Consultant Coaching
Consulting can be a lonely road fraught with challenges. If you are looking for an experienced and effective coach with a background at McKinsey to help you successfully navigate your journey to becoming a better consultant, I invite you to learn more and set up some time below.
What is consultant coaching?
Consultant coaching is holistically improving every aspect of your consultant toolkit from business development to structuring projects to delivery & execution to presenting & communicating. You get better at consulting through apprenticeship, but my clients are often either underwhelmed by their mentors or want an independent expert to support them. Whether you are in a larger consulting firm or on your own, you can learn the best practices I’ve mastered from my 7+ years of experience at McKinsey & Company and Oliver Wyman and the past 5 years coaching and consulting through Stratechi.com. We’ll work together to create a journey to reach your full consulting potential.
What is your process to help me become a better consultant?
In the beginning, we’ll assess your strengths and areas you want to improve, prioritize an improvement plan, and start down your improvement journey to becoming a better consultant. If you are currently working on a project, we’ll utilize the project in your training sprints, which helps clients put best practices to use in real-time and build growth muscle and momentum. Clients often pick one or two areas to start with, which are typically delivery & execution and/or presenting & communicating. These are the heart of your consulting product where you drive client impact and change. We’ll work together on situational coaching to diagnose issues you are having and develop pragmatic strategies to solve them. We’ll supplement this coaching with specific trainings to upskill areas you want to improve. I work with most of my consultant coaching clients for 2-3 months to address all their growth opportunities and then continue to support them on their journey periodically over the years.
Business Development
Growing your clients and diversifying your client base are foundational to becoming a successful consultant. Whether you are aspiring to be a partner in a firm or have your own firm, we’ll collaborate to create impactful strategies to grow and accelerate your sales pipeline. I often start with clients on differentiating, focusing, and crystalizing their personal or firm value proposition. We answer the fundamental questions of what makes you unique and better than others at driving impact for your target clients. Once we do this, we move on to improving targeting, reaching, building relationships, and driving consideration with clients. Then, we get into improving your consulting sales cycle to close more deals faster. And, then, of course, we work on how to plant the seeds and cultivate follow-on work from existing projects.
Structuring Projects
How you structure your projects has a significant impact on the probability of success. We can work together on properly defining the problem you are trying to solve and the impact you are trying to realize for a client. We then get into the right methodologies for particular projects, best practices for project planning and scoping, and client buy-in. I work with a number of clients on the right pre-work and data requests to ensure maximum momentum leading into the launch of a project and best practices in project launches and project governance.
Delivery & Execution
With most of my clients, we work on their project delivery & execution, since this is where they spend most of their time, and where the most impact is created. Clients learn a lot as we improve their fundamental problem solving skills leaning heavily on the McKinsey problem solving approach. We work through problem statements, hypotheses, hypothesis trees, disaggregation, option creation, analytics, and more. We spend a fair amount of time on improving work products whether in the form of presentations, recommendations, memos, strategies, project plans, etc. We collaborate on maximizing leverage with clients and teams to drive insights, work product, and impact. We work on project and progress management best practices along with client leadership and management.
Presenting & Communicating
It’s always been tough to see great work fail to drive impact because of poor presentation & communication skills. We ensure this doesn’t happen by working closely on presentation and communication skills and best practices. This often takes a lot of introspection and self-reflection to fully realize the areas that need to be improved, but clients often value the improvement in skills and capabilities the most, since it gives them the confidence they can use to tackle other areas.
Who do you support with consultant coaching?
My consultant coaching clients typically fall into two categories. Either they are working their way up in a firm or they have their own firm and need support in growing their business and impact. I’ve worked with a significant number of professionals in tech & software consulting, management & strategy consulting, sales & marketing consulting, and HR and process consulting. The fundamental toolkit of problem solving, client services & management, project management, presentation and communication skills, analytics, team leadership, and driving impact are the same, just different industries and disciplines.
What is your background?
The majority of my career has been in consulting and executive leadership. I spent 7+ years in management consulting firms, 5 years at McKinsey & Company, and 2 years at Oliver Wyman. I’ve been the COO of GoalZero, the 9th fastest growing company at the time, head of store operations and marketing at an 18,000-employee retailer, CFO of a successful startup, and the founder of KentleyInsights.com and of course Stratechi.com. I have a unique combination of deep management consulting experience with practical executive experience in a myriad of roles and in a variety of different types and sizes of companies. You can see more of my background and testimonials here. I also have an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, where I graduated top 5 of my class, and a BS in Science, Technology & Society with an emphasis in Computer Science from Stanford University, where I graduated top 10% of my class.
How do we get started?
If you are looking for a consulting coach to support your growth and impact as a consultant, simply set up some time below and we’ll get started soon. If the below schedule doesn’t work, reach out to me at joe@statechi.com and we’ll find a time that works for both of us. If you don’t find value in your first session, I’ll refund your money.
Are sessions confidential?
Of course. I am bound to this confidentiality agreement with every paying Stratechi.com client.
How do clients pay for services?
I try to make everything simple for my clients. I have a pay-as-you-go model. I don’t believe in contractual arrangements that “lock-in” my clients. Most coaching clients initially pay by credit card through the scheduling tool and then move to purchasing however many blocks of hours they want by credit card at the bottom of my coaching page. For larger clients, we typically do monthly invoices.