less, but I would always ask, “Is there anyone you know that I should be talking with? Sometimes, the person would say “let me think about that,” and I’d follow-up later. Sometimes they referred me to someone they knew. Sometimes they’d hire me.

Ageing out of consulting

I should have kept in touch more with younger members of the client system. Usually I worked with clients my age or older. At seventy, my entire contact list was retired or dead. I love being retired, but observing consultants who work into their eighties and nineties, two things are true:

• They wrote several books and
• They surrounded themselves with younger people and kept in touch with junior clients.

I suggested thinking as an independent consultant to focus the consultant’s mind on selling. Even if you are a new analyst, client focus is beneficial. I succeeded in consulting by focusing on helping clients achieve results from change. I might have done better inside a firm treating my managers like clients. 😉 Just sayin’.

Purchase here

In the beginning

I started as a consultant in 1980. I retired from consulting in 2018, a lifer in the industry. To say the consulting industry changed a lot during my career is quite an understatement

Consulting always involves change- new customer needs, new strategy, new operating processes, new technology, innovation, improvement and yadda-yadda. Consultants sell change, but let’s observe the astonishing change to the consulting industry itself.

Computers changed everything

Consultants traded information long before the “Information Age.” In the 1880s Arthur D. Little sold his catalyst research and Frederick Winslow Taylor built a practice on time and motion optimization-the “one best way.” Consultants sold proprietary knowledge and problem-solving processes.

Storing Information

Consultants became information hoarders. Industry information demonstrated credibility; earlier project findings shortened analysis time. Consulting firms still save data, but they’ve moved from huge floorspace libraries, monitored by librarians who updated Dewey-decimal-system-like card catalogues to Lotus Notes and SyQuest disks to their own server farms (the Cloud) to store information available to consultants’ laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Presentations

In my career, presentations progressed from acetate slides, made with press-on Letraset letters and hand-drawn graphs through flipcharts to PowerPoint slides. I know consultants who call PowerPoint slides “panels” from the days when presentations were leather bound into a flip-book of thick posterboard “panels.”

PowerPoint shortened presentation prep time. You could literally make a change seconds before presenting.  I’m not sure that added to quality, but it did satisfy the partner’s need to wordsmith.

Now, presentations include video links and onscreen voting and analysis, and, and, and. . . too often demonstrating the Murphy’s Law effect connected to live demos.

Analysis

My first project analyses were done on adding machines and Texas Instruments hand  calculators (TI-42). I used graphical analysis a lot, plotting two sets of data on a matrix to hint at a relationship. Early on you could get time on the mainframe to do regression, but you’d better have more than a hunch because such time was hard to get.  I experimented with VisiCalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs to do a database task without success. Now middle school kids are better on Excel than I am, and statistical analysis programs process huge files of so-called “Big Data.”

Changes to the Consulting Project Work

Consulting is a boom and bust business. Times look good, consultants create a new strategy; times look not-so-good consultants improve processes and cut costs. The names of the frameworks change. Strategy progressed from the Growth-Share Matrix to Five Forces of Industry Competitiveness to Blue Ocean; Improvement morphed from Quality Circles to Total Productive Maintenance to Reengineering, to Lean Six Sigma to Agile. The desired outcomes, growth or profit, are the same no matter what you call the solution.

During this forty years, there have been some other drivers of consulting work:

• The bottom line: The growing emphasis on shareholder value, promoted by monetarist economist Milton Friedman, raised CEO pay, and created “rock-star CEOs,” who move from company to company, hiring large consulting firms to help them change the company.
• One World: Business globalized creating opportunities for global organization design and off-shoring of manufacturing, data centers, and customer service operations. Now the backlash, localization and tribalism, is creating some consulting firms opportunities to reverse the process.
• Tech Bros Rule: The emergence of computer technologies created huge growth in the tech industry, behemoth companies, and an explosion in consulting service offerings like, data mining, and digital transformation. The democratization of information has also made it easier to start a small consulting firm or go independent. There are now available third party services for analytic frameworks and industry knowledge.
• Buy Don’t Build: The diminishing pressure on anti-trust enforcement accelerated merger and acquisition activity with the accompanying consulting service offerings, due diligence, and post-merger integration.
• The Pill: The explosive growth of the biotech and pharmaceutical-driven US healthcare, a market without competitive price controls, created a sales process bonanza for some consulting firms.
• “Money, It’s a Gas”: Banking and financial services moved from stodgy backwater to fee-driven financial engineering private equity operations that allowed some consultants to share in the gains of ownership.
• “Drill Baby Drill:” All of this growth has needed energy, so consultants who have worked in oil and gas have prospered. They same consultants may have opportunity in renewable energy in the future.

