We take over Andrew’s career to develop an entirely new career strategy and route to the partnership, and we control the entire implementation. In a bold and daring move, Andrew is asked to forget about the common route to partnership and focus on the non-existent, failing and embarrassing innovation practice that the firm’s management committee is considering shutting down.

It is a cost center and no one in the history of the firm had ever before been elected to the partnership from a cost center.

We work with Andrew to find a route into innovation, positioning him to run the function in a caretaker role, and develop a definition and scalable model for innovation. After a very slow start, September through to December turn out to be important months where a grass-roots innovation campaign is assembled.

Our very carefully planned successes and image management strategy gets Andrew noticed by senior management.

After hitting a major milestone at the end of Year 1, we map out an aggressive but logical plan to shift innovation from its internal focus to external clients. We work with Andrew to continue building out an innovation engine that can scale across the firm. Andrew’s star keeps rising.

We set out, with a detailed strategy, to achieve two highly improbable, but significant, goals.

The year ends with Andrew landing his first multi-million-dollar client engagement. Not done yet, we focus on building out an innovation service for external clients, with a bigger goal in mind than when we started working together two years ago.

We pursue the final ambitious goal: to manage a full innovation program at a major multi-national client, while going head-to-head against BCG and McKinsey. Yet by using a different approach to innovation and in an area where the firm has no prior track record.

This program requires Andrew to find a way to execute a plan of bringing together the firm’s skills in audit, tax, corporate finance, legal, technology and consulting to create new sources of revenue for clients.

We develop a “blocking strategy” which allows Andrew to use the unique assets of the firm, to conduct innovation programs in a way that is different from McKinsey and BCG. In other words, they use McKinsey/BCG thinking to build an innovation practice that leverages the strengths of the firm versus replicating the approach used by BCG and McKinsey.

The program ends with Andrew’s initiatives generating >$30 million in savings + revenue for the firm and an offer to join the equity partnership.

Although the number looks daunting, we will explain to you the exact path taken, how we phased the initiatives, how we built a loyal team around Andrew and how we trained Andrew to become comfortable with sales. The business case and results of each engagement is discussed so you can see how the numbers add up.

We break down each source of revenue + savings into the dollar benefit to the firm, how it was calculated, how it was validated and how you could go about applying the same concept. Significant time is spent explaining the build-up to each pilot, the lessons learned and how the improved process was rolled out across the firm.