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 & and execution to presenting & and 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 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 five 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, 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 training 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 continue supporting 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 aspire 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 improve targeting, reaching, building relationships, and driving client consideration. Then, we improve 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 significantly impacts 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 proper methodologies for particular projects, best practices for project planning and scoping, and client buy-in. I work with several clients on developing 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 creates the most impact. Clients learn much 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 improving work products through 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, communication skills, and best practices. It often takes a lot of introspection and self-reflection to realize the areas that need to be improved fully, but clients often value the improvement in skills and capabilities since it gives them the confidence they can use to tackle other areas.
Who do you support with consultant coaching?
I’ve worked with a significant number of consultants in large, mid-size, and independent firms across tech & digital 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 similar across industries.
What is your background?
The majority of my career has been in consulting and executive leadership. I spent 7+ years in management consulting firms, five years at McKinsey & Company, and two 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 and executive experience. 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 make things 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.