When I was working as a Big Four consultant, I thought that thinking and selling were continuous with each other.
Structure the problem, form a hypothesis, test it against data, put the proposal to the client. Be fluent in that sequence, I assumed, and it would work the same way when I started something of my own.
I found out it was an illusion almost immediately after going independent.
The box was far easier to build than I expected
Setting up a gōdō kaisha was so easy it was deflating. Draft the articles, get a seal made, file the documents with the Legal Affairs Bureau. For tens of thousands of yen and a few weeks, the box called “a company” arrived in my hands. I wrote about the mechanics of that in the day I founded a company, and nothing happened.
I felt a small lift when the registration notice came. And from the next day, nobody phoned. Nobody sent an enquiry. Of course they didn’t. Trade is not so soft that hanging up a sign brings people to you.
Inside the consulting firm, I had projects. The client was already there, and my job was to do good work. The moment I was on my own, the first task was not the work itself. It was getting the work.
For that asymmetry, I was entirely unprepared.
A framework will not bring you your first customer
Consulting is, at bottom, thinking on someone else’s behalf. You organise a complicated problem, you support the decision, you help with execution. The skill is real and it has value.
But it is the ability to solve a problem somebody has already brought to you.
On your own, before the problem arrives, you have to be found. You have to be trusted. You have to be chosen. That process of being chosen does not yield to MECE analysis, and a pyramid structure will not organise it.
The contents — the core of trade, which is delivering value to someone and being paid for it — do not arrive in the box automatically. They are accumulated, slowly, over time.
Being an able consultant and living as a merchant are different skills
This realisation is not self-denial. If anything it is understanding that these are different occupations.
An excellent doctor can struggle to run a private clinic. An outstanding lawyer can struggle to bring clients to the practice. Professional capability and business development are different muscles.
A consultant is a professional at analysing a client’s business. Running a business yourself has its own learning curve. However much of other people’s business you have analysed, the experience does not transfer directly into building your own route to market.
That was what the first year on my own taught me.
The quiet conviction I took from it
The difficulty of that period is the foundation I now stand on.
Being able to analyse is not the same as being able to sell. Being able to draw a strategy is not the same as being able to execute. Being clever is not the same as being able to trade. Understanding those differences in the body rather than the head has affected every decision since.
You can build the box. The contents can only be accumulated. That, I think, is the unchanging nature of trade.
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