What’s the name for a person who is neither a consultant nor a contractor?

The term facilitator doesn’t cut the mustard for the definition I’m after.

Online thesaurus’s aren’t coming to the party either.

Neither consultant nor contractor

Because I’m trying to name the role – it is neither a contractor nor a consultant – that sits at the heart of the workshop process of unearthing a Million Dollar Message.

Former consultant and analyst Matthew Hodgman, who has reinvented himself as a dramatist, reckons the part I play sits between a “client telling you what to do, and you telling the client what to do”.

He said the role is a bit like that of a ‘dramaturge’ in the theatre. This is the wise-head person who helps in many different aspects of a play, opera or movie making, including being the director’s right hand person, but is neither master nor minion.

The best description I’ve come up for the MDM workshop is ‘reflective listening foil’ and ‘co-design intelligence’.

But a single word – one which expresses operating in the trenches with a client to reveal the 2-10 words that make up a business’s heart and soul and value proposition statement – would be really handy.

It’s a bit like being a counsellor, but no one is sick or ill.

So, if  anyone has a term that means you’re intensely working with a client – question-storming to discover the One Central Truth of the offer of their product or service, and then metaphorising to express that offer as poetically as possible – let me know.  

Perhaps it is an opportunity to create a portmanteau (combining two different words to create a new entity; e.g. bankster – from banker and gangster)?