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BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL CONSULTING PRACTICE
By Marc Kramer
"Web Sight"
marc@kramercommunications.com
My sister gave me a calendar called "The Millionaire Mind" and each day the calendar gives an excerpt from the same titled book written by Dr. Thomas Stanley. On my 40th birthday day the calendar excerpt read that 80% of millionaires believe there is more risk working for someone else than working for yourself. My wife and I both support that statement.
There is little to no loyalty in the business world anymore. The safe jobs our fathers and grandfathers talked about at such companies as IBM, AT&T and PECO, now called Exelon no longer exist. These three companies have on average 25% less employees today than they had 10 years ago. Even new economy, supposedly recession proof companies such Dell Computers are laying off people.
I understand a company laying off people who don’t bring value to the business or when a company is losing money, but when a company shows a profit and lets go of people in the name of shareholder value I have to question their motives. Was it necessary for Michael Dell to lay off 10% of his work force? Or could have asked everyone to take a pay cut to save those people’s jobs.
At the end of the day, we are all mini-corporations whose job is to support our families and ourselves. Some of us want one client and others, like myself, like having multiple clients. My wife, who is very conservative, becomes nervous when a company wants me to join them full-time or buy a large chunk of my time. The advice I give to anyone who has lost their position is to go out on their own.
If you are still employed, but are worried you are going to be laid off or have just become or know you will be laid off sit down and develop your own business plan. The parts of your plan are as follows:
- My Expertise-You need to make a list of what you do well that past employers paid you for. For example, if you were in marketing at IBM and developed an expertise in consumer marketing that would be something you can sell to other companies.
- Market for My Expertise-Develop a list of types of companies who could use your expertise and then make a list of specific companies that are within drive time that could utilize your services.
- Marketing My Expertise-Marketing is all about getting people to identify you in a certain way and by getting them to think of you in a certain way they will call or think of you when they need your services. For example, we use a guy to fix all of our appliances who once worked for Sears. He lost his job as a repairman and put an ad in the local paper telling people that if they owned a Sears appliance and didn’t want to pay the high and the long delays of dealing with Sears they should call him. After five years of being in business for himself, he now owns a house on the Jersey shore.
- Selling My Expertise-There are many ways of selling one’s experience. One way is to make a list of all of your clients and friends and let them know you are available to provide your expertise. Two, join local and regional chambers of commerce and trade associations that will give you opportunities to meet people.
- Competition-Analyze who will be invited to offer the same services that you do at the companies you have targeted. If you are a computer consultant, but focused on businesses with sales less than $5 million, you don’t have to worry about IBM and Unisys targeting those companies because the sales opportunity would be too small.
- Competitive Advantages-You need to make a list of what makes you better than the competition. That means listing everything you know, the size of projects you have worked on, the size of clients you have worked with and the success you have had.
- Financials-Take the time to put together a spreadsheet of your current expenses and that will tell you what you need to bring in to breakeven. It has been my experience that it can take as little as a couple of months and as much as six months to get your first contract. Therefore, make sure you have some money put into the bank.