I’ve been with my firm for 6 years and 9 months. I joined when there were a total of only 20 people in our entire Consulting and Project Management team. We’re a bit larger than that now.
But when I joined, I was in both the Consulting and PM teams. No one knew where to put me. But in short order I was firmly in the land of strategy consulting. People learned that if there was a large Excel file, they could throw it at me and I could tell them what they needed to know. I would slice and dice the data to understand new angles to the problem.
That lasted for a few years until I got into leading my own projects and building new tools to help back fill me. Suddenly we had a technology group (this is not to say that I built a technology team by any stretch of the imagination – just that I was there on Day 1 helping figure out how we were going to do things). This new technology group had some tools that really set us apart and became a service line all on their own.
Fast forward a couple more years to an internal conference we had. Suddenly I found myself as Mr. Technology. Which is funny because at no point did I ever set out to be in that role or move in those directions. It happened because there was work that needed doing and I set out to do it.
And that’s the moral of this little story. If you do great work and put yourself out there you can develop a brand all to yourself. But it requires getting out and doing the work.
(But really I was just looking to reminisce a bit.)