The work of some consulting firms to these drivers may have contributed to negative effects on society, e.g., financial collapse, addiction epidemics, and environmental damage.

The Growing Importance of “People Stuff”

Maybe it should be obvious, but nothing changes unless people do. A strategy is just a plan, a new technology is just a gadget until someone does something different. I evolved into working on the people side of change, quicker than some, slower than I should have. The consulting industry has caught up now.

The people changes of this period are enormous. There are many more women in the workforce. My generation, post-war Baby Boomers are retiring looking for second acts. Generations that follow  (X, Millennials, Z) are smaller and more diverse and have some different ideas about work.

Consulting firms have started to adopt the practices of organizational development consultants. Many have acquired smaller firms to help them become more people focused.

How Will Consulting Change in the Future?

I don’t know. I imagine that:

• The digitization of the industry will continue. I think that automated, machine learning systems, what we call artificial intelligence (AI), will take over certain parts of the consulting process. CRM software might integrate with problems and solutions databases to suggest potential projects. I can easily imaging Big Data mining systems being set up in companies to change strategies autonomously, (not that I think that is necessarily a good thing). No doubt presentations will get more high-tech. (Again – a good thing? Hmmm.)
• The people-centricity of consulting will continue to grow. Technology may replace some people’s jobs and that will change the workforce contract. Can consultants help to redeploy and train people or will they resort to “rightsizing and POP (people off payroll)? There is a backlash against diversity programs at the moment, but will consultants give in to that or help clients gain the commitment and contribution of everyone?
• Big consulting firms will get bigger; small firms and independent will proliferate. The larger firms will acquire the middle tier, but the availability of frameworks, industry knowledge, and analytical software will make it easier to be on your own. Communications software will create opportunities for form network of independents.
• People centricity will come to consulting firms themselves? For large parts of my career, I flew out to a client site Sunday afternoon and flew home Friday night. Zoom meetings, and four day work weeks, more client involvement can make the job less onerous.
• Consulting firms will work on solving the unintended consequences of the last forty years. We need a balanced portfolio of energy production, sustainable (reuseable) manufacturing, local food and shelter production, and a way for people to speed learn and adapt to mind-shaking change. Consultants can take the lead on these issues.

OK, I admit I’m feeling optimistic today. I’ve also been out of consulting for the last six years, so I may not know about the impact of the global pandemic, international conflict, the changing attitudes toward work, or even the infiltration of new technologies in the industry.

What about you? How do you see consulting changing in the future?

Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors is now available in many places:

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Timing!

A few weeks ago I wrote “Arriving for the Break,” wherein I poke fun at my way of being in the world, which might be called, ”contrarian temporal synchronicity,” arriving when the band goes on break, buying high and selling low as my investment strategy, and adopting new technology after everyone else has moved on to the next new thing.

In keeping with this tradition, in January I published Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors. Surprise! This year it looks like consulting firms are not hiring in the same numbers they did for the last two years; in fact, they are letting go substantial numbers of the bumper crop new hires of the previous two years.  Timing!

Consulting is always a boom and bust business. Consultants help leaders change their business in response to new competitors, new technology, new demographic or psychographic trends of customers, global and regional geopolitics and the economies of industries and nations. These influences move up and down in unpredictable ways.

During the past two years the United States has been recovering from the Covid 19 pandemic, which slowed business in general. Technology boomed for a while because of remote work, but then began to retrench. Electric vehicles boomed, after supply chains recovered, but then the charging station deficit hindered further expansion. Banks were hurt by interest rates, as was real estate and construction. Oil and gas declined in the pandemic because people weren’t driving, but then they were, and then not-so-much.

The consulting industry does well in periods of change characterized by consistent growth (new strategies, innovation)  or in periods of consistent decline (cost cutting, reorganization, continuous improvement). The industry does less well in periods of systemic instability.

So I got caught.

I wrote a book sharing what I learned as a consulting lifer: how to get hired, how to get promoted and be successful when the job changes as you rise. These are boom-time concerns, but I included some bust-time advice as well.

For anyone who doesn’t know the consulting industry, one of a firm’s primary challenges balancing the size and skill base of its workforce to the needs of its market. Firm partners have often lived through several boom and bust cycles. Especially painful memories were the times when they found clients but had no appropriate staff and had to turn work down or delivered poorly. These senior people often talk about “hiring ahead of the curve this time.”

These same partners seem less concerned about having too many staff. This pain just isn’t as personal (for them); they just cut staff.

