That special… something

Forget consultancy for a moment. Here’s a radical perspective: the chances of the person that is you being born were something like one in a trillion. (The classic opening line of Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow puts it beautifully: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones”.)

Nobody else is precisely like you, and chances are that nobody will be again. Like every single one of the seven billion people on the planet, you are having an experience of being human that is totally individual to you. Nobody else has your neurology, your personality, or your perspective. Nobody else has had the life that you’ve had. Nobody else has had your career, wherever it has taken you.

It stands to reason, then, that nobody else can or will ever see the world the way that you do.

Don’t worry: I’m not about to start flannelling you with a moist pile of self-help homilies. Instead, I’m going to assume that for whatever reason your human experience has seen you arrive at a point where you’re either helping others solve their problems as a consultant or have ideas about doing so. 

And I’m going to ask you a question. When you picture this work, does it feel like a manifestation of you: your irreplaceable perspective, career, life experience?

Or are you dampening down what makes you unique in an attempt to fit a formulaic idea of how a ‘consultant’ should look and sound?

The world doesn’t need another consultancy

Last year, 34,000 consultancies set up shop in the UK. Add to that total the number of start-up consultancies in, say, Europe or the US, and the number balloons — potentially into seven figures. Those consultancies enter a marketplace that is already packed with people clamouring to flog their wares. The consultancy market may be growing by double digits each year, but you might feel hard pushed to argue that supply and demand aren’t keeping pace.

The world doesn’t need another consultancy. 

Then again, it’s not as if the issues that the world is experiencing are getting any easier to solve. Much has been written about the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous nature of contemporary existence; the sense of ‘permacrisis’ that seems to dog our daily lives. The resulting issues affect businesses in a range of different ways, as recent experience with COVID demonstrates.

And the problems keep piling up from there. Problems of attracting and managing capital. Problems of managing reputation in an ever more porous digital world. Problems of people management; of overcoming generational differences; of morale and motivation. Of organising and reorganising, of invention and reinvention. These problems occur one on top of each other and, research suggests, feel ever more overwhelming and intractable to leaders.

So the world doesn’t need another consultancy, for the simple reason that if the answer to these problems lay in familiar patterns they would already be solved. 

But it just might need a one-in-a-trillion perspective.

You. Yes, you

There are many problems out there that your one-in-a-trillion perspective might enable you to solve better than anyone else. Harnessed in the right way, your unique abilities will help you find the clients that need you, add huge value to those clients, and prosper. 

This is why I have grown to believe that there is no such thing as competition in consultancy. Everyone has an unreplicable and valuable contribution to make in solving the world’s problems. As people who want to work in consultancy, we just need to find the right route to doing that.

So, as the question at the top of this post suggested, the job is not lemming your way into featureless orthodoxy. It is to do the best possible job that you can of building a business that reflects your outlook and experience. If you do that, and do it well, your business will look and feel like nothing else in the world. Over time, the right problems — the ones that you can solve well — will come your way.

Look at it like this: if you are who you are, those who need you will find you. If you try to be who you’re not, no-one will be able to see you.

The Consultancy Business exists to help independent consultants build the consultancies nobody else can.

What to take from this article

In running an independent consultancy, your principal task is to build a business that reflects what makes you — and the people around you — as unique as you are.

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