My gym trainer threw his head back and laughed when I told him I was a consultant. “Oh, consultant. That’s nice - you get to say ‘consultant’ and no one knows what you actually do.”

He’s right. And I’ve spent years figuring out what I actually do.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the line between vendor and consultant is real and it matters. But the binary is too clean. Because there isn’t one kind of vendor: I’ve identified four. And understanding which one you’re dealing with, or which one you are, changes everything.

The honest vendor

This one is straightforward. They know what they sell, they sell it well, and they don’t pretend otherwise. You hire a firm to run a leadership program, they run a leadership program. You commission a research study, you get a research study. The solution is visible from the start and the engagement delivers it. There’s nothing wrong with this. In the right context, with the right problem, it’s exactly what’s needed.

The extractive vendor

This one has a more sophisticated surface. They ask good questions. They listen carefully. They run a thorough discovery process that makes you feel genuinely heard. Then the recommendations arrive, and they look remarkably like the firm’s existing service lines.

The discovery wasn’t designed to open the solution space. It was designed to scope and sell the engagement. The predetermined destination was set before they walked in the door; the questions were just the route to get there.

This is the model that has given consulting its reputation. Parachuting in with fixed frameworks, producing glossy deliverables, leaving the culture exactly as they found it. The discovery process is real in its way - the questions are good, the listening is genuine - but it’s oriented toward confirmation, not investigation.

The Trojan vendor

This one is more interesting and more ambiguous. They lead with a product or service to get in the door - a research offer, a coaching program, a training module - but once inside they do something different. They start asking the harder questions. They look at the system. They do the work of genuinely understanding what the organization actually needs, which may have nothing to do with what they were hired to deliver.

The vendor offering is a foot in the door, not the ceiling.

I’ve wrestled with this one personally. The question of whether to come in as a researcher and do OD work once I’m inside is not hypothetical for me. It’s a live strategic tension. On one hand, it works - it gets you into rooms you might not otherwise enter. On the other hand, the client hired you for one thing and you’re quietly doing another. Even with the best intentions, that’s worth mentioning.

The confused vendor

This is the most common type and the hardest to see, because it’s invisible from the inside.

The confused vendor sincerely believes they are a strategic partner. They think deeply about problems, they care about their clients, they have genuine expertise. But their professional identity has already decided the solution before they walk in the room. They’re not hiding it. They don’t know it’s there.

I spent years here. As a researcher I genuinely believed that the solution to most organizational problems was better, more rigorous, more widely respected research. I gave keynotes about it. I put “you are not your user” on slides in front of hundreds of people. I evangelized stakeholders who weren’t convinced and privately judged the ones who still didn’t get it.

What I was doing, what I think many professionals do, is mistaking the tool for the answer.

The research world is full of confused vendors. Not because researchers are cynical or self-serving, but because the structure of the role makes it almost inevitable. Your job title already contains the solution. A researcher does research. The organizational expectation is set before you walk in the room. And the system rewards you for delivering it, which makes the confusion almost impossible to see from inside.

The two-sided trap

Here’s what makes all of this so persistent: organizations are often doing the same thing from the other side.

They arrive with a solution already in mind. We need research. We need a change program. We need a leadership intervention. They go looking for someone to execute it, and they find a vendor who obliges, because that’s the transaction everyone signed up for.

The consultant, in that context, is the person who asks why. Why research? Why now? What are you actually trying to change, and is this the right way to change it? That question is often unwelcome. It slows things down. It complicates a brief that felt settled. And in a system that rewards solution delivery on both sides of the table, the person asking it can look like a problem rather than a resource.

This is why the shift from vendor to consultant is harder than it sounds. It’s not just internal, it’s relational. You have to be willing to be the person who slows the room down, knowing the client came in expecting someone to just get on with it.

Next time I’m going deeper on the most common type, and the hardest to see: the confused vendor. It might be you. It was definitely me.