Most large firms have an “up or out” or “grow or go” policy. This means every so often consultants are evaluated not just on current performance, but on promotion potential. In the view of partners, with input from managers, if you can’t grow, you have to go, or if you can’t go up, you must go out.  The great un-leavening can happen anytime, but often happens in the spring, in time to make room for the new cadre of hires from university or business school. At the end of first quarter, the firm notifies certain staff members that there are “concerns,” about performance. The idea is the firm keeps the best performers it hired and allows the bottom of the distribution to “get on with the value-added part of their career,” (someplace else).

At the beginning of April, Fortune magazine reported that McKinsey had given an unusually high number of “concerns notices” in March. A McKinsey Human Resources spokesperson commented, (somewhat defensively?) that the “percentage of concerns this year was absolutely in line with previous years.” The story went on to describe the tens of thousands of potentially unemployed consultants across the major firms and how this year’s cadre of new consultants was likely to be significantly smaller.

Perfect – just in time for my book’s second quarter sales. Timing!

Perhaps you got caught too?

This isn’t all about me. (Really?)

Maybe you were part of the large cadre or the last two years, or maybe you are a more mid-career consultant who for some reason has come a cropper on the “concerns list” this year. Maybe you were hoping to get one of what you now know to be fewer consulting job offers this year. Maybe you even had a summer internship at a big consulting firm last year and the offer didn’t materialize or was rescinded, (yes, they do that sometimes).

It’s time to get creative, resilient and determined. Here are a few ideas:

If you are Inside a firm:

• No whining! Consultants can be a whiny bunch – they whine about clients. They whine about staffing. They whine about the travel, but whining will not help you in this situation. Yeah, it’s “not your fault, they over-hired.” Yeah, it may be more political than it should be, (like the rest of life).Yeah, “not everybody is a salesman.” Suck it up and act.
• Seriously look at your “concerns”:
  • If you are under-applied or under-utilized – look where you might get staffed. Is there firm research that needs to be done? Look at the firm thought leaders -who is writing a book or might write one? Do you know anyone who you might connect a selling partner? What projects might be extending or expanding? (Yes, I know that “staffing yourself” is frowned upon in most firms. I also know that most successful consultants get forgiven for doing that occasionally)
  • If you are a manager with “concerns” – Are you behind schedule, or over budget – get help. Are there people management complaints -ask for a coach.
  • Are you not meeting sales goals – extend or expand where it is reasonable. (It does you no good to annoy clients by selling inappropriately.)
  • If you made a mistake or annoyed someone powerful – Apologize and ask for another chance. I didn’t do this enough in my career, but I’ve learned that humble pie is nutritious for careers.
• Start a firm or “go independent” – This is definitely not as easy as it sounds. If you will accept one piece of advice from someone who spent twenty three years working for myself as a consultant – have a client first.
• When you gotta go – Recognize that it not the end of the world
  • Ask for and take as much severance and outplacement help as you can get.
  • Look at smaller consulting firms, which often have different business cycles than the larger firms. Recognize that you’ll be a newbie all over again even if they expect you to “hit-the-ground-running.”
  • Look at university and business school consulting firms, which sometimes look for advisors and keeps your hand in the industry for when times improve.
  • Look at forming internal consulting firms for clients in a single discipline.
  • Look at former employers or their competitors or client companies and their competitors. (Yes, of course, you still have to respect confidential information.)
  • Recognize that joining a regular business is very different than t joining a consulting firm. Assimilate.

If you are outside, hoping to get hired:

• No whining – (See above.) Also, “yeah, it’s really not fair to rescind an offer.”
• Decide to go for a consulting job anyway- Sure, it will be more competitive this year. The firms may only show up at the Ivy League and the major business schools this year and make a lot fewer offers. Difficult? Yup. Challenging? Absolutely, but not impossible. A few ideas: (these ideas may help get an internship as well.)
  • Look at smaller firms, small industry specialists where you have industry experience, or those who hire generalists in people stuff.
  • Look at non-profit consulting firms around issues that you care about and have volunteered in.
  • Consider staying on at the university or grad school consulting firm and try again next year. Even if you work somewhere else attend the consulting club programs if you can.
• Get a job with a prestige firm in industry and try again later – consulting firms often hire from the Fortune 1000.
• Start a business or get hired by a start-up. Consulting firms love the work ethic of entrepreneurs and the everybody-does-everything-all-the-time culture of start-ups.

There is life outside of consulting.

Some of it even has the same urgent problem-solving and change-driven learning as consulting. Maybe write a book. Just be sure to get your timing right.

Ill-timed perhaps, but still useful.

