Why your consulting value lives in the interaction with the client

The consultant versus contractor distinction

Johanna uses the Consulting Role Grid from Champion, Kiel and McLendon (1990) to draw a line that I think independent professionals will find useful. The grid maps nine consulting roles across two dimensions:
responsibility for client results on the horizontal axis and responsibility for client growth on the vertical.

At the bottom right sits the hands-on expert: high responsibility for results, no responsibility for growth.
Johanna calls people working exclusively in this position contractors, not consultants. They are an extra pair of hands. 

And as she says,

The hands-on expert place for too many consultants is a terrible place to be.

This resonates with something I notice across my Wisepreneurs conversations. Many experienced professionals start their independent practice doing exactly what they did in employment: delivering work, billing hours, being the extra pair of hands. We've all done it when starting out.

The shift to consulting, in Johanna's framework, happens when you take responsibility not just for the client's immediate results but for their growth. That's when you move from teacher to coach to trusted advisor, flowing between counselling, coaching, and partnering depending on what the moment requires.

Robert Vlach, who has written extensively on independent practice in The Freelance Way, describes the same role:

“A consultant is actually a sort of hired extra brain working on the client's side,” he writes, “and ideally making their decisions more intelligent.” 

He adds that “a consultant shouldn't treat false problems; they should treat the true root cause of the client's troubles.”

That is the growth axis of Johanna's grid in practice: the contractor delivers what was asked, while the consultant works out what actually needs solving.

I find this distinction maps directly to David C. Baker's vendor-expert model. In the vendor room, you compete on price and availability. In the expert room, the client seeks you out because your particular expertise matches their particular need.

Johanna's grid adds the mechanism. What moves you from vendor to expert is the shift from delivering results to taking responsibility for the client's growth as well. That shift turns a transaction into a relationship.

Venkatesh Rao, who writes The Art of Gig on independent consulting, puts the same idea in blunter terms.

“If you end up haggling,” he writes, “you're a contractor, not a consultant. You're employed, not engaged.” 

The willingness to haggle is the tell. It signals that the client sees interchangeable hands rather than particular expertise.

David A. Fields, in The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients, names what the expert actually delivers.

“Consulting is about delivering situational, tailored, client-specific advice and outcomes,” he writes. “Even if you have a repeatable, scalable process, the output, analysis, insights, and recommendations are customised to each client.”

Johanna makes the same point with a sharper image. Real consulting, she says, is not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich where all you need is to change the bread and you have a slightly different sandwich. Every single person has to have their own unique solution.

Why principles outlast every management trend

Both Johanna and I recognise that we're not the brand new thing. We discussed this directly in the conversation, and I think it's one of the most important ideas for experienced professionals to sit with. What lasts is your ability in the situation at hand to reframe what the problem actually is.

Johanna was doing incremental delivery before the Agile Manifesto existed. She called it stage delivery. The principles she applied in the early 1990s, delivering small, learning fast, adjusting based on feedback, are the same principles that agile practitioners discovered independently in 2001. As she explains,

I often find that the brand new thing is a tactic, not a strategy or a principle. And principles are long-lived. They are things that we know because we are human.

There's a useful distinction here. Technical knowledge, specific tools, particular methodologies, these depreciate.
Their monetisation window has compressed from roughly 30 years to four to six years. The principles underneath, the discernment, the ability to read situations and see what matters, the capacity to frame problems and work through complex human situations, these appreciate with every engagement.

This is more than a personal observation. Bill LaFayette and his co-authors, in Knowledge Economies and Knowledge Work, draw the same line in economic terms. Knowledge, they argue, has an intrinsic useful life and value simply by existing, but it also has a useful business life that depends entirely on context.

Skills and competencies tied to specific products, practices, or systems are vulnerable to change. In domains where the ground keeps moving, they note, credentials may need updating annually to retain any business value at all.
The credential depreciates; the discernment behind it does not.

