Consultants who act like permanent employees for one client face pricing pressure and lower profits. Instead, focus on change-management projects that create value, then leave. Capture a fraction of what you built and avoid becoming essential to their operations.
Consultants should be important and employees should be central. When you are going into a professional services gig, it should not be the case that you're looking for a client you're going to have forever just by doing the same thing for that client. Because if you are, then really you're acting like an employee. Even if you're coming in with contractor rates, you're really just doing a job. And that is just going to get pushed down in terms of pricing. And frankly, it's going to put you at a lot of platform risk where they're going to say, hey, am I really trusting that you're going to be around for a long enough period of time providing that level of service? Instead, I find that professional services that are in the change management or the change agency business are the ones that provide the most value because they are important. They are creating equity value, they're creating profit, they're creating revenue, they're reducing risk, and then they do their thing and then they leave. When they provide that kind of service, there's huge profits to be made because you can capture a fraction of the value that you created, but you don't have to worry about the idea that you are central and therefore a platform on which they're resting their business.
