Set up your Consultancy Office: Where To Work And What You Need To Start

By Cindy Tonkin

You want to set up your consultancy. You know why you're in business. But do you need an office? Will a home office do? Is it worth separate premises?
And then what do you need to make the office run? Printers, phones, tablets, hard drives, what's essential and what can wait?
Don't waste your time on a lot of technology which won't help you get more business (the first important task of any consultant!).
This is the book for you.
Pros and cons of the home-office, separate offices and serviced offices.
What you need to set up your office and run your business.
Part 2 of Cindy Tonkin's useful Consultant's Guides Series, this book is stand alone, but complements the other books in the series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cindy Tonkin
• Release date: Oct 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310682414

Cindy Tonkin

Cindy Tonkin is the consultants’ consultant – specialising in working with people whose consultative skills differentiate their product and service. Managers, sales people and consultants. A qualified NLP-trained trainer she combines an extroverted, energetic presentation style with a strong understanding of what makes people tick. The results are fun, dynamic ways to make your sales force, your management team or your cultural change program work.Her solid background in consulting and training means she can design a change program with whatever change elements you need – coaching, training, workshops, action learning projects, whatever suits your organisation’s culture and outcomes!With more than 20 years experience in reengineering and productivity improvement, she has the project management skills to deliver your requirements on time, on budget and in the way you need them to work long term with your organisational culture and market. As a comedic improviser, Cindy can link anything to anything, and surprises often result.Her first book, The Australian Consultant’s Guide, was an Australian Institute of Management bestseller. She has written more than a dozen other books for consultants and managers since then

Book preview

Deciding where to work

If you are making a decision about where to locate your business – in premises, at home or both, then this is the section for you. If not, skip to the session on hardware and software for your office.

This section provides practical guidelines for setting up your office. I’ll also talk about the disadvantages of working at a home office.

Since you are setting up the consultancy business of your dreams, you will need to create a place where this business lives, a place you can say is your ‘work’ place, rather than a place to play or relax. It is extremely important to do this properly. Research around effective people in many fields shows that the place in which they work contributes to the success of what they do.

Walt Disney, for example, had three different ways of working in his creative process. Robert Dilts, in The Strategies of Genius, says the three ways of working were the ‘dreamer’, the ‘realist’, and the ‘critic’. Disney set up rooms for himself and the people who worked with him corresponding to each of these phases in the creative process. Perhaps this was why an ordinary man could achieve such an extraordinary amount, creating an entity that would go on to achieve success even after his death.

In its early stages your consultancy may be a little smaller than Disney’s current empire, but you can still set up different places to do different aspects of your consulting work. Or you can set up places to work and to play. The point of the story is that where you work is an important factor in your success. Setting up a space to work in helps you to be more productive. Setting up a different space to relax in is equally important.

This chapter covers where to work.

• Working from ‘nowhere’

• Working from home

• Renting premises

• Using a serviced office.

Read on for the important details

Working from nowhere

Given the itinerant nature of some types of consulting the first intelligent question to ask about workspace is ‘Do you really need an office-sized fixed physical space?’

Maybe your physical space is your smart phone or lap top. There is no rule that says you need to have an actual office.

Perhaps your consulting business requires you to travel a lot, living in hotels, jungle huts, taxis, or Mac trucks. Perhaps you work from client premises for much of the time. If so, it may be more appropriate for you to run your accounts from a laptop, organise electronic banking and do everything else by mobile phone.

Barry is a tropical agronomist who specialises in a particular type of nut-growing tree in the South Pacific. His office is most often a laptop and a web connection. He works in sweaty jungles using battery power. He e-mails from internet connections he finds. Barry has no need for a bigger physical space than the backpack briefcase that carries everything he needs.

Lisa is a marketing specialist with a few corporate clients and couple of smaller businesses she coaches. She plugs a keyboard into her iPad during client visits and coaching sessions. That’s her office, where her iPad is!

The future is wide open, and you are more accessible now than ever before. Look at the options and at your requirements before you invest in any sort of permanent, physical space.

Working from home

Assuming that you do need a physical space, then home is often the cheapest option. Whether you can work from home depends greatly on the type of consulting you do and where your clients are located. If you don’t have the option of working on the client’s sit, consider these advantages of the home office.

Home offices can be:

• cheaper to set up and maintain

• quieter with fewer distractions

• quicker to ‘commute’ to

• more flexible

• very professional if you take advantage of technology.

In a moment I will look at each of these options in more detail, but for now, also be aware of the disadvantages. Home offices:

• can be noisy

• can get lonely and boring

• are not so flexible when it comes to location

• can make it hard to stop work

• may not give the image you want to portray to clients

• require time management discipline.

The advantages of working from home

There are many advantages to working from home, cost and convenience being major factors.

Cheaper to set up and maintain

One of the major reasons many businesses are started at home is because working at home is initially cheaper, and can be cheaper to maintain.

If you and your accountant decide it is worth the effort, you can even tax deduct a portion of your rent or home mortgage (do the calculations first).

It also costs you less in travel costs to and from work, (which are not tax-deductible in general), and you can even save money by eating lunch at home too.

Anna used to work from offices in Chatswood, a short, convenient 10 minute drive from her home in Lane Cove. She needed the car at work, because she