Johanna demonstrates this distinction in practice. Multitasking doesn't work. It hasn't worked since people first attempted it. That 's a principle. The specific project management software you use to avoid multitasking is a tactic.
One lasts. The other gets replaced every few years.

Peter Compo, who spent 25 years at DuPont before writing The Emergent Approach to Strategy, makes a related point about why principles travel where tactics cannot.

“Rules do not contain time horizons,” he writes. “A rule stays in effect until changed or eliminated.” 

A principle is not short-term or long-term; it simply holds until something better replaces it.

Margareta Kruzova, who spent her career in mergers and acquisitions, goes further: business plans are useless.
Both arrive at the same conclusion Johanna reaches through continual planning. The value lies in the planning, the continuous engagement with what is actually happening, rather than in the plan itself.

The late Esko Kilpi's research on networked practice describes this precisely: positioning yourself where problems are still being defined rather than competing to deliver already-defined solutions.

When the territory changes with every step, the spatial metaphor of mapping, positioning, and defending fails.
What works is being present where the flow of opportunities is fastest, in the conversations where problems are still being defined and where your ability to read situations, built over years of practice, meets a genuinely novel problem.

The relational nature of consulting value

I want to return to Johanna's central statement because I think it is the most important thing she says in the entire conversation:

My value is not in how fast I think. My value is in how I frame the problem and explain it to my client and then how we converge on solutions together.

That's a bout as precise a description of how professional expertise actually works. The framing is something Johanna brings to the interaction. The convergence is something that emerges between Johanna and the client. Neither party contains the outcome alone.

Esko Kilpi makes this concrete in his work on skills and responsibility.

Interaction creates capability beyond individuals,” he writes. “Cooperative performance can be more than what could ever be predicted just by looking at the performance of the parties involved. Higher performance is more a result of the quality of interaction than the quantity of training and education.

Elsewhere he puts it more plainly still: what happens in interaction between the parts creates a reality that cannot be seen in the parts, or even in all of the parts added together.

That idea, that value lives in the interaction rather than in either person, turns out to have roots in an unexpected place.

I came to Carlo Rovelli's quantum theory through Jean Boulton's The Dao of Complexity. His core claim turns out to be very practical: nothing has properties on its own. Properties only exist through interaction. A rock is only hard in relation to a hand. A key is only useful in relation to a lock. And I think your expertise is only expertise in relation to a problem it can solve.

Boulton applies the same insight to people.

Our identity, she writes, is not an essential characteristic but a dynamic property that is constituted relationally; it emerges through the interaction of difference.

Your brain has been connecting experiences across time, building associations between situations that looked different on the surface but had the same underlying structure. It's what happens when all those stored patterns, built over years of practice, meet a specific client's situation. The interaction produces understanding that neither party could generate alone.

Kilpi, drawing on Henri Poincare, makes a relevant distinction. A consultant working in isolation can only repeat what they already know. When that same consultant engages with a client's real situation, the energy that arises from the interaction itself produces outcomes that neither party could have predicted in advance. It's the engagement, the back and forth, that keeps expertise dynamic and capable of genuine novelty.

This is also why AI cannot replace the experienced consultant. AI generates linguistically plausible continuations of patterns in its training data. It predicts the next likely word in a sequence. Producing a useful insight for a specific client is a different kind of work: it depends on associations built across decades of lived engagement and on contact with a client's actual situation.

As Johanna puts it (referring to AI and her books), 

You can look there and you can get the information. You won't get my value that adds to that information.

The information is available to anyone. What remains scarce is the interaction that transforms that information into understanding.

Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast call this the cost of understanding. Information is cheap. Understanding is expensive. The cost depends on the complexity of the situation, the prior knowledge of the people involved, and the quality of the interactions available. They make the relational point directly: when you bring another person into the work, that person becomes an additional cognitive resource, and the ensuing dialogue is itself a form of interaction.

What an experienced consultant sells is the reduction of the cost of understanding: the capacity to transform information into something a client can act on with confidence in their specific situation.

