Thinking like a generalist makes you unremarkable

No, it's it's great to be one on the call with you. It's lovely to join you.

You know, I certainly probably could have chosen my timing differently. But I think one of the interesting things was you're right. I was I was with Cotta and previously but prior to that I'd been with another big firm. But I got to the point where I knew that I didn't want to be a part of a big firm anymore. There were other circumstances as well. Yeah, I had kids that were at university and so on and so forth, and I just sort of looked at my life and I thought, where do I want the next chapter to be and what do I want it to look like? And to be completely honest, I didn't exactly know, but I have been an internal consultant. You know, my very first job I managed to get was in consulting. I then had two stints when I actually worked in banking in industry. So I my employer was not a consultant. And I learned a lot from those, but I also realized I didn't like it as much as I liked consulting. And the beauty of sort of connecting with different people, different situations that they had. And the context being different all the time. So for me, consulting has always been a love and a passion. Why then? I I think I just got to the point where I was very honest about what I knew I didn't want. I wasn't quite sure about what I did want. Let me be clear about that. But I knew what I didn't want. And and and it was the right time to then go and start something else. So that's what we did. I took a few months after leaving to figure it out, and then I started the ambition company.

Yes. Yeah. Well about the two businesses. Well, well, the ambition, the ambition company and the work I do with corporate clients is is my love and my passion. It's the thing I've always done. And I learned so many skills in being a business consultant that I had then have taken into the ambition company. But as I said, when I started, I wasn't sure what I was building. Like some people probably start a business and know exactly what it's going to look like. That was not my case.

And I had so many iterations. My business has been around for about coming on six years now. and it's changed quite significantly over that time. And it's now at the point where I love my business and I love the work that I do. I I thought I loved it before, but I really love it now. but the lessons I learned in building that business for myself, I just took for granted. And I thought, well, so many people are learning these lessons. But what I did notice as well is that a lot of people were either leaving corporate, getting to that time in their life where they decided, I want to leave corporate, I'm done with this, or they'd been in big consulting firms, or maybe not even big, but they'd been in consulting firms for a while. And they said, I want to do, and you know, they'd reach out because I have a fairly big network of consultants and they'd say, how did you build your business? Can you talk to me about how you did it? And so I would hop on a call and I'd take them through all my lessons. And they went, Wow, this is great. Do you? Do you do this as a business? And I said, no. And if and for probably the past two years, I didn't. I just helped people who reached out and wanted advice. But then I realized, you know, the world's a really big place. And there's a lot of people. I do believe the future is both employment for people who that works for and the idea of being a being an independent contributor, like a solo consultant, if that works for you. And so I figured, well, if I could help people make that happen, why not? So that's the second business. I've called it the ambitious advisor because it's all about setting up the business that you want to set up. It's not necessarily and there's a little bit of a line I draw between being a consultant and being an advisor. and so mine is all about, you know, what I do right now with my corporate clients. I'm in arguably a a solo consultant, but I really position myself. None of my clients call me a consultant. They will call me an advisor. And so that's what I want to help help others to achieve. You know, how they can become An advisor themselves.

That's right.

