The Consultant’s Playbook Chapter 1 – Activate covers the fundamentals of your role as a consultant, the capability you need to deliver, the services you provide and the clients you will meet.

It explains the strategy you need to bring these elements together so that you have a plan for your future and how to understand the elements that make a successful consultant. The fundamentals before launching into any kind of consultancy and setting up the essential groundwork to ensure successful consulting services.

The five elements of Activate, are Consulting, Capability, Services, Clients and Strategy.

In this chapter you will learn about the various types of consultants. A Consultant is an individual who adapts to perform multiple roles, using their knowledge and skills to influence or deliver beneficial change. You will find out what expert or process consultants are, the difference between an external consultant and internal consultant, and the different ways a consultant can work and the roles they perform.

You will also discover how to develop the right Capability to meet the market need. Your Capability is the skills, abilities, and knowledge that you can bring to your clients. In understanding your capability, you will learn about six categories of skills needed (Expert, Process, Problem Solving, Communication, Self-management and Collaboration skills) and find out how to use a skills matrix to help rate yourself. From there you can set capability targets to develop and demonstrate your credentials in order to position yourself and win paid work.

Next you will learn how to define your Services, (what you deliver as a consultant). There are several different but equally valid ways in which you may choose to define your services. The Consultant’s Playbook describes three main dimensions you can use:

• Client function (what business activity you perform)
• Delivery method (how you do it)
• Consulting function (what consulting activity you perform)

In addition, you will learn there are other ways that you may choose to define your services, including market alignment, intellectual property, domain, and technology focuses.

Furthermore, you will learn all about clients. The Client is defined as the customer of the consultant – the recipient of the knowledge and skills provided by a consultant. Here you will discover the various roles clients play in their client organisation and the objectives they have in their interactions with you, why the closeness of the relationship matters, how to recognise their emotions and fears, different types of relationship ‘quality’ and a method of categorising the importance that you place on the relationship.

And in the last section of the chapter, you will gain an understanding of how your Strategy should be tailored to implement a successful consulting business model. The Strategy is a set of choices that, when brought together, provide the direction for the future actions, with the aim of increasing the likelihood of success. Here the book pulls together many of the topics and thinking covered in the previous sections of Activate, as well as other generic strategic thinking.

Strategy can be divided into two phases – Setting the Direction (including documenting your purpose, embedding values, describing your vision, define strategy elements and balance strategy) and Aligning the Plan (including defining strategic activities, setting targets and benchmarks, setting financial targets, stating value proposition, creating strategic plans and communicating strategy). These two phases are explained and should be done continually throughout the lifecycle of a consultancy at a regular interval, typically yearly.