[gresrun]

My recommendation is to hone your "soft skills": make sure you're on top of communication (be quick to respond to clients and don't let emails sit for more than 24 hours), be patient (working with clients means a wide variety of team dynamics and work paces), be humble yet confident (clients like help but they also want to "be right"), and prepare for the politics inevitably dumped onto outside consultants (consultants often are called in to make hard calls that internal teams don't want to make for political reasons).