The Consultant’s Growth Path ◾ 11
trying to develop a good pipeline. You are getting to know what your clients
want, and it is that growing awareness that you will use as a springboard into
the next stage. You develop marketing strategies. You begin to see the impact
your service portfolio is having on clients, and you also begin to see the
potential for leveraging those solutions deeper into the client organization.
Trusted Advisors operate at Level 3 (Table 1.3). They have graduated to
partnering with the client/owner of the business problem and generate busi-
ness solutions that address the performance issues their clients face. They
have developed a knowledge and methodology base from which they draw
to service their clients’ needs. They are now consciously competent. This is
the “awkwardness of awareness” stage; you know you know. The human
dimension for the Trusted Advisor is the heart.
Thinking Like Business People
Throughout the Good Soldier and Competent Warrior years, we were think-
ing like sales people. We now needed to think like business people. There
was an obvious, logical fit there. We were searching for ways to grow our
business, and so too were our clients. Selling them a training course or an
approach to personal development alone was not going to do that.
Moving to the Level 3 Trusted Advisor stage is a massive step, one that
fewer than 20% of consultants ever take. Although those at soldier and war-
rior stages do good work delivering ad hoc consulting assignments and very
clearly defined projects, the work of the Trusted Advisor is very different.
You stop talking about the features and benefits of your products, and you
talk about the client’s profits, the client’s return on investment. You move away
Table 1.3 The Trusted Advisor
The Level 3 Consultant: The Trusted Advisor
Step 3 Emotional
Consultant growth stage The Trusted Advisor
Buyer type The owner of the problem
Market positioning Business solutions
Needs analysis Performance issues
Learning stage Conscious competent
Human dimension Heart/emotional
12 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
from a transaction-based approach, and you begin to see how your personal
knowledge bank, expertise, and talent can add value to your client’s business.
Increasingly, your point of contact in the organization is the economic
buyer. You shift onto the CEO’s wavelength, and your unique offering
becomes embedded in the client company’s objectives. Your perspective
widens; the discreet interventions you once sold are now supplanted by
strategies that engage the client’s entire business.
Trusted Advisors talk about results, performance, and business solu-
tions. They are comfortable at senior executive and at board level. Trusted
Advisors do vital work for niche markets, with clients that are loyal to them
and vice versa. They have gone beyond the feast or famine roller coaster,
and they enjoy what they do and work primarily with their Ideal Clients.
“Who is the owner of the problem at a strategic level?” is a key ques-
tion. What is the problem? How well is it defined? Why hasn’t it been solved
already? The “already” question can uncover the real source of the challenge.
As a Trusted Advisor, your cost becomes irrelevant because it will be
miniscule compared with the added value your client receives if you can
solve their problem or help implement the change they seek.
At Level 4, Master Practitioners deal directly with the economic buyer at
the summit of the client organization (Table 1.4). They are in strategic part-
nership and work to meet the client’s strategic wants. At this level—with the
soul providing the mirroring human dimension—the consultant is uncon-
sciously competent. This is the “comfort of habit” stage; you do not know
that you do know. You draw instinctively on your expertise and systems to
serve the high-level needs of the client.
Table 1.4 The Master Practitioner
The Level 4 Consultant: The Master Practitioner
Step 4 Spiritual
Consultant growth stage The Master Practitioner
Buyer type The economic buyer
Market positioning Strategic partnership
Needs analysis Strategic wants
Learning stage Unconscious competent
Human dimension Soul/spiritual
The Consultant’s Growth Path ◾ 13
Leaving a Legacy
The mastery stage is the ultimate goal for the Odyssey consultant. It can
take five to seven years or more of dedicated, consistent application and
perseverance. That’s at least 10,000 hours focused on doing the right things
and not simply drifting along, taking each working day as it comes. You are
constantly seeking out new challenges and opportunities for growth and
evolving in mind-set and skill set with each one.
The irony is that you perform at this level with a sense of ease. You are
not selling your products; you are not forcing your point of view. You work
in partnership with the top minds in client companies to find the best ways
of adding value and achieving strategic objectives. You have a direct con-
nection with the ultimate economic buyer. Trust and mutual respect is not
in question. You become the confidante for business leaders and are the
sounding board for high net worth individuals and management teams.
You are in the zone and draw on your extensive experience and learning
to create significant strategic value for your client/partner.
Peer respect has been earned at Level 4. You tend to think in terms of
legacy. In Imelda’s case, she focuses on a combination of activities: Writing,
partnering with a select group of Ideal Clients, and working with other consul-
tants, mentoring them as they move from Levels 1 and 2 to Level 3 and beyond.
