Why Consultants Should Start Building Stuff

The joy and melancholy of consultant life

As consultants, our life is full of action, rich in change and full of surprises. We work with new projects, new clients, new environments all the time. We keep learning new things and are confronted with different perspectives. Which is great. It makes us stay fresh and curious and rarely bored. People working inside organizations are sometimes jealous of this.

However, it has one important downside: Once a project is over, it its over. Even if you feel there would be more to do for you, more value to add, lose ends to tie together: consulting assignments have one thing in common: they are finite.

At some point there will be the day of the handover when you have to say goodbye even to the most exciting topic you were working on and move on to new shores. To uncertainty. You usually don’t know what comes next. And sometimes, in case of the more challenging and exciting projects, there is a feeling of loss.

Other people’s problems

As a consultant you solve problems. After all, this is why a client hires you and pays a premium: You are a problem solver. And you bring in experience gathered over the years from many similar cases. Once the problem is solved, your job is done.

After a project is over you can add it to your resume to wear it like a medal. Over time the project portfolios of senior consultants tend to look a bit like the jackets of these gentlemen:

wearing projects like medals

Growing your list of successful projects and references serves as proof of experience and ensures credibility. What is missing however is one small but important thing: Skin in the game!1

Without skin in the game you can can be the best problem solve, be well worth your fee and earn your badges. But you are solving other people’s problems. You may be deeply involved, but you are not fully committed.

From hit and run to build and run

Why should a consultant move from being involved to becoming committed? Is that not dangerous like in the old chicken and pig joke?2

involved or committed?

Being committed involves risk and it is not billable to a client. But it can have significant benefits:

  • Get better at consulting: through switching sides you experience how life is on the “other side”: you feel the tension when things go south and the accomplishment when they succeed. This helps you empathize better with your consulting clients who are dealing with this situation on a daily basis.
  • Next level credibility and impact: prove that you can walk the talk.
  • Build your brand: position yourself as an expert not only in standard consulting services but as a builder in a subject area
  • Diversify revenue streams: take a product view on consulting services and open up the potential to abstract your services from “time and money”
  • Generate domain knowledge: when building you have to engage deeply with a subject domain understanding its whole context in an end-to-end perspective.
  • Innovate: Get new ideas for consulting, and generally for starting initiatives, experiments and small bets – and make them become real.
  • Personal satisfaction: more of an emotional thing, but building your own thing is actually fun. It is a different feeling to see your “baby” succeed than

I would claim: these benefits far outweigh any risks. And the risks are controllable.

From midwife to mother

Here are some ideas what you can build and create as a consultant:

  • Build a tool for consulting: anything that makes your life as a consultant easier and / or helps your client
  • Build an app or software: something to solve a concrete problem for someone
  • Create a model: reflect on your project experience and bring learnings into an abstract form as a well described mental model or strategy that can be applied to new situations.
  • Build a framework: create a system or structure consisting of standard templates for problem solving in a certain domain.
  • Teach what you learned and build a teaching or training portfolio, maybe also turn it into a tool or app.

These are just random examples. Find the thing that suits you!

In any case: when deciding what to build: Think in concrete outcomes. The question to ask is: How can the thing you create improve someone’s life?

Start building

🚀 Don’t wait too long. Get sh*t done – build and run.

Stay agile and pragmatic!

  1. For a deeper dive into the concept I recommend reading the maestro: https://medium.com/incerto/what-do-i-mean-by-skin-in-the-game-my-own-version-cc858dc73260 ↩︎
  2. Source unknown ↩︎