$42 million in fees for one engagement

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Premieres 15 October 2023. After a glittering start working with us to reboot his career and successfully rebuild the internal innovation division of his firm, where he became a rising star, Andrew decided that he knew enough to work alone. He believed he no longer needed our help as he prepared to build a business serving innovation clients. Things did not go well. He generally knew some of the what to do from our books and programs but he quickly learned that the how and why is what mattered. Subtle changes, which he struggled to deduce by himself, had outsize results. Most of his fellow partners did not help him and he battled to get into existing clients to discuss innovation. He did not have an innovation model or program that resonated with clients. The technology firms were already selling software to automate the innovation program we had designed for his firm. The world had caught up and overtook him and his practice. The tech firms had commoditized the program for which he had hoped to charge premium fees. To gain sales credit he helped other partners with ERP  programs, leading him to spend less time on innovation. Andrew learned it is hard to be a medium-tier consultant. You either compete at scale or the value you bring. There is no middle ground. Andrew did not understand why innovation was not an easier sell. Surely his potential clients knew it was important. Surely his fellow partners should be welcoming him into their clients. Believing he was not fully appreciated, Andrew took small and persistent actions to further undermine the support he had. For example, he took longer responding to partner emails and sometimes showed his frustration when clients and colleagues alike did not see the value that he thought he could deliver. By the time he sought our help, Andrew had not only lost the momentum we had created when we first worked with him, but he had now engineered a worse set of circumstances. This was a tough program and you will see a constant push by Andrew to sell unsustainable smaller analyses work, while we want to move towards non-advisory recurring fees.

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In the Andrew Program, over 214 episodes, we took you through the most detailed and valuable breakdown of how Andrew became a partner at a major professional services firm by rebuilding their internal innovation function. We are now going to begin releasing the next part of the program, to FIRMSconsulting Insider and Legacy members, and it is radically different. You can catch up on all 214 previous episodes on StrategyTraining.com.

What is New in the “Innovating an Industrial Giant” Program?

1. Rival consulting and technology firms had developed similar capabilities and offerings and were shopping them around to Andrew’s target clients.
2. Innovation has more than one definition. It means different things to different people. Andrew struggles to pin down what he, and his firm, will do for clients. They try to sell a program to find new products, revenue streams, and profit centers. Andrew does not make much headway with this approach.
3. Andrew had not learned how to gain the trust of clients quickly. So, he is picking up small audits and strategy studies. This creates several problems. It takes a long time to incrementally earn the trust of clients to eventually secure an engagement in excess of $10 million. Andrew does know how to do this. Those small studies and audits did not train his team to do the type of work they wanted to do. Andrew, like most consultants, hoped that small studies lead to large programs. They rarely do. Worse, studies on innovation are dominated by firms like McKinsey and BCG, who excel at them. So, Andrew keeps going up against firms for work where his team is not the first choice.
4. Andrew struggles to use the full assets of his firm. He does not know how to organize the different parts of the firm to do something McKinsey or BCG cannot do.
5. Andrew forgets why he was successful in Phase One and struggles to replicate the success.

Differences in This Program

The first program was all audio. Subscribers love that program because it is packed with details, insights, and even business case calculations. We have made big improvements to this program.

1. Michael and Kris worked on Phase Two. Michael led the mentoring, while they both worked on the strategy used to mentor Andrew and the strategy he would use to reboot his career.
2. We will be using video to explain key parts of the process and strategy we used. Where audio works better, we will use that. So, it will be a combination.
3. At the end of each part of the program, we will have some tips/guides/questions you can use to implement the most important parts of the program.
4. By following the prompts in step 3 above, you can begin transforming your career. Set yourself a 12-month goal, though it is realistic to see major changes over 24 months.
5. We will focus on the principles. So if you are not a consultant or not in innovation, you will find the material beneficial. The program starts off pursuing innovation programs but ends somewhere far from innovation and consulting.
6. We often do not need to show all the slides we develop, in this video/audio program. However, all slides we created for this program will be loaded into The Strategy Control Room, Advanced Level.

Ten Pivotal Moments in the Program That Ultimately Lead to $42 Million in Fees 

#1 We teach Andrew a process to sell very large studies by significantly cutting the time to build trust with senior clients and increasing the number of senior clients he could reach. (This is different from the approach we teach in The Consulting Sales Rainmaker Program (CSRP). CSRP is a superior process and must be used as you become more senior. The process we used for Andrew in this program is one where we get faster results and bigger sales, but in the long term, he would need to adopt the CSRP approach. Since we need results quickly and he has time to learn CSRP later, we used the new approach. This approach can generate larger sales than CSRP earlier in one’s career, but cannot be used for the long term.)

#2 We use the whole of the firm to compete for clients, in a way rivals cannot match, and for the few that can, they struggle to do so. This was a pivotal style of thinking that we had to impart to Andrew. It made all the difference.

#3 We develop a new definition for innovation. This allows us to identify a unique category of clients.

#4 We identify the problem in innovating that is unique to this class of clients.

#5 Andrew has an “enemy” who is a very senior partner. We identify him, understand how he is sabotaging Andrew’s career, and develop a plan to work around him.

#6 Developing streams of income from the project fees that are recurring and semi-passive. That, in itself, is a form of business model innovation. The problem with consulting studies is they usually result in no asset for the firm, and no form of recurring income. They are essentially one-and-done and the sales process needs to start all over again. We worked very hard to move Andrew and his firm away from this model.

#7 Teaching Andrew how to sell where he does less of the work and voluntarily gives away sales credit, which, counter-intuitively, increases the sales credited to him.

#8 Closing the $42 million single-fee contract. We break down the contract and explain the strategy and what is once-off, passive, and semi-passive revenue, and consulting versus other types of revenue that are more stable and attractive.

#9 Andrew’s promotion to senior partner.

#10 Managing two major priorities for the firm at the same time.

Due to client confidentiality, as always, we have altered some of the details.