Building practice through content and reputation

Johanna attracted her first paying client within three months of going independent. She spoke at meetups, identified what kept people up at night, and offered principles rather than prescriptions. She didn't claim to have the one right way. She offered options based on context: if your managers are willing to consider these alternatives, you can do this; if your team collaborates, you can do that.

That approach, what she calls content marketing, is the same principle applied to visibility. Speaking, writing, publishing. Not chasing every platform nor automating social media. Johanna is on Mastodon, Blue Sky, LinkedIn, and Facebook. She isn't on Substack or X. She publishes what she thinks, gets it to the people she can reach, and trusts that the right clients will remember her as the person who first opened their eyes to their problem.

Venkatesh Rao captures why this matters for the move out of contractor work.

For the contractor to consultant move,” he writes, “a good stunt is to write a book.

A book, like a talk or an article, is a way of making your thinking visible before a client ever meets you. 

Johanna's 21 books are exactly that: a body of work built over three decades that does the positioning for her.

Robert Vlach frames the same outcome as reputation.

A good name, he writes, is an established association of quality between the professional as a person and their area of expertise.

That association is what content builds, slowly, over years. Debbie Jenkins, who has written about building professional credibility through publishing, makes a complementary case: the long game of consistent content, of writing what you actually think rather than what the algorithm rewards, builds a body of work that compounds.

Each of Johanna's books is a form of content marketing, but more than that, each one is an act of thinking in public that deepens her expertise as she writes it. As she says about blogging,

The blogging was really helpful to learn what I think.

Johanna keeps doing her own thinking rather than letting tools do it for her. She uses Grammarly to check her writing but rarely takes all its suggestions. She uses transcription. She sometimes uses AI chatbots to identify what else to read.
But she doesn't use AI to tell her what to write. Her principles have not changed: find the one thing you want to do today, timebox it for first thing in the morning, and do the thinking yourself.

What this means for experienced independent professionals

Johanna and I are both 70. We're both still working, not because we have to but because the work is still interesting and our expertise still matters. That combination, sustained curiosity and deepening capability, is what I call being a Wisepreneur.

Johanna's conversation walks the talk of everything I've been writing about on Wisepreneurs. Her expertise shows up in the interaction with specific problems and specific people, not in a list of credentials. Her principles have appreciated while tactics have depreciated around them. She creates her path through walking rather than following a predetermined map. And her ability to frame problems, to ask the right questions, to reframe what the problem actually is, that's precisely the kind of discernment AI can't replicate.

The pipeline that builds this kind of expertise, the hands-on work, the mentoring, the years of consequential practice, is narrowing. Most people can't see it from the outside, which is part of why it gets undervalued.

If you're an experienced professional considering independent practice, or already in it and wondering whether your approach still holds, Johanna's message is direct. 

• Start with your expertise,
• Connect it to what keeps people up at night, 
• Offer principles your clients can adapt to their own context, 
• Set your rates around the discernment you bring rather than the hours you log, 
• Build visibility through the work you publish, And 
• Remember that the brand new thing is almost always a tactic, 
• Your principles are long-lived.

one hub-page link. Use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text.]

• Peter Compo Emergent Strategy: A Design Framework for Independent Professionals Managing Uncertainty  
• Margareta Krizova Freelance Advice: Six Questions for Professional Reinvention
• Robert Vlach Professional Reputation: Why Your Good Name Beats Personal Branding
• Debbie Jenkins Writing Short Books for Credibility: Why Concise Books Build Professional Authority
• Hub page: Relational Enterprise

Listen to the full conversation (release date Friday June 4) 
Johanna Rothman Independent Consulting: Principles That Outlast Every Trend

Frequently asked questions

References

Johanna Rothman - Wisepreneurs Podcast interview (2026). Independent consultant since 1994 and author of 21 books including Successful Independent Consulting. Her distinction between consultants and contractors using the Consulting Role Grid, and her articulation of consulting value as relational convergence, form the core of this article.

