The New Consultant's Quick Start Guide

An Action Plan for Your First Year in Business

Elaine Biech

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119556916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Consulting

An action plan for working as a consultant

Management consulting is a $250 billion industry and growing at a rate of over four percent annually. Many predict that more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce will soon be contingent, freelance, or consulting members of the workforce—making this book more relevant than ever.

Individuals become independent consultants out of necessity or preference: necessity because they lost their job or the company offered an attractive exit package; preference because they want a career change, more control over their time, or an enriched, varied work situation. Consulting also appeals to the Millennial workforce who are searching for careers that offer a good salary as well as meaningful work. The New Consultant's Quick Start Guide:

• Serves as a companion to The New Business of Consulting

•Provides you with a place to plan your transition into consulting

•Helps you identify your niche, develop a business plan, charge what you're worth, and create a marketing strategy to ensure a steady stream of clients

•Prepares you for changes you will encounter beyond your professional life, including social, family, and financial aspects

The New Consultant's Quick Start Guide helps you work through the challenges of consulting such as working alone, deciding on necessary insurance coverage, finding your first clients, struggling with cash flow, and understanding market trends.

1
First Things First: Why Consulting?

In this chapter you will

• Define consulting
• Identify the experiences, skills, knowledge, and attributes that will lead you to a successful consulting career
• Assess your consulting aptitude
• Identify your initial consulting focus
• Test your entrepreneurial attitude

Consulting: What Is It?

A consultant is a professional who provides unique assistance or advice to someone else, usually known as the client. The assistance is usually advisory, strategic, or tactical in nature. The work is defined by the consultant’s expertise, the structure in which the consultant works, and the process the consultant uses.

Expertise is based on what a consultant knows and has experienced. It can be anything from gardening to the stock market; from astral projection to pig farming; from organization development to preventing child abuse; from manufacturing to mining emeralds.

The structure within which the consultant works varies. You can work for a firm—for example, one of the large worldwide accounting firms, all of which have consulting branches. You could also work for a small or medium-size consulting firm or with a partner in your own office. Other possibilities are working in a virtual organization with a loosely structured relationship with other consultants across states or even nations, working as a subcontractor to any of those I have listed, working by yourself from a home office, or any of a dozen other structures.

The process a consultant uses is usually within one of the steps of problem solving. For example, a consultant might help a client in these ways:

• Identify the problem: “Why aren’t our online sales growing the way we anticipated?” A consultant might identify the problem as a wasteful use of resources or a lack of repeat business.
• Identify the cause: “What is causing limited repeat business?” A consultant might identify the cause as sales staff who are rewarded more for new than repeat business, as poorly designed electronic tracking systems, or as employees with poor customer service skills.
• Identify the solution: “How do we ensure that our employees have the skills they need?” A consultant might identify solutions such as hiring more highly skilled employees, offering higher compensation to attract and retain skilled...