EBooks are now available in many places. Print is only available on Amazon (for now) but will be coming soon to a bookstore near you.

I would be grateful if you read it. Thanks

You know who you are.

You decided to become a consultant for a good reason. Maybe you liked business, loved problem-solving and were good at the analytics. Maybe you were freaked out by how much to had to borrow to get the degree that was your ticket to consulting. Maybe everyone in your top of your class cohort joined the consulting club and the discussion was electrifying and you aced the interview case prep.

So you interviewed. The interview team was impressed by your volunteer work and, once again, you aced the case they asked you about and loved it. You felt at home. They made an offer to you – one of the very few they offered to anyone at your school. They liked you.

Or maybe you were headhunted or sought out a consulting firm after you had worked in industry and had some specific expertise. Your accomplishments were impressive. They liked you.

You joined the firm. You worked very hard. You knew there was an “up or out” policy, (even though it’s now called “grow or go” by HR) but it never worried you. Even among the other smart, nice, interesting people you work with, managers and partners are impressed with you. You got promoted, maybe even more than once.

No one calls you “Newbie” anymore.

You hear yourself referred to as a “Journeyman” or a “real Yeoman.” (Maybe you didn’t have to look that one up and enjoy the compliment of being called the first medieval farmer who actually owned the land he farmed or carried a longbow and was the backbone of the English Army in the thirteen century.) Even though you hated the term newbie, you hear yourself referring to the newest class that way.

You’ve gone from crunching numbers till long after dark, to managing schedules and budgets and supervising the people who crunch numbers till late at night. You are a lot nicer to the newbies than some managers were to you.

Now what?

If you are asking yourself this question, you have raised your head from the work and are considering (reconsidering) your career.

Maybe that is because salary increases have levelled out. Maybe you are looking at the personal relationship challenges from your travel schedule. Or maybe you are feeling that the job has changed and is changing as you rise. Are you managing the work more than doing it? Is there pressure to “extend” or “expand” your project, i.e., sell more work?

You have reached a fork in the consulting road.

You might have easily missed the earlier “doesn’t have ‘right stuff’” fork. You know the one I’m talking about – the associate that can’t estimate how much time a task takes and misses a deadline. You’ve never been the associate who gets too chummy with a junior client and shares a finding before the presentation.

If you joined from your undergraduate university you might be up against a bias in some firms, “real consultants have graduate degrees,” and be considering a return to school. You might even be among the infinitesimal percentage of consultants in the big firms that might be sponsored for a graduate degree.

But even so or if you joined from graduate school, suddenly you are faced with choices:

• Do you like managing? Mid-career consultants, manage the team, manage the schedule with the client, manage the client’s acceptance of findings. They know when they can manage the “big client” on their own and when they need to “roll out the partner.”
• Can you, do you want to, sell? OK, maybe they never use the word “sell” in your firm. Maybe they use euphemisms like “extension” (more work from the same client buying center) or “expansion” (additional similar work from another part of the organization). Maybe bringing in new project work is called “business development” or “client development,” or maybe there is a quasi-mystical language like “we’ve been asked to serve,” but if you’ve gotten this far you know, partnership and the real money in consulting, is reserved for the people who “feed the firm,” ”bring in new business,” “acquire clients,” “establish relationships.”  There are two primary sales paths:
  • Rainmaker – direct sales. These partners often maintain excellent relationships with people who currently hire consultants or will shortly rise to that role.
  • Thought Leader – indirect sales. These people attract clients with research, published books and speaking or media engagements that turn into service offerings that clients want to buy.
• Do you want to keep the multiplier? Clients pay fees that are two and a half to five times what you are paid. At mid-career, many consultants say to themselves, “if I worked for myself I could keep some of that money.” At this point some mid-career consultants consider, starting their own firm, or “going independent.” If you are in this group, think carefully. All of the above choices will still apply, all at once, immediately. Ask yourself, who are the clients that will hire me, right now? Next month? Next year or the year after?
• Do you want to stay a consultant? I was a consulting “lifer.” Over almost forty years, I worked for five different consulting firms and worked for myself as a firm founder, independent, and as part of a network of independent consultants. You could say I liked the field. I loved the learning curve associated with a new client or new project. I loved working with smart, nice, interesting people. I loved helping clients change their business for the better. In my retirement, I still write about the industry. I also recognize that consulting isn’t for everyone.

Mid-career in consulting is a time of choices. Choose wisely. 

I wrote a book. (Maybe you know that .)

EBooks are now available in many places. Print is only available on Amazon (for now) but will be coming soon to a bookstore near you.

I would be grateful if you read it. Thanks