We Must Save the Endangered Junior Consultant!

David’s note: If you’re a regular reader of the newsletter, please make sure to vote in the polls below. It helps me a lot to know what you think so I can improve the content!

Also, if you want to discuss any of the topics below or any issues you’re currently navigating with your consultancy, please let me know by replying to this email or book a time here and let’s chat!

If you and I haven’t had much of a chance to speak face-to-face, here’s one thing you need to know about me: I think basically every take about the death of consulting in the age of AI is complete bullshit, with the notable exception of one:

That junior consultants are a species facing an extinction-level threat.

And today, I want to talk to you about why that is.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been regularly sharing my thoughts about why Big 4 consultancies succeed (check them out here, here, here or here, if you’re curious). I’ve spent a lot of digital ink on this, but one of the main reasons for it is really that, historically, the internal growth for a consultant is simple AF:

That model has traditionally allowed big consultancies to make a ton of money because, by design, it’s self-reinforcing and lets you scale extremely well.

Then rinse and repeat, until you have a consultancy with revenues in the 10 digits.

That is, until AI tools come along and cause a major existential crisis in the model and break it.

So the bad news is that we have to admit, as boutique consultancy leaders, that the old growth model for the people on our teams is now obsolete, whether we like it or not.

The good news is: WE CAN PREVENT THIS FROM HAPPENING (at least much faster than big 4 shops can). How, you ask?

We need to find ways to incorporate junior consultants as early as possible and to flatten the usual pyramid so that they can move up the usefulness ladder as soon as they join your firm.

So instead of making them watch while you do the work → have them slowly own outcomes as they get their bearings and learn what makes your firm special

Instead of giving them uncontextualized tasks → make them a constant part of the planning and strategy teams that decide which clients to pursue and why

And obviously, instead of benching them for sales motions, give them the opportunity (and grace) to see what actually sells first-hand.

We boutique consultancies in the Data & AI space have a lot of flexibility to experiment, so my opinion is that it is our responsibility (especially to the craft of consulting at large) to be good stewards for the next generation of consultants and figure out what the growth model looks like in the age of AI.

Because our future as a species may very well depend on it.

(Do you agree or disagree? Reply to this email or let me know in the comments!)

A year ago, I started doing free “therapy” sessions to help my fellow consultancy founders figure out the existential problems they get stuck with as they grow their Data & AI shops, and I honestly expected that all of them would basically be the same.

I was very wrong.

There’s been so much variety and so many interesting lessons in my conversations that I thought it’d be really cool to actually show you the situations and decisions your fellow consulting nerds go through daily, instead of just telling you about it like I usually do.

A big problem, though, is that not everyone is brave enough to tell me all about their issues running their company, LIVE for 90 minutes, while the entire internet watches, and that’s where I need you.

I’d like to use the exact same structure I use in my work daily in a session with you, completely free, where you’ll get a real, unbiased read on what’s currently blocking your consultancy from growing.

Except it’s an extremely public setting and recorded on the internet forever!

Want to see what these look like? Check one out below, and let me know if you want to participate (or if you’d like to do one but don’t want to showcase it to the whole world - I also offer private versions of these on an ongoing basis, so sign up here):

As I continue trying to make these posts better, I always wonder whether or not I have a good pulse on what you all like to see on here. So rather than continuing to guess, I figured I’d start including more polls on the posts to get a sense for what you think.

So take a look at both of these topics below and please vote to give me your opinion on two very important areas for the future of this newsletter:

Normally, I'd try to close the first season of This is Fine with the single most outrageous career f*ck-up I could find.

But I couldn't pick just one, so I found two!

In this very special season finale of the only show on the entire internet where I talk to other consultancy founders about the biggest mistakes of their careers, I'm joined by the co-founders of Amralytics (Femke Munting and Arantza Garcia Delfin) as they hit the PANIC button together to tell us the stories of:

Femke’s full-on crash out at 7 am caused by a stupid check, and a small missed checkbox on Arantza’s front that made their clients' entire restaurant menu FREE right as customers were walking in.

Two huge lessons that massively influenced how these two amazing consultants individually and collectively think about their work today, all focused around the moment that happens when you as a Data & AI consultancy founder finally hit that moment of total panic:

If you’ve enjoyed the first season of this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel! It’s been a huge labor of love to interview all these wonderful founders about some of the most vulnerable moments of their careers, so if you like Femke and Arantza’s stories, please show some love to the other 9 who participated in season one as well (Dylan, Tris, Gillian, Brad, Orell, Ricardo, Danilo, Christian, and Susan)

Also, stay tuned for a big announcement about the return of my game show in the coming weeks 👀👀👀

As most of you know, LinkedIn recently introduced a button made specifically to report posts that seem like AI slop:

This stupid button has had the internet in a bit of an uproar, as LinkedIn (along with Substack) is now one of the first social media platforms to explicitly call out the garbage we all regularly see on our feeds.

While the implementation and reasoning from this on LinkedIn’s part has been um… short on detail, I think this is a major moment for what won’t be the last we see of this happening moving forward.

It is pretty clear that if you talk to any normal person on the street, the read on the classic AI-generated low-effort content is getting worse and worse by the day (and it never was that good to begin with).

And the days where you can just post some AI-generated nonsense and expect to get any sort of results are thankfully already behind us.

As you can imagine, I have really strong feelings about this. I put a lot of effort into my content (which is why you’re 1000+ words deep into reading a setup for a meme), so if I was king of the world for one day, AI slop would be pretty close to the top of the list of things to get rid of (right next to putting scissors in plastic packages that require scissors to open)

So if your reaction to this recent announcement was to run back to your AI tool of choice to ask it whether your low-effort slop was going to get you banned and you got hit with one of these:

You need to get to work. Understand your audience, be vulnerable, exercise your creative muscle, pay professionals who do creative work what they deserve, and use AI tools judiciously to make your content better, not to replace it.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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 of all shapes and sizes overcome existential problems in their growth.

So if you’re finding yourself stuck as your shop scales, I’m here to help!

Want to talk about a problem internal to your company? Sign up for a free therapy session with me!

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

And if you want more details, check out my:

Otherwise, thank you so much for reading, please make sure you vote in the polls above, and see you next week!