The shapes of consulting work

The word covers several different jobs that share a method and differ in almost everything else: who pays, how work arrives, what a deliverable looks like, what expertise means, and how long the cash cycle is.

Two structural choices that matter more than type

Firm or independent. A firm supplies apprenticeship, brand, pipeline, and colleagues who catch your mistakes, in exchange for most of the fee and most of the choice about what you work on. Independent reverses all of it. Most people who go independent well have had an apprenticeship first, formal or otherwise. Going independent with no apprenticeship is possible and it means you must manufacture the feedback yourself, which is what this programme is partly for.

Advice or delivery. Pure advice has higher margin, lower effort, and is easier to disown when it does not work. Delivery is harder, lower margin, and produces vastly better proof. Early in a practice, taking delivery work is usually the right trade, because a client who has watched you finish something difficult will hire you for judgment afterwards. Nobody hires a stranger for judgment.

The cash cycle differs enormously and nobody warns you

This is a practical difference that decides whether a young practice survives, and it is rarely discussed in courses.

• Private sector, small and mid-size. Invoice to payment often 15 to 45 days. Sometimes immediate. Scope is loose and negotiable.
• Large corporates. Procurement onboarding can take longer than the engagement. Payment terms of 60 to 90 days are normal and non-negotiable. Budget the working capital.
• Government. Payment is tied to appropriation cycles and verification steps. Delays of several months are ordinary and are not a signal of dissatisfaction. Never build a practice whose survival depends on a government payment arriving in a specific month.
• Donor and UN. Milestone-based, with deliverable acceptance as the trigger. Acceptance can be slow because it requires named reviewers who have other jobs. This is why acceptance-deemed clauses matter so much.

The practical rule: the more procedurally rigorous the client, the longer the cash cycle and the more important your runway. A practice serving only donors and government needs several months of reserve to be stable. A practice serving small private clients needs less reserve and has more scope volatility instead.

On mixing types

Early practices often serve whoever appears, which is understandable and produces a specific problem: the proof you accumulate does not compound. Five engagements across five sectors give you five unrelated references. Five engagements in one sector give you a position. If you must take mixed work for cash, be deliberate about which strand you are building references in, and treat the rest as income rather than as practice building.