New Year’s is a common time to establish new habits.
The calendar demarcation is great psychological trigger to adopt healthy new behaviors like working out every day, avoiding email until afternoon, and waiting until after breakfast for the first cookie of the day.
Two keys to making new habits stick:
- Limit the number of new habits you’re going to take on. One new habit that sticks is far better than three or four you abandon.
- Track your compliance and, if possible, gamify it so you are rewarded for not “breaking the chain.”
Of course, being the smart, chocolate-loving consulting firm leader that you are, you want to step beyond new, personal habits.
You want new, firm-wide habits.
Fortunately, you can easily select one or two habits to implement at your firm, then use a tracking tool available to your entire team.
For tracking, my team uses a Miro board. Our clients use a similar device or a shared document, Google sheet, custom dashboard or even Slack channels to track their new habit compliance streak.
At the personal level, daily habits are particularly effective. For consulting firms, though, we’ve found that weekly habits make more sense.
So, here’s the big question for you to answer:
What one, weekly habit will you adopt at your consulting firm to improve your fortunes in the year ahead?
Our 4-part consulting firm model is a handy framework for categorizing new habits, and I’ve used it to list some thought starters for you below.
Strategy
- Review and update your firm’s strategic initiatives dashboard every week.
- Conduct at least one interview each week that is purely research (no selling) to understand your market better.
- Identify one non-strategic activity, initiative, relationship or commitment each week to prune.
Win Engagements
- Make X outreaches to new contacts in your Network Core every week.
- Every week, ask for at least X introductions to new contacts.
- Meaningfully advance at least one piece of Thought Leadership each week.
- Appear on at least one podcast (your own, or a collaborator’s podcast).
Profitably Create Value
- Track and display your firm’s weekly productivity (i.e., dollars of revenue delivered).
- Conduct at least one feedback survey with a client each week to gather information about your firm’s client experience.
- Highlight a firm-wide delivery framework or template each week for the team to learn and use.
Infrastructure (People, Processes, Systems) Habits
- Start your weekly, team meetings with a positive statement.
- Note your consulting firm’s achievements every week.
- Recognize a key contributor at your consulting firm every week.
The baker’s dozen of ideas above barely scratch the surface of new, weekly habits your consulting firm could adopt.
You’ve probably thought of one or two others that fit your firm’s situation.
So, what ONE habit will you implement at your consulting firm in the coming year?
Text and images are © 2026 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
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