A Love Letter to the Second Banana

In every startup ever, the founder is the one who gets all the glory. And in any consultancy, this goes doubly so.

They did, after all, start the company. They have the expertise, vision, guts, and the self-delusion to be the leader the firm needs to get them where they need to go.

So everyone always wants to play that role.

But in my experience, there’s a much more important role that keeps everything together in your consultancy and is the one that actually makes everything work.

And that role is the second banana.

The second banana role is funny because it’s not necessarily the second person that joins the company. It’s just the person that the company actually falls apart with when they’re gone.

A great second banana is a founder’s safety blanket, because they’re the ones that:

And the good news is that second bananas can come from anywhere: sometimes they’re co-founders, sometimes they’re one of your first employees, sometimes they’re a former contractor, sometimes they’re a friend, or maybe even a family member.

They just have to be someone you would trust with your life if it depended on it.

If your consultancy has been even remotely successful at scaling beyond just yourself, you have a second banana. (no matter how much you think you don’t).

And if you don’t have one, then you almost definitely are gonna need to identify one, because this is the person you need once things get more real as you grow.

A great second banana is worth more than gold to a consultancy founder, but the bad news is:

It’s kinda obvious why, but second bananas are the most underappreciated member of any consultancy relative to the amount of work they put in.

So if you want to succeed over time, you have to keep yours happy, motivated, and (goes without saying) incredibly well compensated.

Here’s how you do that, if you have one:

And if you don’t have one, and you’re scratching your head because you’re literally working 90-hour weeks to keep everything together, you need to:

Second bananas are the reason your company is not a hot mess. They are real, and they matter so much more than you think.

So give them love, learn what makes them important, be honest with yourself about why that is, and fix it if you can’t figure out why (or if you need to understand what a good one looks like in the first place).

(And if you want help to get there, let’s talk about it.)

One of the funny things about second bananas is that even F500 companies need them.

Running a behemoth like any of your friendly neighborhood mega-conglomerates requires a lot of people who can do the dirty work of keeping the trains moving.

And in many cases, they pay extremely handsomely for companies that can fill that role, which is where Big 4 consultancies come in.

A lot is said about the price tag of projects that large consultancies take on, so today I want to give a brief breakdown of how these shops charge 7, 8 and 9-figure sums for the projects they take on (in part 2 of my 8-part series on the real reasons Big 4 consultancies are successful.

The reason why F500 companies pay such obscene amounts of money to begin with is that, unlike small companies, they are huge machines, and huge machines break in very heavy, expensive, and complex ways.

Which means that to solve them, they need two services:

And big consulting shops are designed to provide both in spades.

This is why when a big consultancy builds a relationship with a client of that size for the first time, the play they inevitably call is LAND & EXPAND. It goes like this:

The goal in this model isn’t to sell a single $100 million project right off the rip, but to become an indispensable partner to solve ridiculously complex problems that require ridiculously expensive solutions.

Solutions that can be very technical (like multi-year infrastructure modernizations, long-term managed IT services, or platform implementations) or business-oriented (like remediating regulatory compliance, M&A work, and major re-orgs)

The thing to keep in mind is that as a boutique shop, you almost definitely can’t compete at that scale, but you can experiment.

Big consultancies are stuck with a business model that requires them to slowly build up to take insane moonshots and to move slowly as they look to seek massive wins above all else.

You don’t have that problem, so have fun trying different approaches to selling out, and see if something sticks for you that wouldn’t work for a massive consultancy.

Because who knows? You might be able to outmaneuver them in a way you could’ve never imagined.

I’ve always heard people say that to be a great consultancy founder, you have to have that dog in you.

Well, joke’s on them, because the dog that we Data & AI nerds have in us is more like:

And as I was saying earlier, the reason you need to find someone that will keep you honest and help you through the many challenges of building and growing a consultancy is that they can complement our weaknesses as the wonderful nerds we all are and enable us to run successful companies!

You’d think that if you spent 320 days in a row publishing content every single day, you’d catch someone’s attention and sell something, right?!

WRONG.

Danilo Kreimer was one of those people. He built a huge email list of 800 people from posting. 300 of them were exactly the kind of clients he wanted. He'd been doing everything right. So why didn't it work?

Because he was doing everything except for actually talking to even a single one of the people in his audience.

In this episode of This Is Fine, Danilo breaks down what it actually took to notice that mistake, why writing every day felt like progress while his pipeline quietly dried up, and how all of this affected his role as a now-founder and consultancy advisor:

Check out the full video above, leave a comment to let me know what you think, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more episodes just like this one!

Also, reply to this email and let me know if you’d like to jump on the hot seat and tell the entire world the story of your most embarrassing career mistakes - it’s very cathartic and educational!

Helping our clients understand what is possible with AI tools is hard AF, and extremely challenging for them to even conceptualize.

So every AI ideation workshop I build and facilitate follows the same stupidly simple formula:

Most consultancies never think beyond step two. They build the shiniest, most useless tools, and then wonder why they can’t ever get their clients to buy in. (Spoiler Alert: It’s because you don’t actually know what your clients need.)

When you’ve already decided where their pain is, you end up building a future for your clients that you want for them, not the one they wish for every day when they leave work.

So trust your clients to tell you where they need to go, keep it simple, and focus on their pain!

And if you want to see all this in action, check out this video that’ll show you what I mean.

Next week, I’ll be covering one of the more hotly debated topics among all data nerds: what exactly the truth means, especially when we’re talking about metrics, KPIs, and our work in implementing data & AI tools as consultants.

So make sure you join me next Monday to learn more!

(unless, of course, I don’t come across a brillant idea that beats this one instead 🤣)

If you’ve enjoyed the topics I talked about today and want to learn more about my work - let’s chat!

I specialize in helping founders of boutique Data & AI consultancies that have brute-forced their growth and feel like they need an external perspective to get unstuck.

So if you’re stuck yourself, I’m here to help!

Want to talk about a problem internal to your company that you’re struggling with? Sign up for a free therapy session with me, and let’s talk about it!

Want help to expand, ideate, and scope Data & AI projects with your clients? Sign up for a demo workshop to see how we can help you!

And if you want more details about either, check out my:

Otherwise, thank you so much for reading, and see you next week!

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