Success to a client is very much a personal as well as a corporate defined ingredient of a consultant's role. Many consultants fall into the trap that satisfying your client manager is always the same as making the client as a corporation successful. Not so, especially with very large and very small companies. This is hard lesson to learn. Often these companies are very much driven by large egos and within the rank and file folks you must interface with there is resentment and politics at play. Listen carefully for clues.

Many consultants have tried to play the middle and others have tried to win for one side or the other, but many have failed. It takes listening carefully to what is asked of you and understanding the nature of the assignment relative to the persons you will interact with and help.

Books have been written about setting expectations and managing the client and managing the consultant. But a critical aspect for successful consulting is to be able to differentiate the two and make the two come together for success.

Not all clients have the success motivation that drives the true entrepreneur. I have had many entrepreneurs who were in love with their products or technology and found it difficult to complete the product development or relinquish the business control. But most came to realize, at some point, that they must step back, let go, and let the market bring them riches. The ones that didn't do this no longer exist. Successful clients truly understood the buyers requirements and the environment for the product and the application for the technology

Realizing, especially in my frequently involved world of start-ups, that product success is often very different than client over all success. Your success as a consultant must be measured on what you are asked to do, required to do, and can contribute. Often, after becoming involved with a client, I am asked to expand my role and thus my requirements become different and my contribution can be much different. Both the client and I must understand that before my continuing.

There is a great deal of discussion about "innovation" these last few years.  I certainly am not an innovator or as I used to say not a concept person even though many of my clients and my projects have involved leading edge technologies. My role is the implementer, I take the ideas (innovation), in the case of a product, through the various phases to make it market ready. My role is find or develop and manage the most cost effective and productive process to take the idea through to a marketable product, by phase or in total.  Over the past several years I have been involved with overall business analysis (risks, processes, opportunities, structure, etc) of certain technologies and products. Recently looking for a doable business model using the low cost computer. Thus trying to determine how to develop and sell product into the developing nations without using existing or anticipated ROI/margins and business expectations.