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When you spend as much time talking about the craft of consulting on LinkedIn as I do, you get a lot of different types of comments on your posts. Some are very weird, some are really good, and some are truly insightful. This past week I got one of the latter.

Originally, I had planned a different topic for today’s newsletter, but I had a LinkedIn post a couple of days ago where I talked about an upcoming series I have coming out soon, and I got a comment that really stood out:

If you’ve worked with me, you’ll know that is a topic I think about often. As a long-time social impact-oriented person (especially during the time I worked for a Big 4 consultancy), my internal monologue always goes back to one question:

Do we consultants have to be assholes to do our work, and do we have to take on clients who are assholes themselves (either to their teams or to the world at large)?

I’d like to tell you that the answer is a clear-cut no to both, but the real answer is more complicated than that.

Large consultancies (think Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc.) are machines. These are organizations with revenues and profits larger than many small countries you know.

When you operate at that scale, keeping the machine alive requires (if you just do some basic math about the scale of the companies we’re talking about and what it costs to make them work) taking on what you might call unsavory clients (think questionable governments, sketchy F500 companies actively destroying people’s lives, and the like).

The biggest downside of working in it, on a personal level, is that you’re a tiny cog, and tiny cogs don’t make decisions about what direction the machine turns to.

You turn, and you keep your mouth shut.

Every big consultancy you know takes on many projects like the ones Gary was referencing in the comment, and you might think that everyone in it would say something.

But when you work in that sphere, it’s actually pretty easy to rationalize why those kinds of projects and clients don’t affect you.

The vibe, at the end of the day, is “out of sight, out of mind”.

And in a big enough company, it’s actually pretty easy to keep things out of sight as long as the bank account, partner profits (and the stock price) keep going up and to the right.

The point of me telling you this story is that if you’re reading this newsletter, you almost definitely DO NOT work for a big consultancy.

You run a very small one instead.

And boutique consultancies have one major advantage against the market-leading shops: you control your own destiny.

Because you don’t have a never-ending hole of stockholders, investors, or market expectations to fill, you not only need to be thinking about how to take on work that grows your company.

You need to first be thinking of what your values are, what clients you want to take on to reflect them, how you’ll treat your team to serve them, what kinds of work you feel comfortable turning down, and yes, even what impact your work will have on our society.

No matter what anyone tells you, you don’t have to take on projects you don’t feel comfortable with.

You don’t have to work with people that you think are making the world a worse place for the rest of us.

And most importantly, you don’t have to compromise your values to make money.

If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re full of shit, and I want you to send them to me so I can hit them with one of these:

One of my biggest pet peeves as a long-time consultant is when people talk about big consultancies without any context on what they sell, how they make the money they do, and what they’re actually good at.

You hear it all the time on LinkedIn, and it drives me insane how much of it is basically insecurity cosplaying as hot takes.

I’ve spent over a decade working for both Big 4 and boutique consultancies before launching my own meta-consultancy. I’ve lived the good and bad from both models, and I want to share it with you. No frills, no bullsh*t.

So I decided to change that by writing a series of LinkedIn posts where I cover the basics of the differences between the world’s largest consultancies and yours.

And starting next week, I’ll be sharing long-form versions of each of those posts with you here as well every Monday!

The first part of today’s newsletter is a preview of that series, so reply to this note and let me know if there are any topics you’d like me to cover.

Make sure you follow my LinkedIn page to not miss the upcoming short-form articles, and stay tuned for the long-form versions on here over the coming weeks!

You probably have staked your company’s reputation on being more careful and detail-oriented than the big consultancies. The kind of shop that doesn't accidentally send their clients 857 emails in the middle of the night.

Unlike Ricardo, who accidentally did the complete opposite.

In this episode of This Is Fine, Ricardo walks through the exact moment he realized what had happened, why the "big firm pedigree" on his team didn't save him, and how one afternoon of panic turned into a permanent overhaul of how he runs QA today.

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!

Whenever I build an AI Use Case Ideation workshop for other consultancies, the thing that surprises most of the founders I work with is how simple the formula is.

You would think there’d be a million steps to it, but there’s really just 3:

Most Data & AI consultants 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).

You’ve already decided where their pain is, and not where it actually is.

You know the future you’d build for them, not the one they wish for when they leave work every day.

And most importantly, you’re not taking into account the fights they’ve already fought and the work they’ve already put in.

Trust your clients to tell you where they need to go, and if you want to suceed, give them the chance to do so.

Back on the topic of being an asshole, one of the more important things you need to keep in mind is that as a founder of a successful but growing consultancy is that your reputation will follow you.

If you’re newer to the world of consulting, you might not realize this yet, but the consulting industry is tiny.

More often than not, it doesn’t take more than a jump or two to find a mutual connection when you’re meeting someone at a networking event full of other consultants.

So if you take one thing from today’s newsletter, it’s that the number 1 rule to be a successful consultant is "don't be an asshole".

don't be an asshole to your clients (because clients become friends)
don't be an asshole to your friends (because friends become clients)
don't be an asshole to your competitors (because competitors become partners)
don't be an asshole to your team (because your team might become your competition)

And even though this is a highly intense line of work that attracts a lot of super competitive people, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is:

This is a people business, and people don't forget.

So do with that what you will.

To close out today’s newsletter, I’d like to do something slightly different and get your thoughts!

I’ve been wanting to try out this poll feature since I started publishing these, and today’s the day.

After all, I want to always share more of what you want to see, so click one of the options below and let me know:

If there’s another topic not listed there that you’d like, feel free to reply to this email and send me a note directly as well!

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!

P.S.: A reminder that if you enjoyed this post, you should click the ad below because running a newsletter every week ain’t cheap, and it helps me keep making this for you every week!

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