Best Consulting Practices

Happy Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving today in the U.S, and while I know I have followers from elsewhere, it's still a good day to remind everyone that the reason we training consultants run our own businesses is because we want to have more to be thankful for. And I do not mean money.

Whether celebrated quietly or with ceremony, on one's own or in the midst of a mob of friends and family, Thanksgiving is a good reminder that we work to build better lives for ourselves, to spend more time with the people who matter, and more time doing what we want to do.

So wherever you are, whether this is a holiday for you or not, I'll wish you the best of the spirit of this day, as I take a little time off. Back next week.

If Time Is Money, Is Money Time?

For many consultants, turning time into money is a fairly straightforward proposition. They charge by the hour or half-day or some other unit, so that time worked directly determines revenue received. They think of "time management" as a process of finding more time that they can sell to clients.

They only run this "Time is Money" equation in one direction, converting time into money. They rarely think that the whole point of going out on your own, of running your own business, is to get more control over your time.

Sure, you may have seen opportunities for a good income when you started your consulting business. But few consultants jumped into the solo business act just because of the money they thought they can earn.

They had a vision of more flexible time, of spending more time on the things they liked to do -- on the job and off the job. They wanted to win a new measure of independence.

Success on the Installment Plan

Avoiding marketing/selling activities in your training business may just be a product of how you "frame" your conversations with yourself, of your perspective or mindset on marketing activities.

You are probably focused on the activities, rather than the results, the benefits, those activities will obtain for you. After all:

• Putting away money in your savings account is not particularly thrilling, but buying something you want with money you saved can be a lot of fun.
• Exercising and eating carefully are not always intrinsically enjoyable, but receiving compliments on how you look can certainly brighten your day.

In the same way, regular marketing activity may not be something you like to do, and if that's all you see when those activities are scheduled, you will find all sorts of excuses and distractions.

The Outsider's Perspective

As a consultant, if you have been at this a while, you have learned that your outside perspective is a valuable asset in your work with clients. In other words, part of the value you bring to the client is simply the fact that your perceptions and advice are not shaped by the client's history, habits, and assumptions. (Indeed, one of the challenges for training consultants who work with the same clients for years is that they start to lose that outside perspective!)

Sometimes, as an outsider, you see things the client cannot see, or ask questions that they would never think of.

Other times, you may give advice that they could have thought up themselves. But it carries more weight, coming from the outside, than it does when raised internally.

The strange thing is that many consultants who understand this outsider's role very well when they play it themselves, with their clients, cannot get comfortable with the idea that some outsiders could help them build stronger training businesses.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Consulting Delusions: Setting Ever Higher Goals For Your Business

One of the most common traps for training consultants is setting higher revenue goals, or higher targets for number of clients or projects or appearances, year after year after year.

Perhaps you look at each year's billings and add 25%, or even more, as your next year's target. Maybe when you crack the $100,000/yr threshold, you get obsessed with making $200K, and so on.

This is not bold thinking, necessarily, because it often isn't thinking at all. It is the blind application of a process rather than the thoughtful examination of what you want, and whether you have achieved your goals.

And it can undermine your very purpose in starting your own business in the first place.

Nurture Your "What For?," Not Just Your "How To"

I spent the last weekend teaching Irish Gaelic at a two-day workshop, and our most advanced class reminded me of a common imbalance in our efforts to learn how to grow our training businesses. (If you're curious, you can find out more about the volunteer Irish language organization I work with at Gaeltacht Minnesota.)

I'm assuming, of course, that you explicitly look for new ideas, as well as ways to cultivate needed skills, in marketing and selling your training services. These might include "retreats" to focus on particular topics and "learning sessions" at seminars or coaching workshops.

These retreats and learning sessions may be led by someone else, or they may be something you do on your own. If you haven't tried it, I recommend setting aside a morning, or more, just to focus on some aspect of growing your business, away from your phone and e-mail. Schedule learning sessions around a specific book you've been trying to get through, or other marketing materials that you haven't had the time to explore.

Balance

Pet Peeve: What You "Deserve"

I recently ran across a blog post that included a statement along the lines of "you deserve a professional looking web site for your business." It's probably just me, but "You deserve ..." is one of those phrases that gets my blood pressure up, that hits a sensitive spot that's just been rubbed raw.

Part of my sensitivity is due to the prevalence of this phrase in advertising. You're watching television and as a woman slips into her bubble bath, the voice-over tells us we all deserve to be pampered, we all deserve the smaller, and even the larger, luxuries of life.

Poppycock!

Deserving? Why?