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Million Dollar Consulting summary

Name: Million Dollar Consulting
Rating: 4.4 (69 reviews)
Author: Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss

The Professional’s Guide to Growing a Practice

4.4 (69 ratings)

27 mins

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Million Dollar Consulting
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What’s in it for me? Start your own million-dollar consulting practice.

Not everyone is satisfied with the grind of a nine-to-five job in the corporate world, and many people choose to take their knowledge, skills, and experience with them to another, more lucrative industry: consulting.

But as any successful consultant knows, solo consulting isn’t just about amassing a large fortune. In fact, success in consulting involves surmounting a dramatic learning curve and collecting broad and diverse experiences and skills. It brings the possibility to make changes that can potentially impact the lives of tens of thousands of people.

These blinks will teach you how to set up your own company and acquire the kinds of clients that will make your million-dollar business. They’ll also give you tips – some of which are quite counterintuitive – for success in this industry.

In these blinks, you will also learn:

why successful consultants actually fire their clients,
why putting relationships before money will actually make you wealthier,
how to ask for $50,000,
why you should never ever enter negotiations with the “gatekeeper,” and
why your free time is your true wealth.

A consultant adds value to their customers’ cause.

What does it take to become a doctor or a lawyer? That’s easy: there is a strict set of requirements you need to fulfill, like passing the bar or doing your residency, after which you’re awarded a certificate that allows you to practice.

While the requirements for becoming a doctor or lawyer, like those for many other professions, are quite narrow, virtually anyone can call themselves a consultant. If that’s the case, then what does the word actually mean?

A consultant is someone who has a unique set of skills and talents that help to create the value-adding components that their clients’ businesses lack. The value that they add comes from two sources: content expertise and process expertise.

Content expertise is earned through study and work in a specialized field, where the wealth of your experience and professional relationships lie. In other words, this is your professional “comfort zone,” where you are the most competent.

This expertise is rooted in the specific skills and talents that made you successful in one particular industry or field of study in the first place. If you are consulting for a specialized firm – for example, as an expert witness in a legal dispute – then you are acting as a content consultant.

This contrasts with process expertise, which transcends specific industries, is applicable in almost any environment, and involves a set of highly effective methods.

For example, the company Bain & Co. has spent years conducting strategic planning projects, and thus has developed the experience and the methodology necessary to consider themselves as having expertise in strategic processes. Consequently, they tend to specialize in just that area, as they know it best.

For solo consultants especially, process expertise is often more valuable than content consulting. This is because process expertise has a wider range of applications across a broad spectrum of diverse industries, which can help to make up for a lack of content expertise.

Get discovered by making yourself visible.

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.

Focus on the big picture and don’t let your job get in the way of your career.

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.

Be crystal clear about your strategic 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.”

Sometimes you need to fire clients in order to grow.

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.

Consulting is a “relationship business,” so a likeable brand is crucial.

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.

Focus on value and partnership when negotiating with a potential client.

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.

Don’t charge for time, but instead for value.

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.

Don’t be fooled by immediate success, and always keep your pipeline evenly filled.

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.

Diversification and investment are the best protections against bad times.

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.

Think long term and wise up if you want to hold on to your dream client.

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.

Balance work and life – your real wealth is your free time.

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.

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What is Million Dollar Consulting about?

This fully revised fourth edition of the 1992 classic, Million Dollar Consulting, walks you through everything you’ll need to compete – and win – in the highly lucrative and busy world of consulting. Million Dollar Consulting offers you the tools you need to attract clients, organize your pipeline, and grow your current consulting business into a million-dollar one.

Best quote from Million Dollar Consulting

There is a tendency in the consulting business to look no further than the latest client check.

—Alan Weiss

Who should read Million Dollar Consulting?

Anyone who wants to succeed as an independent consultant
Anyone who works with or is considering hiring a consultant
Anyone who wants to do better in business

About the Author

Alan Weiss is the founder of Summit Consulting Group and has penned more than 50 books, such as Getting Started in Consulting and Million Dollar Referrals. In addition to being named among the National Speaker Association’s top one percent of speakers in the world, he has also consulted for a huge number of companies and has consistently made more than $1,000,000 per year.

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