Speaker 1: Welcome everyone. It's another Saturday, this means another coffee break here on my channel FIRMLEARNING. My name is Heinrich and today I want to talk about a piece of advice that I got from one of my mentors when I worked at McKinsey. And it was one of the pieces of advice that were most influential, most impactful to my career as a consultant when I spent six years as McKinsey. And even as of today, when I work today in the PropTech company in Munich in the position of a Chief Revenue Officer, I still think about that and it's still important to me. So I want to dig into this with you today. I will keep this video a bit more conversational, a bit less edited. So let me know in the comments whether you like this new or different style. I would be very interested to hear your feedback. And here this comes really from the perspective of a young consultant, someone who starts out at a firm like McKinsey, BCG, Bain or any of these other management consulting firms. And what this mentor of mine told me is that there are three stages that you progress through, that you can develop yourself into as a consultant. And most people start at this first stage. Though people will very quickly find out that in this first stage, you will just not be successful as a consultant. So then at some point you graduate into this second stage and then later into this third stage. So let's look into these stages. What do people do and why are certain of these things not really helpful and not really good and will really limit your career if you're not realizing this and if you're not able to at some point move up these stages. The first stage is the stage of a data gatherer. So this is the mindset that many young consultants have, that maybe you got a task from your project lead or from your partner to go out there and conduct certain analysis. And now you know that for this analysis, for this piece of work that we need to do, you maybe need certain data or certain information. And you know that there are these specific clients that would have this information. So you go out there, you sit together with these people and you want to do your best to collect exactly this data that you are looking for to do the analysis, to do the work that you need to do. So you are a data gatherer. You're treating your clients as a source of data, a source of information that you just need to sit together with and then hopefully you will get all the information out. Of course what is the problem with that? The issue with that is that these relationships that you will build with clients, if you follow this mindset, this way of working, these relationships are highly transactional. You treat your counterpart, your client counterpart, not really as someone you're interacting with at eye level but rather just as a source of data. And clearly this often does not feel great for your clients. It's not a great experience. And from your perspective it's just your job. You're doing your job. You need this information and you might then even complain or not understand if you're not getting all the data that you need from the client or you feel like he or she is not sharing something with you. You might go even to your project sponsor and complain about the person and so on. So these are behaviors of these more junior consultants which clearly are not really helpful and I will now reflect when we talk about the next two stages why this is the case. And one other key problem here is that by this way you're really not using the opportunity of getting more information, more insights out of your client besides the very specific things that you will ask them. Because once a client realizes that you are just treating him or her as a data source, often these people will just only share exactly the things that you asked them to share. But clearly often these people know much more, many more insights that would be very helpful to you. And this is then where the second stage comes into play. And this mentor of mine, this other partner that gave me this insight, he called this stage the stage of co-creation. So often, usually around like one year or so, some people understand this earlier, others more later, at some point you will realize that this way of working is not really successful, right? This is just not how it works. What you want to do instead is to co-create solutions with your clients, right? So of course, at some point you will ask your clients also for information and for data. But this is not the main purpose of you interacting with them. Instead, you want to talk to them and treat them at someone at eye level with whom you can co-create the solutions with. You don't want to fall into the mindset that you collect all the data, then you sit alone in your team room or at home at home office, and then you prepare some analysis, crunch the numbers for weeks. And then after several weeks, you go back to the client and show him, wow, this is what I created. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that a great piece of work that I accomplished here? This is just often not what works well. Maybe it's even correct. But if the clients feel like this is not really something where they had also an opportunity to partake in the whole ideation process, if it's not really something where they at least feel like they also had some buy-in, they also had some input that they could give, this often does not go well. In the end of the day, the perfect idea, the perfect solution is not really valuable if the client organization is not buying it. If in the end, the client organization is not acting on it. So really think hard about how can you co-create the solutions with these people? Are there some great effective workshop formats you can have together with these people? I even saw setups where we shared our team room in consulting with a couple of our key clients who really worked together