[greggyb]

Feel free to email me to talk more about this. I can share trajectories for myself and a few peers who have similar experience.

Get a role at a >decent consulting firm in the field you like. Move aggressively into a role where you get to take lead on projects. Find conferences in your area of interest. Speak at those. Build relationships with any vendors that are common to your customers and area of interest. Speak more. Get to know organizers at conferences and seek keynote and panel discussion opportunities. Engage with everyone you can to identify problems. Evolve your content to focus on the intersection of interesting and common problems. Somewhere in here you can shift to a top-tier consulting firm in your field, or to independent consulting, or jump to a vendor, or take on a senior role at an org that would otherwise be a customer of your consulting firm.

At this point you should have strong experience and a reputation for the same. Leverage this to filter opportunities to those you want.

All of this is predicated on you actually being quite good at what you're interested in. You don't have to be world class to start, but you do need to continuously improve. You'll probably end up in the top 10% of your field. Again, predicated on ability.