10 things you must know about how to become a consultant

By Neil Patrick

My mailbox is a constant source of inspiration for this blog. And this morning was no exception.

I received a LinkedIn invitation to connect with a chap I knew at university. I was delighted to reconnect after so long, accepted immediately and messaged him to ask what he was up to.

In his message back to me he told me that he would be leaving his employer in a few weeks’ time where he’s been the Managing Director and intended to become a self-employed consultant.

This isn’t an unusual aspiration for senior professionals. After all those years’ experience and rising through the ranks on merit, it’s tempting to think we are well equipped to take on such a career pivot.

I know. I have done it myself. And I learned the hard way that very little of the experience we acquire in a management career actually counts for much when we switch from being an employed executive to a self-employed gun for hire.

But this communication prompted me to think about the things I learned in the process. If you are or are considering becoming a freelance business consultant, these are the 10 things I think matter and which you must address in your plans:

No-one cares what we have achieved in the past. They only care about what we can achieve for them in the future.

Rebranding ourselves as a freelance version of what we were before is a non-starter. Clients don’t value us because of the breadth of our experience and previous seniority. They want one thing (at least initially) and they want an expert at it.

Simply changing our Linkedin profile to show us as a consultant will not get us any attention. We must have a personal media strategy which enables us to be found when people are looking for the skills we have.

What we did five or ten years ago is mostly irrelevant. If we’ve not done exactly what people need in the last few years, that experience is considered pretty much  redundant.

We may think we have transferable skills, but clients do not. Most clients or prospects I have encountered believe that relevant experience of their sector is vital. They may or may not be correct, but few will be persuaded otherwise and they call the shots. So sector specialism is a very wise choice.

We must specialise despite our wide experience. When we have wide business experience, it’s tempting to market ourselves as a jack of all trades. This is fatal – we will be perceived as master of none.

We must be able to solve a problem that is hurting our clients every day. Not a problem we think they have, or the type of work we most want to do; a problem that they know is stopping them achieve their aspirations.

A wide and appropriate network which has goodwill towards us is an essential prerequisite. Just having a website is not enough if no-one ever goes there. The explosion of online content in recent years means that we will never be found by search engines unless we have invested in online content and built social media networks which enable us to be found online. Moreover, the social web and its peer to peer nature means we are judged not so much by what we say about ourselves as by what others have to say about us.

The internet isn’t as clever as we might think. It’s a paradox for sure, but the internet is not yet very good at perceiving fine nuances about people. It’s powered by big data and algorithms. These are good at counting but not so good at interpreting subtle qualitative information. If you or I have 500 LinkedIn connections with really great people who have active goodwill (i.e. they will voluntarily help us) towards us, that’s powerful. If we have 5,000 who couldn’t care less, it’s actually a liability.

We need to have a funnel strategy. Actors and sales people know this well. They accept that one positive result is the normal outcome of perhaps 50 or even 100 auditions or sales calls.

So transitioning from senior executive to consultant is a conundrum. Such a pivot is possible, but it takes time and an effective strategy. Who we were previously and our experience is usually much less valuable than we’d like to think.

I know a ton of other consultants. Some are doing well usually because they have managed to transition from a ‘normal’ job to a freelance/contractor version of the same job. This is not real freelancing in my view – it’s actually a degraded job contract more than anything else.

This isn’t really what I am talking about here. I am talking about those of us who want to create our own true consulting businesses from scratch. Hunting and securing our clients and earning our living based on the success of our work for them.

The harsh reality is that most other consultants I know are finding it extremely difficult to secure good clients, good rates of pay and assignments which last more than a few weeks. The labour on demand model which is becoming the new normal, is making freelancing a very precarious career choice.

Success as a freelance consultant has very little in reality to do with our previous career experience. It has everything to do with our ability to network effectively, build awareness, acquire goodwill. And critically being able to solve a problem that our clients cannot solve themselves. Recognise this and develop a strategy that creates these things and we are half way there.

But half way will not pay the bills. And in my experience this transition takes years not weeks or months. Today I have long standing regular clients that I love working with. They are happy and I am happy. But in almost every case, the initial contact took 3-6 months to evolve into an arrangement whereby the commercials were finalised and the work was underway.

It’s a hard path to follow, but the satisfaction I get from seeing my clients succeed as a result of my involvement makes it more rewarding than anything I have done before.

Better still, because my clients are happy, they recommend me to others and so finding new assignments is never a problem for me.