I will say that we did ourselves a massive disservice probably in the past 10, 15 years, with how we have maybe even 20 years. And maybe it started in Silicon Valley, I'm not sure, but we started about talking up this idea of entrepreneurialism and startup and startup culture and the startup grind and doing things on your own. At the end of it, there's going to be this great big payday or payout, whatever the case might be. So you build something and it builds to this big outcome. And I think that became sort of quite. quite misinterpreted with the idea of being an entrepreneur because sort of no one says being an entrepreneur is bad. So everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. And I think what we what we fail to recognize is the fact that the risks are different. You know, I talk about it in terms of a tax. There's a if you're an employee, the tax is the tax that you pay is the fact that, and I'm not talking about financial tax, although that might be there too, but I'm talking about the fact that you work for someone. You have to work a certain number of days a week. You're expected to show up at certain times and at certain places, maybe, unless you're fortunate you can be entirely virtual. You have to do the work that the employer gives you. You have to do the things the way the employer wants you to do them. And so that is a form of a tax. If if if you like that, that's great. you can have an incredible s incredible career, maybe even a 30 or 40 year one place career, which I think is incredible. Where you know that business really well, they know you, and it works. The flip side is, and I'm this kind of person, I like change, I like things that are different, and I'm also quite creative, if I'm honest. I'm very good at thinking up an approach or something new, and I'll implement it a couple of times, and then I'll get to the point of going, all right, well, what's next? Right. So for me, the idea of being an employee, and I also will tell you this: the one thing that kind of Made me think about whether I wanted to continue doing what I was doing is I was running a business. I was running a big business. We had almost doubled it in size when I left. And the thing that I started to not like was, and I'd done it all my career, was the time that I needed to spend doing sort of one-on-one calls with team members. And it took me away from the thing that I loved most, which was my client work. And so I found that as I moved up in a consulting world, It ticked, it took me away from a lot of the work I love doing the most, which was the client work. And instead I was managing and building the firm. And so the ability for me to get back to that is important, but it comes with a consequence. So I no longer have, and this is something people probably think about all the time when they when they go off on their own, but it's quite real. What kind of a consultant do you want to be? In my case, as I said, I don't use the word consultant. I talk about advisor. So how do you want to differentiate yourself from the big firm? you're not going to be an employee, so you're not gonna get a salary, whether you're working or not. You've got to go and hunt for your work. Your network has got to help you bring in those those those deals. and you've got to be able to market yourself in a way that you probably haven't before. There's been a big firm, you know, I was at Deloitte. Everyone knows Deloitte, right? I was then with with another bespoke firm, and everyone knew that firm too. And it's the same with big firms. But the minute you start on your own, it's like, well, who are you? And so you've got to market, you've got to sell, you've got to build intellectual property. And for some people, it can be quite lonely. I know a number of people who've gone and done their own thing, but after a year or two, they've gone back to the bigger firm because it's it's a lonely existence. You only have yourself to think with. well, some people would say you've got AI now, but yeah, maybe. but the point is you don't have a team around you. It's a very different way of working. So I think anyone who goes and wants to become sort of their own, their own business owner. should think carefully about what what they get and what they give up because it's not just an equal trade where you I'm sick of corporate, I want to become a solo consultant. It doesn't work that way because you know you might not have a boss, but you also don't have an income.

Okay. The big thing with any institutional firm is that the way the firms work is that the bigger the book of business and the more you can do, the more valuable you become to a client. And that is absolutely true, right? If I can help you with a technology implementation, perhaps I can also help you with some efficiency programs. Maybe I can help you with a a cost reduction program or whatever the case might be, right? Those are those are unique and distinct skills or areas of skill. And a big firm can do all of that. One of the biggest mistakes I see people making when they start their own business is they they think they think like a generalist. And I will often talk about, you know, if you're thinking like a generalist, you become generally useful and generally likable, but specifically unremarkable. So you don't get known for that thing. You get known for doing lots of things. And you might do them well, but you get to a point where you can't do it all. well, as as great as some solo consultants think they are, like they you can't do it all well. So the first thing that I find is that people come in with that big firm model of I'm going to get into an account, I'm going to find a lead, I'm going to use my network, and I'm going to see whatever they want me to do. And they end up taking work that they frankly shouldn't do because they're not good at it. But it's it's revenue, right? The thing I said before, you're not getting a salary. Well, and not unless you sell. But a client comes to you and says, Can you do something? And you go, maybe it's sort of like what I can do. You say yes, but then something else happens. The minute you say yes to work that you are not exceptional at, this thing called imposter syndrome kicks in, or the idea that you're not as good as you actually know you need to be, but you need to do the work because you need the revenue. So you're kind of putting on a front where you're pretending to do it, and you probably do it okay. You might even do it quite well. But the point of it all is that you can't go in with a big firm model where the scope can creep and creep and you can do more and more and more. One of the things that I found is most people have to unlearn that big firm model and learn the model of what how does it how does it work for us as solo advisors? Well, the way it works is that if a client has a problem and we can solve that problem and we can solve it better than almost anyone else, the client will pay us to do that. That's increasingly the world of business. Clients don't have consultants hanging on just because they like them, right? They're there to solve a problem. So, my guidance that I give to anyone who comes into any of our programs is let's let's take that big firm knowledge and it gives you the credentials that you need. Put it to one side though. What do you love to do? What will not bore you? And what are you curious about solving? What are you good at doing? And you put those things together and go, right, this now is is how I describe what I do. But that's not good enough because you've got to talk about it in the way a client talks about it. I had somebody recently who talked about doing a lot of loss mitigation in in risk situations. And I said, Well, is that how the client talks about their langu their their problem? And it wasn't, right? The client used very different language. So those of us coming from big firms. We come in with a big firm mentality. We want to do as much as we can. And we talk about it often from our point of view, the methodology we've built in a big firm. Clients don't talk like that. Clients use their own language and they want you to go in, solve a problem, and then importantly, and this is where it's different from the big firm, get out. Right. if I go in and solve a problem for a client and they say they we shake hands and they say, Thank you very much, I think I've done a great job. But in a big firm, If you finish the job and you haven't got more follow-on work, that's almost viewed as a failure because you weren't able to sell follow-on work. So there's a very big difference in how you mentally come into this, acknowledging I'm going to come in, you know, in your case, I'm going to come in, mix my client, I'm going to solve his problem better than anyone else, faster than anyone else, not cheaper, right? That's important. I'm not doing this cheaply, but I'm going to go in, I'm going to do it really well. I'm going to do it better than almost anybody else. And you're going to be thrilled. You're going to be so happy. We're going shake hands. I'm going to leave. But then you're going to start telling your friends about me. You know, when you play golf or you go to a restaurant or your next door neighbor says, Hey, Mick, we both do this thing. I'm struggling with this. You're going to say, Call Russell. He came in in three days. He solved what my problem was and it was great. So it's frankly thinking about it quite differently to set yourself up as a successful independent advisor.

