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Paul Winter was destined to be a professional footballer or thought he was. As a youngster, he was on the books of Hull City when the then manager Terry Neill gestured at his team-mates and said to him: "The problem with you, Paul, is you've got choices. These lads, they do everything I tell them but you, you ask questions. You're better off going to university."
Winter took the hint. Today, Winter is the new president of the Management Consultancies Association.
The tale about the sports career that never was - he went on to play for Merthyr Tydfil as a semi-pro while studying in Wales and later, top-flight rugby - is told with relish. "I wasn't hungry enough to be a pro', you've got to have that hunger, to have come from nowhere and want a way out. And to make it, you need an awful lot of alpha." As for rugby, he says, "Malcolm Gladwell reckons that if you're going to make it in sport you need to have put in 10,000 hours by the time you're 21 - football was my first game, rugby my second. I simply hadn't put the hours in."
We're sitting in the back of a coffee bar in Kensington. Best place really, I murmur, given that journalists and management consultants never seem to score highly in the national popularity stakes - we always seem to be down there with estate agents. He does not disagree. "The truth about management consultants is that they don't come into contact with the people who say that."
He pauses. "At the last count, 99% of the FTSE100 use management consultants. Their chairmen and chief executives surround themselves with them" He shrugs as if to say, so we must be doing something right.
"Around 60% of my time is spent with chairmen, chief executives and their boards. They value what we do. It's like top sports stars. Compare Paul Gascoigne, who hung out with his old mates, with Pete Sampras, who made sure he had very intelligent, competent people assisting him. Which did better? It wasn't Gazza's fault - he didn't know what to do. But with the best businesses, they know they have to buy support to compete at the highest level."
Companies, he says, are always looking for that bit extra, to get ahead. "They're not playing in a local kick-around any more. They're operating in a field where anybody can do anything and sell anything. They bring us in because they want to know what's really possible, what they're capable of."
But that's often not how management consultants are perceived. They're associated with cuts and job losses, giving the intellectual, business-school veneer of approval to the board's grim tidings. He shakes his head. "No management team of a large organisation can cope on their own; they've got to get help. And they must make sure it's somebody they like, someone they trust. But that doesn't mean it should be someone who doesn't challenge them. A good management consultant should always be challenging."
Much of the problem, he says, is that, "People don't like change. We're not brought in to keep things the same." He even goes so far as to speak in terms of "the Change Curve being the same as the Grief Curve, with denial, anger, acceptance and moving on. You've got to take people through it in the same way."
After a spell in the property and venture capital industries, Winter studied at Cranfield Management School. He then founded his own Corpra consultancy, specialising in devising and implementing strategy and change. He's kept it deliberately small - up to 20 consultants before the recession bit. "Anything bigger than that, 20-odd intelligent cats, is difficult to manage." It downsized in the downturn and is "now rebuilding again".
Despite its scale, Corpra has had some big clients: Kimberly-Clark, BP, British Red Cross, News International, Xerox, Aegis, Severn-Trent. These are the ones he can name. And his proudest projects? Advising the Association of Accounting Technicians on a complete shift in approach and culture, which won Corpra a clutch of industry awards. And assisting with the merger of Cancer Research and Imperial Cancer Research Fund to form one huge charity, Cancer Research. "That had enormous complexity."
The least proud? "When I don't find an elegant way of doing something, when I don't get it right - and sometimes I don't."
Contrary to the image some might have of management consultants as yes men, he says he has not shirked from telling a chairman or chief executive that actually they're the problem.
"We have told them when we have to - it's part of what we do." Often he says, it's a question of their style and that can adapted.
But if they're not prepared to listen, that's when issues arise. "A good leader is somebody prepared to slash the workforce, to reduce costs to save the company, to take a look at themselves if needs be. It's someone who is prepared to take some very tough decisions."
How much does he charge? "It depends. A top, premium rate would be £5000 per day. If it's a change project over time, it could be a third of that. A strategy workshop over a weekend would cost £25,000 to £75,000."
As president of the trade association, Winter says he wants "to let the reality about management consultants come out more. The industry comprises a lot of very bright, enthusiastic people who are doing work which adds value."
He asks if I'm aware that the cost-benefit ratio for a management consultant is one to six? "That means for every £1 you spend on a consultant, over two years on average you will get £6 back." In Corpra's case, he adds, "it's one to 10 - spend £1 and you get £10 back."
What he'd like to see is the talent he admires in his field extended to the third sector. "I want to make the whole business world an exciting place to be and that includes charities. I want to alter the British paradigm which can be anti-business. I want to see business at the very top of the agenda."
Very rarely, he says, across the profession, "will you find zero returns - nearly all the work we do has a very positive return. We constantly add value but it's true, we take the blame for a lot of sometimes negative, hard stuff and that harms our image."
He adds: "It's the price of doing the job. The truth is that image-wise, the very brightest leaders of the very best businesses use us systematically every day to add advantage to their company. That's it."
Simple really - but management consultants have a long way to go before they leave journalists and estate agents behind.
