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Chapter 1
The Consultant’s Growth Path
◾ Are you on the Odyssey consultant’s growth path?
◾ If so, at what level are you engaging with your clients?
The consultant’s growth path looks at how a successful consultant builds a
sustainable career and business by working through the levels and stages of
the Odyssey process. We examine the four levels and explore a consultant’s
development from a variety of differing perspectives, including learning, busi-
ness, and communication. We also present two case studies, depicting Odyssey
in action, and conclude the chapter with a series of calls to action designed to
help you bring the model to bear on your own business of consulting.
Four Levels of Consulting
The model of the four parallel process levels is central to the Odyssey con-
sulting framework (Figure 1.1). It captures the multifaceted nature of a con-
sultant’s journey while at the same time mirroring the four dimensions of the
human being: the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, and the spiritual.
You must attain sufficient experience and requisite skills at each level to
generate the momentum to progress to the next level.
At the most basic human level, the hand does the work. The head, the
center of your intellectual faculties, is responsible for thinking about the
consultant role and the heart for your emotional response to it. Level 4 is the
level of the soul, the most elevated plane, where the human simply “is.” This
highest level is about awareness and mindfulness of the present moment
2 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
and implies a radically altered mind-set beyond one engaged in simply car-
rying out tasks at an operational level. These gradations also mark a consul-
tant’s journey through their career.
The Good Soldier
Everyone starts out at Level 1, the Good Soldier. This is the entry level,
exemplified by the enthusiastic solo professional who has just joined the
profession from college or from the world of work. The barriers to entry
into the sector are low; anyone can set up and call themselves a consultant.
However, few stick with the pace. Fifty percent exit the profession within
the first twelve months and return to corporate employment. Surveys sug-
gest that at any one time, there are more than one million consultants work-
ing globally. These are the feast or famine years, where earnings can pitch
wildly up and down and where projects undertaken tend to be based on
Master
Practitioner
Unconscious
competence
Being
Spiritual
Trusted Advisor
Conscious
competence
Feeling
Emotional
Competent
Warrior
Conscious
incompetence
inking
Intellectual
Good Soldier
Unconscious
incompetence
Doing
Physical
Hand
Head
Heart
Soul
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Learning
Consultant
Response
Approach
Human
Figure 1.1 The four levels of consulting model.
The Consultant’s Growth Path ◾ 3
prior work expertise. On average, a Good Soldier can earn between $50,000
and $90,000 per annum.
The Competent Warrior
Good Soldiers who remain in the business have the opportunity to become
Competent Warriors. Consultants at this stage have established a track
record and a reputation. You are known for being good at what you do
and have built up experience together with a portfolio of solutions. Income
tends to stabilize, and you begin to focus on the future and expansion. The
Competent Warrior is able to generate income revenues of up to $300,000 a
year depending on the client base and service level. Typically, these are short
to midterm work assignments carried out at the midlevel in organizations.
The Trusted Advisor
The third level, the Trusted Advisor stage, is where consultants define their
area of excellence. The Trusted Advisor refrains from selling in the tradi-
tional sense and focuses instead on adding strategic value to client solutions,
blending intrinsic qualities with extrinsic ones to build mutual trust. Trusted
Advisors talk about the business case and the fit of the business model for
future growth. They are comfortable in the boardroom and develop peer-
level respect with high-level decision makers within the client’s business.
The potential rewards for the Trusted Advisor are substantial.
The Master Practitioner
The Master Practitioner is the fourth and the highest competency level. It is
the ultimate goal for the Odyssey professional, attained by only a small per-
centage of the world’s consultants. Mastery of your subject can take five to
seven years or more of dedicated learning and experience of the business of
consulting at the highest levels. Progress towards mastery must be a mind-
ful yet evolving process, to the point where the Master Practitioner is recog-
nized as the subject expert or guru.
The Learning Continuum
Here, we look at the parallel process levels through several different lenses
to help illustrate how a consultant’s Odyssey unfolds.
4 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
The Learning Lenses
From a learning perspective, the first level is characterized by unconscious
incompetence; you lack awareness even of the things you need to know.
As your experience and exposure to the profession increases, you become
aware of the gaps in your knowledge and you begin to ask questions: What
systems do I need to invest in? What products and services work for me?
How do I get clients? How do I service them? What do my clients need? You
are consciously incompetent. At the third level, your experience at earlier
stages gives you a base of knowledge from which you draw to expand
and improve the solutions you provide to your clients; you are consciously
competent. The final mastery stage of unconscious competence is when you
work with ease. You are in the zone, loving what you do and doing what
you love. You are answering your calling in life and fulfilling your purpose
with passion and grace.
The Business Lenses
Figure 1.2 captures the consultant’s career path and illustrates how each pro-
cess level affects buyer type, sales activity, management, and strategy as you
progress up through the four levels.
At the beginning of your career, your consulting activity consists of deliv-
ering just-in-time product-based solutions; for example, a half-day’s training
or an assessment. These solutions feed into the client’s operational efficiency.
You are managing separate events. As you progress, those events become
more sophisticated and may form part of a conventional strategic interven-
tion. The great events, however, do not begin until Level 3, where you
devise innovative strategies with clients and marshal a range of interventions
within that process. At Level 4, you are in collaboration with the client and
operate primarily as facilitator.
At Level 1, the buyer type you deal with for your product-based transac-
tions is almost always the end user who is likely to operate at supervisor
level in the client organization. Level 2 buyers may require a little more: low-
level interventions to facilitate the use of the tools you have sold. Although
you are now more likely to deal with various manager levels, your solutions
are still largely product based. At Levels 3 and 4, you are a solutions pro-
vider, partnering directly with the economic buyer. You are an innovator,
a thought leader, facilitating the implementation of strategies that will help
transform the business. This is the real business objective: to work with the
The Consultant’s Growth Path ◾ 5
economic buyer in the C suite, in a position where you can make a major
contribution to the entire organization and support the key visionary in lead-
ing their business forward.
At Level 4, you are in partnership with the client. There is never any
question why you are there. You work collaboratively, your worth is proven,
your value is recognized, and you operate at the highest level. You share in
delivering value at a “big picture” level.
It is also worth pointing out that you never leave behind what you
started. If you begin with a buyer type who is purchasing assessment tools
from you, this can become part of your multiple revenue stream as your
business evolves. However, the excitement and challenge exists in strategic
innovation for major change, whether that is in a small family business or a
large multinational corporation.
Remember, these levels are paradigms of thought, mind-set, and ulti-
mately skill set; a consultant will almost always spend some time on all four
Strategic
collaboration
Facilitator
Partnership
Economic buyer
Strategy
innovation
Leader
Business solution
Problem owner
Traditional
strategy
Manager
Product solution
Functional
Operational
efficiency
Supervisor
Sales transaction
User
Excellent
Great
Good
Average
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Management
Strategy
Sales
Buyer type
Paradigms
Figure 1.2 Parallel process levels with business perspective.
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