And I indulge myself in a way I could never do when I had a normal job. Today if I don’t like a prospective client for any reason, I don’t work with them. Period. And that's a luxury of choice I never had before.

I just wish I had known what I know now when I started out.

P.S. Guardian Careers have published some further comments on the subject here. (Although I hope my views are a bit more actionable and insightful!)

How to earn money while you look for your next job

By Diana Schneidman

There are millions of things you could do while you look for your next job.

• You could mow lawns or shovel snow. 
• You could return recyclables or take a metal detector down to the beach. 
• You could work breakfast shift at the local fast-food outlet or babysit your nephew. 

Here’s a better idea: You could practice your proven work skills as a well-paid freelancer or consultant working with businesses.

Why businesses? Well, because that’s where the money is. Businesses are more likely to have the funds to hire the assistance they need than individuals are, even if the individuals do have a need that service providers can fill.

This strategy is easier to implement than you may think, and if you have a little gumption, applied with forethought and taste, you can be earning good money quickly in a few weeks or less. 

The secret to success is to get busy with marketing efforts that directly connect you with valid prospects while postponing nice-to-have but optional brand positioning and internet marketing for later.

I’ve been unemployed several times and each time I followed the same three steps to land work as a freelance writer / editorial consultant serving the insurance and asset management industries.

These steps are:

Step #1: Offer a service as similar as possible to what you did in your last good full-time job.

You can jump into marketing with confidence because you understand which companies are most likely to want your services and exactly which benefits they desire. You also know the job titles of those most likely to hire you.

Also, it’s easiest to work independently when you have already polished your skills and can do the work without guidance from others.

Some may advise that you should do what you love and the money will follow. Sounds persuasive but this saying is not always true. Your hobbies and other “love interests” may be in overcrowded fields or talents that are challenging to monetize.

So why not start where you are and offer the service you know best?


Step #2: Contact the best prospects individually . . . and since today’s marketing gurus recommend developing personal relationships, why not start with a no-pressure, simple phone call?

Over the years I’ve made thousands of phone calls on behalf of my services and I only remember one person who hung up on me.

My calls are nothing like the nuisance calls you get at home while at the dinner table.

Since I only phone businesses, I call during business hours. I make the calls myself. I phone live - no recordings for me!

I only phone people who are likely to want my services.

I get to the point quickly and don’t waste time on useless happy chatter.

Sure, some people say “no,” but it’s all in a day’s work. I don’t consider a simple “no” as rejection.

Step #3: Get real! Let’s define getting work quickly as within 30 days, not 30 minutes.

Every marketing technique, from Twitter to advertising, relies on large numbers. So does phoning.


Why not give this simple three-step system a try? Access everything you need to know to achieve success with Diana Schneidman’s new book on Amazon: Real Skills, Real Income, A Proven Marketing System to Land Well-Paid Freelance and Consulting Work in 30 Days or Less.

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0991015304)


Diana offers an informative blog and other free advice on how to market freelance and consulting services at www.StandUp8Times.com.

Why contractors are the future and the downsides of hiring a mercenary workforce

By David Hunt, PE

A friend of mine from when I worked at Ford Motor Company in Sandusky, Ohio and I talk about once a week. He, I, and a few others from the circle of friends I developed there stay in touch. A while ago, he and I simultaneously had an epiphany while chatting: this was the last place where we developed real friendships at work.

Do I stay in touch with a few people from subsequent employers? Yes, but they are few and far between, and – with one notable exception of a vendor representative – they are nowhere as close as these friendships.

I am reminded of my own youth, where my parents would often host dinner parties whose attendees were – almost exclusively – colleagues from my father’s or mother’s place of employment. People who attended celebrations were mostly people whom my parents or I had come to know through their workplaces. Their children were my friends. Looking back, I’d have to opine that the overwhelming majority of persons in my parents’ social circle were people from work.

In the last couple of decades, the workplace has become increasingly mercenary and the average tenure in a company has been shrinking (the average now, IIRC, is three years). In a recent article by Gary Swart on LinkedIn, The Future of Work and the follow-up piece The Future of Work Part II: 10 Tips For Professionals, he addresses the increased churn rate of the workplace today. Citing the fact that most people are now shifting jobs every few years, he claims this is driven by employees wanting to be freer and more mobile, among other reasons. Another essay, Half Of Us May Soon Be Freelancers: 6 Compelling Reasons Why, discusses the benefits of this trend, as does Why Everybody’s Going Freelance.

