Consulting Basics

By Joel Gendelman

Ah, the life of a consultant. Sleeping late, working in your pajamas until noon, never having to do anything you don't like. It's exactly what everyone dreams about, right?

Wrong! If you've ever wondered what it's really like to be a learning and development consultant and what it takes to become a successful one, then you need this book. If you decide to go for it-or if you've already taken the plunge—Consulting Basics can help you every step of the way. You'll learn about:

The four things you must have before becoming a consultant:

Realities of daily work life on your own

How to sell yourself, find clients, and develop proposals

The client's point of view and how it impacts you

Setting up your practice effectively and professionally.

Along the way, you'll find charts, checklists, anecdotes, examples, and questionnaires to help you gain perspective, navigate your choices, and move forward. An appendix provides sample written agreements so that you'll have essential documents as soon as the need arises.

Consulting Basics is comprehensive, yet it's a quick and pleasant read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Association for Talent Development
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781607285892

Book preview

Preface

There’s only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and this is not learning from experience.

—Archibald MacLeish

My journey started the same way it starts for many other consultants. I was a practitioner, a manager, a director, and finally a vice president. One Friday afternoon, my boss came in and told me that I was laid off. I figured that I had worked for other people long enough and since I knew what I was doing, I could make it on my own.

That was many years ago. Since then, I’ve probably made every mistake in the book. Therefore, I decided to write a book—this one. I’ve written Consulting Basics to pass on some of the knowledge I’ve gained to people like you, who are venturing into the life of a consultant. As with most people starting out, you probably have little time for theory. I hope you’ll find this book comprehensive, frank, and to the point. In addition, since we all need a little bit of humor, especially when we embark on a new journey, I have written this book to be lighthearted, conversational, and enjoyable to read.

Who Should Read This Book?

Consulting Basics is for learning and development consultants of all shapes and sizes. These include

Human performance technologists

Learning and development professionals

Instructional designers

Trainers

Multimedia authors

Course developers

Talent management and other human resources professionals.

How You Should Read This Book

The main purpose of this book is to help you take the first steps toward becoming an independent consultant. In this regard, it is a comprehensive and concise overview of both the mindset and the practical steps needed to begin this journey. I have chosen a first-person approach to help you overcome the irrational fear that sometimes accompanies the thought of leaving a regular paycheck and solid company benefits to embark on this exciting road. I want you to know you are not alone. The advice offered here is based on my own successful transition from inside learning professional to independent consultant. While the book is targeted toward learning and development professionals from the everyday trainer to talent management and other human resource experts, the advice is applicable to almost any profession.

My purpose here is to be your guide as you think through your basic motivation for choosing the life of a consultant. To help you plan an escape from an established job. To give you pointers as you set up an office and land your first client. I will help get you off to a good start in marketing your services and billing clients, and even provide some advice on the pitfalls and triumphs of working at home.

In this sense, this is a complete, basic guide. For more specific advice, you need only Google the word consultant to become instantly overwhelmed with the number of entries. With this book in hand, you should be able to successfully navigate these selections.

To help you with some of these choices, you will find Appendix A arranged by topic area such as general consulting, sales and marketing, developing proposals, and so on. I have identified key resources under these topic areas that will help you take the next, more advanced steps toward your dream of becoming a consultant.

Chapter-by-Chapter Highlights

Nearly everyone at one time or another entertains the idea of starting a business. In today’s challenging world, where change and job instability seem to be daily blue-plate specials, learning and development professionals increasingly grapple with whether they should add the word entrepreneur to their resumes. However, before you take the plunge, or if you have already done so, you should have a plan. Consulting Basics is a great place to start.

The following is a breakdown of each chapter in this book.

Chapter 1—Is Consulting the Life for You? addresses what you should know and what you need before going out on your own and highlights the most enjoyable parts of running your own show. This chapter also identifies the skills and traits that make a successful consultant.

Chapter 2—There Is Never a Good Time to Go Out on Your Own addresses the reality of there never being a perfect time to start your practice, though some times are definitely better than others. This chapter will also help you plan your escape and provides some hints to ease your transition from the corporate world into the wild and wooly world of consulting.

Chapter 3—Consultants Are Treated Differently prepares you for the realistic challenges you may face during the transition from employee to outside resource.

Chapter 4—Land That First Client: The First 90 Days helps you hit the ground running by providing you with ideas for finding work quickly.

Chapter 5—Setting Up Your Practice helps you turn your home office or spare bedroom into a quiet work environment. It will also provide you with simple steps to help take care of the essential business aspects of your practice and manage your cash flow.

Chapter 6—Bigger Isn’t Always Better: The Benefits and Challenges of Working at Home makes you comfortable with being a small business and communicating the value of the personal service that a small consulting firm provides. This chapter also discusses the challenges and pitfalls of working at home, and how to rise above them.

Chapter 7—Selling Doesn’t Have to Be a Dirty Word helps change your thinking about promoting your practice and provide you with a plan for growing your client base. It will also provide you with guidelines, hints, and ideas for transforming your clients into repeat customers and your most productive sales force.

