{"id":1386,"date":"2011-05-25T00:27:49","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T05:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=1386"},"modified":"2011-05-25T00:27:49","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T05:27:49","slug":"how-to-get-started-in-the-consulting-business-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/how-to-get-started-in-the-consulting-business-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Get Started in the Consulting Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow do you get business?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I get asked this a lot, and since I doubt random people I meet at conferences are truly interested in my life, I think what they really want to know is:<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can I get business as a consultant?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been working as a consultant for over thirty years. Here are the steps, in order of how I got started in the business. Hope this helps.<\/p>\n

1. Be able to DO something that has an impact your client can SEE.<\/strong>Leave the client with a concrete product\u00a0 \u2013 a grant proposal submitted, database that now can be used to produce reports, statistical analysis and final report to a funding agency, a program that automates your monthly charts. The consultants I know who provide \u201ccoaching\u201d or \u201cstrategy\u201d have a harder time finding work because no one is quite sure what you\u2019re going to do, if you did it well or how to tell when you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n

2. Go to graduate school and stand out.<\/strong> I started out with two projects that were referred to me by a professor who had more consulting work than he could do. When I went looking for more work, I could point to those successful projects. I have been hired on several occasions by former professors. By \u201cstand out\u201d, I mean academically. I published articles while a<\/p>\n

graduate student, presented at conferences, received two fellowships and a small grant. In my statistics classes, I was at the top of the curve. Be genuinely interested in your field and try to learn as much as you possibly can, more than is just on the test. Work on campus. While you may get noticed if you are working full-time and just on campus for class, it is certainly less likely.<\/p>\n

3. Work at a university.<\/strong> I was a professor full-time for seven years and part-time, on and off, for the next 14. There is a lot of questioning in the media currently about the value of a higher education. I think it depends on the type and quality of your education. Certainly there are a lot of really smart people at universities. Most people don\u2019t meet a lot of statisticians and as my students graduated, moved on in\u00a0 their careers and came to the point where they needed a program evaluator or statistician or statistical programmer, they thought of me. Others didn\u2019t know me but they called their alma mater and talked to someone, a business professor, Multicultural Student Programs, or whoever they happened to know and that person recommended me.<\/p>\n

4.Write the proposals yourself. <\/strong>Several of my first major contracts came from proposals I helped write, either as part of my duties at the university, or on a consulting contract. The client needed an evaluator, they didn\u2019t have anyone in mind, so I offered to throw in my resume. (By the way, I get LOTS of people asking if I will write the grant for free and then they\u2019ll give me the evaluation contract if it gets funded. I always say, \u201cNo\u201d.\u00a0 That is the topic for another post.)<\/p>\n

5. Find partners who bring you business. <\/strong>After about ten years, I started working with partners who were very good at finding business. I don\u2019t know how they do it. Magic, I think. If you\u2019re good at the technical side and you find some partners who are good at the business development side, count your blessings and don\u2019t EVER, EVER regret the share of the money they take. I have acquaintances who don\u2019t do a fraction of the business I do<\/p>\n

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and a big reason is that they don\u2019t see why they should share any part of \u201ctheir\u201d money. I just shake my head.<\/p>\n

6. Be generous with your referrals.<\/strong> Many times, I have referred clients to graduate students or other professors who were interested in starting out as consultants. Partly I did this to pay back the help I got early on. My less altruistic reason is that it is not a good use of my time or the client\u2019s money to be doing t-tests in SPSS or correlations with Excel. It\u2019s one thing if that\u2019s part of a project, but if it\u2019s the whole project, they\u2019d be better off paying someone $40 an hour and I\u2019d be better off working on a contract for $20,000 or $200,000 instead of one for $2,000. It would be nice to say that these people paid me back by referring work to me later. They didn\u2019t, in most cases because I was much further along in my career and they don\u2019t really have enough business to let go of any. I guess there is a philosophy of only helping people who might be in a position to help you back, but I don\u2019t hold to that. Interestingly, in most cases, those CLIENTS came back to me when they had larger projects. Other consultants have referred work to me when they were booked. I haven\u2019t paid back the favor yet, but I remember it. I think what goes around comes around. Karma.<\/p>\n

7. Don\u2019t ever rip anybody off.<\/strong> There have been times when a client was really over a barrel. I once had someone who called two days before a grant proposal was due because they had forgotten the research design section. Everyone on the project thought someone else would do it. I came in on another project that was 18 months past due on their evaluation reports and the agency was pulling their funding if they didn\u2019t get it in six weeks. You get the idea. There are times when people are desperate. I DO charge overtime on those occasions, and it may be as much as double our usual fee because I may have to have people doing data entry, editing and other tasks and they all have to be paid overtime. It\u2019s the law. I\u2019ve known people who charge triple or more in those situations. The client will pay it. But they\u2019ll never work with you again. If you can pull out all the stops and get an incredible job done at at reasonable price, they\u2019ll remember you and come back under normal circumstances.\u00a0 Related to that is charging a fair price for your regular work. I have friends who brag about their consulting rate \u2013 which is much higher than mine \u2013 but they have no work. Yeah, well, when I\u2019m not working, I charge a million dollars an hour.<\/p>\n

8. The biggie is referrals from other clients<\/strong>, and this is how most of our business has come about over the last dozen years, in addition to numbers 4 & 5, but you can\u2019t get client referrals until you have clients. The question was about how you get started.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t mentioned LinkedIn, CCR (Central Contractor Registry), presenting at conferences, meetups or any of the networking that is supposed to bring you business. That\u2019s because it hasn\u2019t DIRECTLY brought us much business. Some of those things have brought us some business, and maybe my magic partners have met a lot of people that way (I\u2019m pretty sure not).<\/p>\n

I say \u201cdirectly\u201d because what these venues have done sometimes is thrown us in the path of people we already knew, when a conversation would come up that, \u201cHey, we need a statistician- \u201d or \u201cCould you do training on \u2014 \u201d<\/p>\n

Also, LinkedIn didn\u2019t come up until we had been in business for decades, and I don\u2019t think I heard of CCR until about a dozen years ago. The size of contracts we get from these sources would probably be a much bigger proportion of the business for someone just starting out.<\/p>\n

Well, good luck!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m off to Grand Forks in the morning and I had better pack. I kind of like North Dakota in the summer, but winter is a whole different ball game. Which comes to the subject of another post \u2013 are you insane to be considering going into the consulting business?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow do you get business?\u201d I get asked this a lot, and since I doubt random people I meet at conferences are truly interested in my life, I think what they really want to know is: \u201cHow can I get business as a consultant?\u201d I\u2019ve been working as a consultant for over thirty years. Here…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-julia-group"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1387,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions\/1387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}