I was never an athlete growing up. And I think part of it was, you know, people would, you know, people would laugh and you know say, you're not very good at this, you're not very, and you just accept it. It becomes, it becomes your persona. and so I accepted I wasn't an athlete for the longest time, right? And that's not what I did. But I looked at it and I thought, you know, as I get older, like my knees, I can't run like I used to run. So, and I'm not really, you know, I'm not into tennis as much as now. I'd like to play maybe, but I'm not very good and golf is not my thing. So I thought, what could I do? And swimming came up. And then I challenged myself, Mick, because here's what I thought. If I needed to get ready to then take on the challenge, I'm not trying to find a parallel to business world and teams, but it is interesting to me. I've lived in this world since I've been working, consulting world and thinking about teams and performance. I thought, if if I need to take the time to now train to get ready to take on something that is. Challenging, really challenging, but very exciting. What is the message that I take to teams? And maybe I don't have to prepare. Maybe I can be powered in that moment by the dream or the aspiration, or in my case, I call talk about it as the ambition. You know, ambition is that feeling, it's the culmination of things that takes what can be and makes it what must be. And I just thought, I I know how to swim. Have I ever swum eight kilometers? No. Have I ever swum eight kilometers in cold water in a speedo without a wetsuit? No. Have I ever swum in ocean open water with sharks? No. But okay, I think I can. And and so I tackled it, I did it the first time. And the second time I did it backstroke, partly because I wanted to know if it was just, you know, a fluke that it worked the first time. Or maybe there's something to this, and I believe there is. I believe the idea when I did a backstroke, I was the first person ever to do speedo backstroke in that temperature water for that long period. And it was hard work. It absolutely, there's no mista it wasn't a walk in the park. it was tough. But when I got out at the other end and I realized I had been powered essentially by my own conviction, by my own sense of I can do this. It got me thinking why leadership teams sometimes get so stuck on things. We haven't got the skill, we haven't got the resources, we haven't got the people, we haven't got the time, whatever. There's always excuses. And I just thought, what if there weren't excuses? And I don't believe they have to be, which is why I think change can happen so much faster. If you want to make it happen, I wanted to swim. So it wasn't a problem for me. But if I, you know, do I want to climb Mount Everest? No, not really. So that probably won't happen. But if you want to do something, so creating the conditions for a team to want to do something is frankly the the the secret for me.