Douglas Champion, David Kiel, and Jean McLendon - “Choosing a Consulting Role,” Training & Development Journal (1990). The Consulting Role Grid maps nine consulting roles across two dimensions: responsibility for client results and responsibility for client growth.

Robert Vlach - The Freelance Way and a Wisepreneurs Podcast guest. His descriptions of the consultant as a “hired extra brain” and of reputation as an association of quality between a professional and their expertise deepen the consultant versus contractor distinction.

Venkatesh Rao - The Art of Gig. His framing that a willingness to haggle marks a contractor rather than a consultant, and that writing a book aids the move into consulting, sharpens both the role distinction and the case for content marketing.

David A. Fields - The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients. His point that consulting delivers situational, client-specific outcomes supports Johanna's argument that every client needs a unique solution.

Peter Compo - The Emergent Approach to Strategy and a Wisepreneurs Podcast guest. His observation that rules do not contain time horizons grounds the argument that principles outlast tactics.

Margareta Krizova - Wisepreneurs Podcast guest, mergers and acquisitions specialist. Her statement that business plans are useless reinforces Johanna's case for continual planning.

Bill LaFayette, Wayne Curtis, Denise Bedford, and Seema Iyer - Knowledge Economies and Knowledge Work. Their distinction between knowledge's intrinsic useful life and its context-dependent business life provides the economic basis for why credentials depreciate while discernment appreciates.

Esko Kilpi - Essays on networked professional practice and the economics of interaction. His claim that interaction creates capability beyond individuals underpins this article's central argument about relational value.

Debbie Jenkins - Wisepreneurs Podcast guest who has written on building credibility through publishing. Her emphasis on the long game of content connects to Johanna's 21-book body of work.

David C. Baker - Expert positioning framework. His vendor-expert distinction provides the market structure that maps to Johanna's Consulting Role Grid.

Carlo Rovelli - Relational interpretation of quantum theory, encountered via Jean Boulton's The Dao of Complexity. His insight that properties exist only through interactions explains why consulting expertise manifests through engagement with specific problems. 

Jean Boulton - The Dao of Complexity. Her account of identity as a relational, dynamic property bridges Rovelli's physics to the practical claim about expertise.

Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast - Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding. Their principle that information is cheap but understanding is expensive grounds the economic argument for why experienced consultants' value increases as information becomes freely available.

Roger Kneebone - Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery. His reminder that information is not wisdom, and that wisdom is what experts provide, supports the argument about what AI cannot supply.

Bibliography

Reviewer note: publication years and publishers below are my best record and should be spot-checked before publishing, as I could not verify them online in this session.

Anderson, Stephen P., and Karl Fast. Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding. Rosenfeld Media, 2020.

Baker, David C. The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth. RockBench Publishing, 2017.

Boulton, Jean G. The Dao of Complexity: Making Sense of Our World. 2024.

Champion, Douglas P., David H. Kiel, and Jean A. McLendon. “Choosing a Consulting Role: Principles and Dynamics of Matching Role to Situation.” Training & Development Journal, February 1990.

Compo, Peter. The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution. 2024.

Fields, David A. The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients: Six Steps to Unlimited Clients and Financial Freedom. Morgan James Publishing, 2017.

Jenkins, Debbie. Stop Writing Books Nobody Reads.

Kilpi, Esko. “Rethinking Skills and Responsibility” and “We Need to Shift Our Focus From Competencies to Agency.” Essays.

Kneebone, Roger. Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery. Viking, 2020.

LaFayette, Bill, Wayne Curtis, Denise Bedford, and Seema Iyer. Knowledge Economies and Knowledge Work. Emerald Publishing, 2019.

Rao, Venkatesh, with Grace Witherell and Jenna Dixon. The Art of Gig, Volume 1. Ribbonfarm.

Rothman, Johanna. Successful Independent Consulting: Relationship-Based Consulting. Practical Ink, 2022.

Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. Riverhead Books, 2021.

Vlach, Robert. The Freelance Way: Best Business Practices, Tools, Tips and Tricks for Successful Freelancers. 2020.