At 26, I decided I was ready to be a consultant.
Why? Because I wanted to make more money.
That was it. That was the whole strategic plan. I'd been training for a few years, I was watching the people with “Consultant” on their business cards walk around looking important, and I figured—well, that's clearly the next step. Bigger title, bigger paycheck. Sign me up.
Looking back, I was not ready.
I had no idea what I didn't know. The gap between trainer-Becky and consultant-Becky was a lot wider than a salary bump. If you're standing where I was—pretty good in the classroom, eyeing the next move, and assuming the leap is mostly about the title—pull up a chair. Let's talk about what performance consulting is, and what it takes to do it well.
Most professionals throw the word “consultant” around without nailing it down. Here's a working definition: performance consulting is a process for focusing on results—getting people to change behavior in ways that create real business impact.
The shift sounds simple, but it's significant. As a trainer, you're often handed a problem (“our reps don't know X—build a class”) and you build the class. As a performance consultant, you're working the front end. You're figuring out whether training is even the right answer.
At The Bob Pike Group, we use the Performance Solutions Cube, and training is the sixth answer on that cube. Sixth. Coaching might be the answer. Recruiting might be. Compensation, hiring, firing, the work environment, the tools people are handed at 8 AM on a Monday—any of those can be the real lever. Training is one option, not the default.
Once that clicks, you stop being the hammer looking for nails and you start being the person who diagnoses the actual problem.
If I had to boil consulting down to two skills, here they are: questioning and influencing.
Questioning sounds easy until you try to do it well. It's not asking the obvious thing on your list. It's asking the question that gets the person across the table to think differently—and then the follow-up that goes one layer deeper.
Influencing is its own animal. Quick gut-check: think about the last time you tried to bring someone around to your point of view. Did you get there? And how did the other person feel afterward—heard, or steamrolled?
If you made them angry, you've got work to do. If they walked away nodding—even after disagreeing in the middle—you might have a natural fit for this work.
Here's the part that humbled me most.
When I started, I'd ask a question, get an answer, and immediately start solving. The problem? People often don't know what they don't know. The answer they give you is rarely the real answer—it's the surface answer. The real answer is usually two or three layers underneath.
Good consultants dig. They ask, “Tell me more.” They ask, “What do you mean by that?” They ask, “Can you walk me through what that looks like on a Tuesday?” And then they shut up and listen.
Experts are often the worst listeners, by the way. When you've solved this exact problem at three other companies, the temptation to answer for the client is enormous. Don't. Their version of this problem is going to have its own wrinkles, and you'll miss every one of them if you're already drafting the proposal in your head.
Every consulting conversation eventually hits an objection. “We've tried that.” “We don't have the budget.” “Leadership won't buy in.” “Training isn't really our problem.”
A good consultant doesn't push back hard or get defensive. You stay calm, you use the client's own words, and you reframe in a way that helps them see the situation more clearly. That takes practice. It also takes the kind of brain-based, application-driven approach we've spent nearly 50 years teaching trainers to use—the same Creative Training Techniques® and Participant-Centered Training principles that make a classroom land hard, make a consulting conversation land hard.
When you're diagnosing a problem, you're looking at three things:
The business need—what does the organization really need to achieve? This is almost always the biggest one. For for-profit clients, it's tied to the bottom line. For non-profits, it might be called an operational or organizational need, and it might be framed as a goal or a problem instead of a “need.” Different language, same idea.
The performance need—what specific behaviors have to change for the business need to be met?
The work environment—does the environment make those behaviors possible? Sometimes the people are willing and capable, but the system around them is set up to make success impossible.
If you can map those three, you're ahead of most internal consultants.
If you're reading this and thinking, “I'm not there yet”—good. Self-awareness is half the job. Here's where I'd start.
Find a mirror. Who in your workplace is already doing this well? A senior consultant, an internal advisor, a trusted leader who runs great discovery conversations. Ask them to mentor you. Watch how they ask questions. Watch how they handle pushback.
Mentor someone else. Once you've got reps under your belt, turn around and teach. Teaching forces you to articulate what you're doing—which is when most of us realize we don't fully understand it yet.
Build a repeatable process. It can be a flow of steps, a data-driven framework, whatever works. The point is repeatability. Every time you run the process, you get sharper.
Pre-write your questions. Before your next meeting, jot down three “why” questions, three “what” questions, and three “how” questions you could ask. Then go in and pull one out when the conversation needs to go deeper. This one trick took me from “winging it” to “running the room” faster than anything else.
If you want to start the shift now, here's where to begin:
If you want a faster on-ramp than I had at 26, our Step Into Consulting workshop is built for exactly this transition. It walks you through the questioning and influencing skills, the diagnostic process, and the methodology you'll need to be taken seriously as an internal or external consultant. It's grounded in the same Creative Training Techniques® and Train-the-Trainer principles that more than 100,000 trainers have learned through The Bob Pike Group.
The leap from trainer to consultant is worth making. Just don't make the mistake I did—assuming it's about the title. It's about the skill set. Build the skill set, and the title comes with it.
The Bob Pike Group has been equipping trainers with practical, proven tools since 1979. Whether you’re looking to improve your delivery, rethink your instructional approach, or bring our methodology to your entire team, we’re here to help. Reach out to training@bobpikegroup.com or 952-829-1954.