I would argue that this is reversing cause and effect. Since the 1980’s, companies have become freer and freer to downsize, fire, and otherwise shuffle people around. Driven in part by increased globalization, but also the spate of MBAs pursuing an extra fraction-of-a-percent profit margin, the idea of the old employment contract has been undermined, with employers – not employees – being the driving force. The disposable nature of people these days is forcing people to take a contractor’s mentality. More than a few networking contacts of mine foresaw this and became contractors ahead of the curve!

While I might be projecting here, my understanding of the ultimate end state of this trend is of a company with a skeletal core of people, reaching out to freelancers and contractors to form teams that swirl around a project or two like piranhas swarming a piece of juicy prey, then dispersing to the next location (i.e., company) where more prey is available.

The benefits, I do agree, are obvious. Lower head count, less benefits to fund, having specialists on board when a company needs them and not when they are not needed. But there is a price to such ephemeral groups…

Back at Ford Motor Company, one of the first projects I worked on was the launch of the 1996 Ford/Taurus headlight assembly line. Of the several projects I did on this line, one was looking at the allowable leak rate specification which was forcing the rejection of a substantial number of headlights. Where did this specification come from? Nobody at the plant knew. It was what it was, handed down from the hazy mists of long ago.

I quizzed our design group. The same story: nobody knew. Finally I found a grizzled veteran of the lighting design group. The leak rate specification was from sealed beam headlights from decades ago, passed down from lighting generation to lighting generation.

But our lights weren’t sealed anymore. Instead, they incorporated a filtered vent to allow the light to breathe – a totally different design philosophy. Given this insight we designed a series of experiments and widened the allowable leak rate substantially, reducing reject and scrap rates substantially without compromising field performance. If I had not had this insight of the origin of the specification, arguing for the testing I did would have been much more difficult. More importantly, without this insight and the subsequent testing, a step-change improvement in first-time-through and reduced scrap would not have been achieved.

Another project, while in climate control, involved cost-reducing a heat shield. Again, I had to dig and dig and dig to find out why the heat shield was there (beyond the obvious, first-order answer of protecting the plastic case underneath). And again, it was only a chance conversation with a longtime veteran in the design group that I found out why the heat shield was used: this heavy formed-fiberglass piece served solely as a carrier for the aluminum foil to reflect away the engine heat.

Armed with the actual function of the piece, I developed and successfully tested a concept that – had I not been laid off with almost 2,000 other people – I would have pushed through with the potential to save an estimated $750K per year.

What did these two things have in common? The value and knowledge of how things were developed, as contained in the memories of people who had longevity at the company – the company’s “tribal knowledge”.

More recently at Cabot Corporation, we had a retiree come in and work a couple of days a week. He had extensive and invaluable experience in the WHY of our systems. Often understanding why things are the way they are – something only truly available by having access to someone whose long-duration tenure gives them that knowledge – is critical before one starts making changes in more than a trial-and-error mode.

Sell-swords have their uses; many are indeed experts in their area of expertise and can be useful when a company is faced with a specific and extremely thorny problem. But a company consisting mostly of as-needed mercenaries is continually doing two things:

• Employing people who, while working, are worrying about where they’re going next when this gig ends – and having to spend time and mental energy searching for it instead of spending that mental energy on the project (or on other “trivial” things like their families). 
• Scrambling to find pieces of that “tribal knowledge” – the knowledge that vanished when the company dispersed their full-time staff slavering at the cost savings – and having to duplicate effort and rediscover all that information time and again. 

There is, possibly, a better term for this than sell-swords: pirates. Pirate crews swarmed to the leader who promised the most booty. Ultimately loyal only to themselves, they would often disperse the moment things got difficult; if they didn’t it was more from fear or inability to leave than any loyalty or inspiration.

When faced with official navies, usually pirates came out on the worse end. Why? Because formal militaries were organized, learned from experience, and had people who were dedicated and loyal to something more than the promise of, arrrr, treasure.

As companies descend into free-wheeling teams of self-focused, short-timer buccaneers, signing on for quick booty, what will they do when they face organized companies with long-term, loyal, committed employees inspired by something greater than their next paycheck or a fat bonus?

© 2013, David Hunt, PE

David Hunt is a Mechanical Design Engineer in southern New Hampshire looking for his "next opportunity" that allows him to design new products and shepherd them to stable production. His LinkedIn profile is: www.linkedin.com/in/davidhuntmecheng/; he blogs at davidhuntpe.wordpress.com and tweets at @davidhuntpe.