I'm gonna answer like two quick perspectives. So I'm in London. So I live in the US, but I'm in London now with a client, right? And this week we're talking all about AI. AI as an accelerator for their business, what they can do faster. This is a this is a massive 14,000 person company global, and they are looking at how AI helps them not just drive efficiencies, but find nuggets, find insights in data. They have a lot of data, right? How they make decisions better. there's a lot of practical uses for how you use AI within the context. And I'm certainly, you know, as a as a small but growing advisory practice, I'm figuring out how to use AI for myself. But what I will say at the meta levels, that was answer number one. Answer number two, though, is at the meta level, as long as as long as people are still working together, there's a need for relationships. AI cannot read a room. AI cannot take take tone and take inflection and take what makes us inherently human and and frankly work that out. Even the most empathetic responses that I've seen AI give to prompts or whatever the case might be are still words on a page. They're not felt. And I think so much of what we do goes back to the point we just made, right? An organization is all about growth. If you're not growing, you're dying, right? So every organization should be about growing. They should be unapologetic about growing. And the way to grow is to stop doing the things that you've been doing all along that have stopped you from growing. And so the way to stop that is to get the people who are doing these things to unlearn the old ways of working and want to embrace new ways of working. AI is not going to help me change my mind about anything. It'll give me the information, it'll give me the data, it'll give me more data than I probably care to have. But how does it actually change my mind? And so much of that still comes down to sort of emotions, to feeling, to thinking, and to doing some of that in a in a sort of in a big company at scale with others, not just on my own. So me reading a copilot screen, this is an organization they use Microsoft Copilot, but if I'm reading Claude or Grok or whatever, me doing that on my own might shift something in me, but it doesn't shift the whole dynamic. And that's where. I still think AI incredibly powerful, but there's still a role for us to play in helping to understand the human dynamic that frankly makes us different from just robots walking around a an office building.

Yeah, you just said a very interesting word there, right? One thing that I have learned through starting my business, my my advisory business is focus. So I'm very concerned about splitting my focus now, even as I start working with other former consultants who want to start their own business. Like, how do I grow them? what's next is I think trying to retain the focus on just these two things, my own business with corporates. And then the the work I do with consultants, but I want to grow the work I do with corporates. It's incredibly successful. I've got a great record of of success. Well, we have working with my teams, not just me. working with the clients that I work with. So figuring out how we grow that business in a way that is scalable and still doesn't compromise anything because growth sometimes means you need to compromise something. I don't want to compromise anything. And at the moment I don't have to. So how I do that is going to be is something that I'm thinking through. And and I just I've seen I've seen a glimpse of what the future could feel like for people who don't necessarily want to be full time employed. And I will say again, I think full time employment is phenomenal for people for whom it's built. But for everyone who wants to sort of do something else that's not that, but have a has a skill that a that they can help a team solve, a problem that they can help a team solve, I just want as many people to be successful as possible. You know, the world's a very big place and helping more independent consultants be successful doesn't mean I'm gonna lose business or be unsuccessful. I just know I struggled for a few years to figure it out. And maybe I haven't figured it all out yet, but if others can learn from that, that's just that's just great. That's part of yeah, that's part of why we're here, right? To make make the place around us a little bit better than when we found it.

Yeah. well, I've got Russellrath.com. and I guess you'll put these in the in the notes or whatever. Russellath.com is the hub for everything. From there you can find out about the teamwork that I do. and I'm doing I'm I'm probably working with teams to twice a month at the moment. So it they they're fairly intensive. but they're event-driven things. So twice a month with teams. You'll also find the work around consultants there. there's some YouTube videos that I've got on a on a on my YouTube channel. And that's pretty much and LinkedIn, of course. We have to be on LinkedIn, right? So that's where you'll find me. I'm not that active on the other socials. Maybe I'll figure that out, but that's where you'll find me.

Well, I I applaud you for for reaching out. Thanks for doing that. I think learning is the art of growth and the fact that you are and obviously your audience is, is terrific. I've learned even a few things as we've been talking it through just beforehand, which I love. So thank you. This has been great, Mick.