Consultants can contribute to sales and client relationships, but leadership owns the pipeline, hiring decisions, forecasting, staffing, and resource allocation. An individual consultant does not control when a customer finishes procurement or starts a project. Yet when the pipeline slows down, bench can start following employees around as though they personally failed to generate enough work. A gap between assignments is not, by itself, evidence of poor performance.
Bench is capacity the company is already paying for, and leadership should have a plan for using it. An experienced consultant can review upcoming proposals, build an accelerator or demo environment, document lessons from the last engagement, or develop a new offering. Others might mentor colleagues, write a case study, help another practice, or automate something everyone hates doing. These activities need priorities and useful deliverables, but waiting for somebody to find a charge code is resource waste.
Senior employees should have responsibilities that use their experience between engagements. Architects should have standing responsibilities for architecture reviews, developers should have opportunities to build reusable components, and experienced client-facing people should be involved in discovery and pre-sales. Agree on those responsibilities before people become available, so their next contribution does not depend on somebody inventing busywork. You paid for the experience, so use it.
This post is part of my 25 lessons from 25 years in consulting series, exploring what it takes to build a consulting firm that delivers for clients and supports the people doing the work.
From leadership and employee experience to sales and delivery, the series comes back to one idea: a consulting company should be its own best client.
Have a lesson of your own? Share what has worked, what hasn’t, or what you wish more consulting firms understood in the comments.