The rewards are less to do with financial gain and are more about making a
significant contribution to the world of business in conjunction with fulfilling
her personal purpose.
Level 4 is about partnership with the client organization. There’s honesty,
openness, vulnerability, total respect, and confidence. There are no real
questions about why you are there. You are embedded, you work closely
with the client, and your valued contribution is recognized.
Odyssey in Action I
Whit Mitchell, Working In Sync, Hanover, New Hampshire
The Trusted Advisor Breakthrough
Whit Mitchell says that he took a backwards route into consulting. He
was an accomplished rower in high school, and when he went on to the
University of New Hampshire, a chance opportunity lead him into coaching
the sport.
14 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
He says: “That’s when I discovered a passion for getting people from
point A to point B a bit quicker than they had been going.” When he left
college, he started his own business, bringing together his exercise physiol-
ogy major with his passion for coaching athletes, to create outdoor experien-
tial training programs for a wide range of clients.
He was, at that time, the quintessential Good Soldier. Enthusiastic, profes-
sional committed to doing the best job he possibly could. But inexperienced. He
had commoditized his expertise and was selling solutions to a client base that
could quite possibly have gone elsewhere for the same service.
When he discovered experiential learning, he diversified into executive
coaching and quickly collected several high profile clients, including United
Airlines and Mobil Oil. He ran corporate executive retreats, where he would
lead groups of execs on outdoor programs designed to teach them about
leadership and team dynamics. Whit’s Competent Warrior years were good …
but they were not great.
“I found that most of the work that I was getting was a one- or two-day
team building event. Or I’d do an open-invitation seminar, where anyone
could come along. I was making enough to pay the bills, but it was all very
short term. There wasn’t a whole lot of what I’d call stickability to it.”
Whit had the sense that he was missing out on something, that there was
work out there that was more valuable, more worthwhile, more fulfilling. So he
went looking for pathways out of what he was doing, and discovered Odyssey.
He signed up with the Odyssey Business of Consulting program and spent
five days in Dublin, Ireland working through the coursework with eight other
participants. “Most of my contracts were between $3,500 and $7,000 for a one-
or two-day program and a little bit of follow up. Within three months of going
with Odyssey, I secured a year-long deal worth $200,000.”
The transformation was dramatic. The one and two day programs fell away.
He stopped providing product-based solutions and began developing lasting,
long term relationships with great clients, clients who came back to him again
and again, and became his best referrers. Instead of talking to function heads
and HR people, he established direct connections with VPs and CEOs. Whit
changed the way he thought about his business, his clients, and even himself.
In securing that first $200K contract, he was, he admits, shocked at his
own audacity. “I walked into the CEO’s office of a small manufacturing
company in New Hampshire, gave him the price and he said: ‘Great! When
do we get started?’ I was flabbergasted. I walked out and got in my car and
yelled at the top of my lungs, I couldn’t believe it.”
The Consultant’s Growth Path ◾ 15
It would be wrong however to think that Whit was simply chancing his
arm. He was a consulting professional with two decades of experience deal-
ing with a range of corporate buyers. He had worked on executive programs
at Columbia and Harvard. A who’s who of top 100 companies had been
through his hands.
The difference however is that he had managed to transform his expe-
rience and expertise into a high value proposition for the client and that
had similarly transformed his earning potential. Whit puts it like this: “If
they hire me for a year, and the value is five to ten times greater than what
they’re paying me, well, they’re not bad mathematicians.”
But to really engage the power of that experience, Whit had to change
the way he thought about his clients. “Odyssey,” says Whit, “helped me
understand how to approach people as peers rather than being scared of
them.”
Overcoming that fear has been central to Whit’s success since then.
“Once I had the confidence to go and seek that kind of work and develop
peer relationships with CEOs, things have been very different. For example,
I’ve developed a great relationship with a bank CEO and that client has
given me four years of great work.”
“I deal very little now with the people who need permission to spend
money, I just go right to the top. Today, I’m meeting with the CEO of a small
company and I feel perfectly comfortable walking in there and chatting with
her about what’s going on. Odyssey gave me the boot in the pants to go
have these conversations.”
Odyssey in Action II
Dr. Shayne Tracy, CEO, Executive Strong, Ontario, Canada
The Veterinarian That Never Was
I was at an executive round table, facilitating a basic personal assessment
exercise. It was real Good Soldier stuff; transactional, generic, product based
designed to answer questions like: What’s my style? What are my strengths?
What are my liabilities? One of the people taking part was the vice-president
of a retail company, a long-established family business, nearly seventy years
old, with twenty odd stores around the country. They sold safety boots,
overalls, work clothes, and that sort of thing.
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