with them every single day, got their input, involved them in all our internal problem-solving meetings. These are the situations where often you really form very deep bonds with your clients over the months that the project that goes on, you will get ideally the full buy-in. They will feel like everything that you created was also co-created by them. And ideally, it is not even you in the end, presenting the results of the projects to your project stakeholders, to your project owners. What I've seen often really is extremely powerful if it's the clients that you worked together with, if it's them that then stand in front of the board and present the results, present the outcomes of the project. And of course, it is clear that you as the consulting firm will then also be part of the meeting, that you surely also contributed to that. But also for them, for the clients, this is a great opportunity to show what you created to show that they were part of that, that they also contributed to that. It increases their visibility in the organization. And by the way, if you don't know what visibility is and why it's so important, I have a rather old but I think still very relevant video on the topic. I will link it somewhere above here. But this often turns your clients into the stars, into the successful heroes of the project. And this surely is a way better way of really building relationships with the clients as just treating them as a data source. But this is not necessarily the end of this evolution of a consultant. Ideally, at some point, you are able to reach stage three. And this is usually only where you achieve this as a senior project lead. And then of course, ideally at a partner stage, where you turn into something, which this mentor of mine that gave me this insight, which is called the trusted advisor. This is if you want to say this way, the last and final evolution stage of a consultant. As a trusted advisor, your client seeks you out not only for the very specific project that you're conducting, but also for any other question that is relevant and important that is top of mind for the client, you really positioned yourself as a person who can really add value to any of these business discussions that you're having. And often you have very great and significant opportunities as a consultant, especially in a model where you're working on site together with a client to really sit together with your clients every single day. And even at least as a project lead, you will often have the opportunity to talk to the senior project sponsors, which might be board members, or at least senior business unit heads or some equivalents of that. You will have opportunities to sit with these people once per week, twice per week and talk to them. And very often, if you have conversations with them, they will share also other issues that they're having other challenges that they are facing beyond the strict scope of your project. And these are often opportunities for you to pick that up to offer some insights, go to them and say, Hey, I understand that this is really something that's bothering you. Why don't we sit together next week and I will compile some knowledge, some insights from that of our expert networks of our insights that we have at the firm. Let me connect you to another expert that we have in our firm that works specifically on the topic. Let me reach out to this person, see what I can do here. Try to help these people left and right. And ideally, at some point, whenever these people have a problem, they will think of you, they will treat you as their trusted advisor, they will invite you to lunch or to dinner, or maybe you invite them to lunch and to dinner. And you talk about these things and you offer your insights, offer your recommendations. And this, of course, is the basis of a successful long term career in professional services. I would argue this is true not only for consulting, but also for investment banking and many other professional services areas as well. But you really create a relationship with one of your clients, which goes far beyond just the strict boundaries of a specific project. So these are the three stages that most consultants go through. So you start as a data gatherer, you develop into a co creator, and then at some point, hopefully eventually become a trusted advisor of some of your clients. And of course, if you're not starting out in consulting, ask yourself, what can you do to really co create your solutions more with the client to get their buy in to align ideas and your thoughts with them to really make them part of the process and do not just treat them as a data source. And frankly, being able to do that you showing that you can do that is often also one of the main things that consulting firms look out for around your first year or so when the first decisions are due to promote you to the next stage to the next level. These are really the essential skills that will make you successful as a consultant. And that will be relevant in your evaluation processes as well. So as always, if you took any value out of this video at all, please smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm and also subscribe. If you liked this video and want to see more content like that. My name is Heinrich, I release weekly videos every single Saturdays here on my channel. So thanks for watching. As always, also a big thanks to all the members of the channel from learning you're really having a great impact on the work here on the channel. So thanks to all of you. My name is Heinrich and bye bye. If you want to continue your learning journey here on the channel, I will link in the end cards a video where I talk about some sneaky tips and tricks that consultants use that are extremely effective and quite helpful. I trust this might be relevant to you as well. So feel free to check it out. You'll find it here in the end card.