From the age of six?

“And what you want to be when you grow up,” said the lady with blue hair, pinching my cheek.

I don’t  know anyone who at six years old was asked this question and answered “Golly, gee, I want to be a management consultant!” Some people first think about a consulting career when they look at their student loan balance and panic. Some work in a company that hires consultants and observe young consultants being listened to by senior executives in a way that they are not and say “I can do that job!” Some know someone who is a consultant and the travel, money, and solving big problems seem exhilarating.

In ancient history, when I became a consultant it was harder to get a realistic picture of the career. Now, if you wipe the stardust from your eyes and look, articles like this one are a Google search away.

Consulting careers are a life cycle of roles and three distinctly different jobs:

1. Newbies: a person investigating the field, a new entrant, a starting analyst, someone who does a lot of the work. Newbies work hard, learn a lot and burn out or get promoted within a few years. There is some Newbie hazing that goes along with the role, and many consultants seemingly look down on Newbies after they have learned the ropes and graduated to a slightly more advanced role. But get a few experienced consultants together talking in a bar and they will speak wistfully about this period in their careers, when “everything was new” and they were “drinking from the fire house every day.” In the best firms there’s a Newbie cadre comradery that lasts a long time. “You never forget those you shared a foxhole with.”

2. Yeomen: these are mid-career consultants who manage the team and keep the client happy day-to-day. Yeomen still do work, sometimes more than is realistic, and they keep the wheels on the bus, solving team and client problems as they go. They may be called senior consultants, senior associates, team leads, engagement managers, project managers, account managers, or principals. I chose the term Yeomen, the name of the independent farmer, archer or infantryman in the medieval English army (think 1066 Battle of Hastings) because this role in consulting has a similar responsibility and danger. In several places I worked the ultimate compliment for someone single-handedly holding the entire project together was “she’s a real Yeoman.”

3. Old Hands: this role includes the been-around-the-block senior people, discipline or methodology experts and partners of every stripe. Old Hands don’t have to be old in years. Some are even in their late twenties or early thirties, but they bring a certain gravitas to every project. Clients listen to them. They also have a completely different job. It is their job to bring in business, new clients, new projects from existing clients, extensions on existing projects, in other words . . .sell.

Some consultants and some firms dislike the word sell because they think selling is beneath the profession. They may call it client development, business development, or “having client conversations,”  but personal selling is what generates revenue in consulting. It is the major criterion for promotion from Yeoman to partner. Old Hands sell directly by bringing in new clients, or indirectly by developing new service offerings and methodologies, writing books, speaking and attracting clients. Usually, not always, partners get a share of the revenue they bring in, or a share of the profits based upon the clients they bring, so direct sales pays better than service offering development.

Becoming a Newbie

As can be seen on the diagram above, there are several different paths that newbies enter consulting.

Some come into an analyst role directly from an undergraduate program. These folks may start as an intern in the summer after their junior year. Being an analyst is doing a lot of spreadsheet data analysis and PowerPoint slide drafting. Some intern analysts are hired upon graduation. Most of those work for two years, and if they want to stay in consulting, leave to go to graduate school, often to get a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) or sometimes a law degree. An infinitesimal percentage are sponsored by the consulting firm for their master’s degree provided they return to the firm for an agreed period.

Most Newbies join after their MBA or other graduate degree. A few are hired early from industry with four to eight years of experience. Consulting firms also hire people from industry who become industry or discipline specialists and they hire executives who have worked at senior levels as direct sales partners (rainmakers).

However a newbie enters, he or she is still a newbie. That may feel like all previous experience is being disregarded, that the newbie is treated as ignorant. Some firms are better at “on-boarding” newbies than others, but consulting is a unique industry and until newbies demonstrate that they can be consultants there is a steep learning curve.

Becoming a Yeoman

Yeomen may have the toughest job in consulting. They manage the team, keeping people on task and not burned out. They manage the deliverables of the project keeping on time and on budget. They manage the client, getting the inputs needed and keeping the client appropriately appraised of findings and progress. Finally, they manage the partner.

Partner management may seem inappropriate. The partner is generally much more experienced and sold the work based upon his or her relationship with the client. But partners are also frequently off-site selling other work or touching base with other projects and prospects. This means that the partner is often out of touch with the day-to-day work. The partner needs to be updated constantly and consistently and be on-site at just the right time. That takes management skill. Some partners work hand-in-glove with yeomen. Some are the proverbial “bull-in-a-china-shop.”

Promo or No-Go

On the diagram above, there are little red arrows after each role category. These show people leaving the firm both voluntarily and involuntarily. In olden times firms had a policy called “up-or out.” That meant there was a proscribed period young consultants were to spend at each stage of their career – one to two years as analyst, two years as associate, and so on. Anyone who wasn’t ready to be promoted was asked to leave.

Balancing staffing is one of the supreme management challenges in a consulting firm. Partners are constantly finding projects and they need staff. New service offerings need to be created and that requires staff. When a firm is humming everyone is operating at the level above where they are and there is a full pipeline of new hires flowing. There is little room for the “late bloomer.”

I’m told that the human resources mindset has reached  consulting and that “up-or-out” is much more staff focused and is called “grow-or-go” with staff being offered many more learning opportunities before being booted out the door. This is certainly true of The Big Three, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain, or MBB as recruiters say, and probably true of other large firms, (PwC, Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, EY, etc.). Larger firms also soften the blow by having strong outplacement departments. This gives them an client development advantage as they are selling to alumni of the firm. Smaller firms may be slower or less rigid about deselection, but they rarely have outplacement.

Old Hands: Direct and Indirect Sellers

Let’s be clear, all levels do consulting work, even partners, especially those partners who have risen through the ranks. Those folks are likely to jump on Excel or PowerPoint anytime. But the system is set up so as a consultant rises the portion of the job spent selling increases.

Yeomen sell extensions (same client more of the same project work) and expansions (different client buying center, same or different project work. Old hands bring in new clients. There are two different paths for selling new work.

One group of yeomen and old hands build and maintain client relationships at their level and as those people rise to senior levels they sell new projects to them directly. A second group of yeomen and old hands focus on researching and developing new services offerings. These attract clients indirectly through published articles and books. Some firms, especially smaller firms expect senior people to follow both paths simultaneously, which doesn’t always work.

The secret to a long career as a direct selling Old Hand is to be able to pick the people who are rising at corporations, especially those younger than yourself. The secret to a long consulting career as an indirect selling Old Hand is to publish. Old Hands working into their eighties and nineties, W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Peter Drucker, Jon Katzenbach, Tom Peters, invariably have multiple best selling books, and busy speaking schedules.

Trajectory Variations

This trajectory is drawn from the perspective of a consultant in a firm, surviving every level of “grow-or-go’ culling and becoming and Old Hand. Most consulting careers aren’t like that. Consultants change firms a lot. Consultants go back and forth between industry and consulting. Some consultants go into academia, do research, teach and supplement their salary with consulting. Consultants start new firms or become solo practitioners doing sub-contract work to larger firms or working alone. Some independent consultants work with a network of other independents. It is a very fluid industry, with many different ways to structure your work.

The one thing that all these variations have as a common success factor is consultants have clients. In the long term, that usually means that an individual or some group of clients who hire them, find the consultant helpful. The client find that the results that are achieved are greater than the client can achieve without the consultant’s help.

Early in my consulting career, a mentor told me, “Alan, you are the product.” At that time I took that as an admonition to “be professional.” Later I realized it was also career path trajectory advice, with implications for innovation, continuous improvement, and client relationship building. The trajectory of a consultant’s career is one of continuous self-development, increasing capability to be helpful and deliver results.