Chapter 8—Develop an Effective Sales and Marketing Plan offers gorilla suggestions for getting noticed using your brain instead of your wallet, and offers you tools to grow a steady stream of clients.

Chapter 9—Develop Proposals That Sell helps you avoid the pitfalls of wasting valuable hours developing useless proposals, so you can spend that time constructing short and crisp selling documents that bring home the bacon.

Chapter 10—Put It in Writing: Develop Fair Agreements provides you with samples of agreements that are simple yet comprehensive for clients and outside resources. It will also offer you hints on how to avoid the delays associated with dealing with the legal department.

Chapter 11—Nobody Likes a Hog: Give a Little Back explores several methods of profiting from not so random acts of kindness.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all those who have contributed to my development as a consultant. Those most special to me include Dr. Donald Cook, Roger Pell, Caroline Yeager, Sivasailam Thiagi Thiagarajan, and Bonnie Seligson. I would especially like to thank everyone at the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) for their support and patience. Finally, I dedicate this work to my mother, Lila Gendelman, who opened my eyes to the beauty of the written word.

—Dr. Joel Gendelman

1

Is Consulting the Life for You?

Consulting is one of the greatest professions in the universe. If you handle it right, you can live in that special corner of the world that you’ve dreamed about, do what you enjoy most, have more free time than you can imagine, and make a good living while you’re at it.

Benefits of Becoming a Consultant

I am sitting here on a Friday morning looking out a tree-lined suburban street and listening to a favorite and familiar tune on my iPod. Life doesn’t get much better than this. Write this down somewhere and look at it often. It’s really true.

I would be the last person to tell you that a consultant’s life is a bowl of cherries, but it sure does have its advantages. If you play your cards well, you’ll reap many of the following rewards.

Focus on What You Do Best and Enjoy Most. Despite current thinking, not many people can be considered a jack of all trades. If you are truly gifted at just one thing, you are fortunate. Becoming a consultant will allow you to focus on what you are best at and enjoy most. It could be developing training courses, delivering training sessions, authoring computer-based training programs, or speaking on a particular subject, such as leadership or management development. The choice is yours.

As a consultant, you will still have to do stuff that you do not like, but only for small amounts of time. I dislike accounting and I am also really bad at it. But when I began my practice, I spent hours doing it myself. Thankfully, my practice took off, and I was able to hire a bookkeeper who does my accounting in a quarter of the time and does it well. I also built my first website and seem to be able to keep it running and updated. While I am OK at it and enjoy working on the site, I know that someone competent will be able to do it much better. While it will be with a heavy heart, I foresee that I will shortly relinquish that as well.

Keep Your Own Hours. Few people work best Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. One of the best things about being a consultant is the ability to keep your own hours. I work best from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. The rest is gravy, so I do my most important work in the morning and leave the more routine activities to late in the afternoon. You can work a couple of extra hours on Saturday morning to make up for the few errands that you’ve done at less crowded times during the week. You can even take a day off to go for a motorcycle ride in the foothills with a friend.

With today’s two-career couples, having flexible hours can be a tremendous help. Dropping off your kids at daycare or picking them up at the end the day is a lot easier if you don’t have to punch a time clock. You may even find that when you work for yourself, you have more hours in the day. I live in a suburb, where most people spend one to two hours commuting to and from work. Most days I work at my home office, so I don’t have to be part of the parade of stalled cars on the freeway. This gives me a few extra hours each day to run errands or write articles and books. It also saves a great deal of money in gas and auto maintenance.

Many companies allow employees to enjoy some of these benefits by working virtually all or part of the time from home. However, I find that in most cases, these employers expect their staff to be at their desks during business hours, regardless of where that desk may be.

Move to the Country. For the most part, when you are employed, you need to live where the work is. Consultants have more flexibility. Since you will not have to visit clients every day, you can live a little farther out. If you are good at what you do, you may find that consulting will allow you to live and work in places like Boulder, Colorado, or the banks of the Hudson River. With the growth of the Internet, you can now consider moving out of the country, where life can be a whole lot cheaper. I’m thinking of Portugal.

Free Yourself From Office Politics, Meaningless Memos, and Meetings. In their many books, Peter Drucker and Ron Zemke talk about the amount of time that is wasted in corporate America doing stuff that is not related to the customer. This is what I hated most about my stint in the corporate world. This includes bitter office politics, pointless meetings, office policy memos, we pump you up presentations, and birthday parties. I guess all this is important in some sort of way, but the best thing about being a consultant and working for yourself is that you no longer have to deal with these things.

On the flip side, isolation is also the hardest part of being a consultant. I often miss being part of a corporate family. Many people cope with this by joining a local professional society and making that their professional home. Networking with other consultants and communicating with clients and friends are important parts of being a successful consultant. They will provide you with the friendship and human bonding that we all need. I enjoy those interactions more than meetings and memos.

Live Large. When you work for a company, you usually need to live smaller than you are. The company’s accomplishments and needs are more important than your own. As a consultant, you can finally live as large as you want. Your accomplishments are your own. All the articles you write and the conference