I was a consultant at Accenture. Here’s why I opted out of climbing the corporate ladder.

Will Oakley, 35, lives in London and works as an independent consultant. He works, in part, with the Barton Partnership, which helps him bring in other consultants as needed to assist in his work with clients. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I started out my career at Accenture, so I went through the graduate machine there, did my training, my time in the trenches, and enjoyed that experience. Accenture is a huge consulting company, and it’s a great place to cut your teeth. But with all of those large, tier-one and tier-two consulting firms, they come with a certain culture and a certain way of working.

There’s always been a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit in me. When I started and looked at the next 10 years, I thought, did I want to climb that corporate ladder, or take some risks and try to build my own portfolio of clients?

I’ve been independent since 2014. A lot of people say I’m kind of an independent consulting thoroughbred, in the sense that I haven’t really ever had too much of a long, permanent career.

The last decade has been spent going from client to client. I’ve been lucky enough to have client relationships that have lasted four or five years and never really had to have a break between those contracts. I’ve just kind of rolled from one to the next, and companies like Barton have helped me do that in the last few years and given me some further pipeline and opportunities.

Network-based consulting

Other parts have come from my own prospecting, my own network, and some recommendations. Today, I’m not just an independent consultant. We’re starting to pull together a new model and way of working, where it’s network-based consulting. We’re starting to form together into teams of consultants who can do projects and programs for clients at much larger scales.

Clients, we found, are looking for an alternative to those traditional players who usually come with extremely high costs. Clients come to us and say, “Hey, can you do that next step in the chain of what the firm was about to do?” So, we’ve kind of followed in the wake of these huge container ships and made a pretty good living off the back of that.

When it was just me, there was sort of a predefined expectation with the client of what they were shopping for. It might be, “I need a project manager, and I’ve got a series of deliverables already done; I just want you to come in and do so.”

Now, it’s kind of changed the narrative. I can bring other people into the conversation to not just execute, but maybe help you look forward to recommending what you should be thinking about.

‘A meritocracy kind of guy’

The thing that attracts people to this approach is the flexibility. If you decide to take some time out, you’re your own boss. We’re often working with remote and global clients, so there’s an element of being able to locate yourself around the world and move between different clients.

While our day rates are lower than traditional consultants’, people often take home more than they might have with a permanent career at a big firm.

One downside is trying to find a way to mitigate knowledge loss. I wouldn’t quite call it IP, but the content that you bring from one client to the next. Often, when you’re engaging with clients, what you’re building is for them, and it’s their IP. That’s what they’re paying you for. In the background, there are loads of playbooks and frameworks, and materials that you can store for yourself. But how do you galvanize five, 10, 15, 20 other independent consultants to rally around the same service offering or solution?

I am a meritocracy kind of guy. I like to deliver good work and be judged on the results of that work. For those at more traditional consulting firms, it can be a pretty brutal political game. Some people love that, but a lot of the advice I got right at the start of my career was that the people who make it to the top are the people who take the most shit for the longest period. I thought, “Is that the life I want?”

The best advice I give other independent consultants is, whatever level of experience you’re at or whatever role you’re playing, invest in yourself so that you can be indispensable.

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