On the consultative tip, one of the most valuable things you can provide to businesses is your own set of proprietary diagnostics. It’s important for businesses to know how they fit into their wider industry, and where their strengths & weaknesses lie. But this is often a blind spot for them, since they’re too busy actually running the business to know what’s wrong with them or how to improve.

This role is impossible to automate, and it’s essential to outsized consultative impact.

It must be consistently applicable across your client portfolio. And most importantly, you need to create the diagnostic yourself, because if you adopt anybody else’s you’re not fulfilling the goals of your own consultancy’s positioning. This also allows you to become irreplaceable. Helpful, yes?