Million Dollar Consulting summary

Starting a business isn’t easy, and often the biggest hurdle is attracting the attention of potential clients to your services. So how do you do it?

There are two major ways in which organizations find consultants: word of mouth and an outstanding body of work.

How do you measure the quality of your work? Many consultants get tangled up in quantifying their tasks with arbitrary measurements, like the number of meetings held or reports written. In reality, the quality of your work comes down to one thing and one thing only: the value you add to your client’s business.

In this way, consulting is about results, not tasks. If you just fulfill tasks and define deliverables without connecting them to a specific value-adding result, you’re just creating a heavy and unproductive workload for yourself, such as writing reports and sitting through meetings devoid of goals.

What is it that defines your consulting business and sets it apart from the crowd? Every consulting firm has some unique motivational force behind it that sets out their strategic goals and paves the path for their business.

Unfortunately, companies too often formulate mission statements such as, “We want to help clients to achieve the best results possible,” or “We want to be on the cutting edge of our field.”

Has your doctor ever told you that there’s something you need to cut out of your life – maybe smoking or candy bars – in order to improve your health? Surprisingly, the same is true in the world of consulting: sometimes consultants fail to grow because they refuse to abandon bad clients.

This is because consultancy firms operate differently to other businesses, such as soft drink manufacturers, who will always try to sell to as many people as possible. In order to grow – both financially as well as in terms of client relationships and professional experiences – you will need to let go of less lucrative businesses.

A consultant’s most crucial actions are to differentiate their business and find their niche – but how do you achieve this? The answer lies in branding yourself and building relationships.

Although we’ve been told not to, people really do judge a book by its cover. Knowing this, you should be sure you create a personal brand that others will both like and recognize.

Consultants who don’t “make it” are often unsuccessful because they fail to convince the client of their value. This is because there are a number of hurdles that can make negotiations difficult.

Firstly, you will often find yourself sitting across from a gatekeeper at the negotiating table – someone who is authorized to say “no” but not “yes,” like, for example, HR personnel or a mid-level manager. Under no circumstance should you ever enter negotiations with a gatekeeper and you should always insist on the presence of the person who actually makes the ultimate decisions and writes the checks.

It can sometimes be difficult to translate the services you provide into a dollar amount. Many consultants make the mistake of charging a per diem fee, but unfortunately for them, this is not only counterproductive, but can even be considered unethical.

This is because the time you spend on a project has no intrinsic value for the customer in and of itself. The only thing that the client is interested in is improvement, or value.

How far ahead do you plan for your future? If you’re like most consultants, you don’t look much further than your next paycheck. This tunnel vision is what causes most consultants to miss the omens of bad times ahead. In order to stay above water, you’ll need to closely monitor the volume and source of your incoming assignments.

The pipeline approach is one way to gain perspective on your incoming assignments. Your pipeline indicates all of your long-term, short-term, and immediate projects along a timeline, all of which are “signed and sealed,” thus representing safe income.

As a result of the economic crisis of 2008, many consultancy firms suffered a loss of business and drastic cutbacks in their expenses. Others, however, were able to actually grow their business in spite of this economic hardship. So what did they do differently?

The answer: they invested in their businesses instead of cutting costs, and made use of their highly diversified services and excellent client relationships.

In order to be the most successful consultant possible, your ultimate goal must be to become irreplaceable for your clients and to form lasting relationships with them in order to maximize your fees and keep your pipeline filled with assignments.

To achieve this, you’ll need to think strategically and in the long term, even discounting your fees for special opportunities that allow you to gain enough knowledge about your client’s organization to make yourself an irreplaceable asset.

Hell-bent on being as financially successful as possible, many consultants end up spending their lives in airplane seats and clients’ offices, leaving only the weekend for their families, if that. Others, however, believe that their real wealth is their discretionary time, and that money is merely the means to achieve that lifestyle.

If that’s the case for you, then growing your business may actually mean a decrease in your wealth.