Most people think it’s difficult start a career as a business consultant. I used to think the same in my early 20s when I started in IT. In retrospect, I should have made more efforts to establish myself as a consultant earlier; the benefits certainly outweigh the downsides. As luck would have it, I was forced into a consultancy role when I lost my 9-5 job. Time to learn to hustling and bring in business. Harvard Business Review refers to it as The Hustle Strategy. More on that later.

3 Types of Consultant

Before we start, there are 3 types of consultants:

1. Academic — those with academic achievements, e.g. PhDs, who are brought in to solve/explore/test problems. Their skills match the problem at hand. So you have it or you don’t.
2. Management — those with senior management skills, such as in M&A, legal, international business development and
3. Solutions — this includes the broad spectrum of 9-workers who’ve ‘repositioned’ their skills, want to work for themselves and/or have others working for them. This, I assume, it where you fit in. It’s where most consultant start out.

How to get started as a Consultant

The next question is: how do I get started? Here’s one way of approaching it.

1. Focus — identify your top 3 skills (not technologies). Be honest. If someone put a gun to your head and said “what are the three things you do best?”, then you’d say ”what I do best is…”
2. How do you see yourself — write a pen portrait (100 words max) of how you see yourself. So, if you were introducing yourself person to someone at a conference, you’d say “Hi, this is Amanda she,….” Remember, focus on the benefits you offer, not the tools. Tip – Start to visualize the person/consultant you want to become.
3. Role Models — identify 3 business leaders and use them as role models. For me, Richard Branson is a good example, for you it might be someone else. Read everything about these people, soak up how they made it. It’s not in the words of their bio – but the energy, the drive they had. Having a role model gives you a frame of reference, something to use as a compass/anchor.
4. Meet and Greet — Contact 10 people who are in a similar position as yourself. Meet up, for example, on a Saturday afternoon and see how you can help each other. Remember, you’re looking to link up with people for the long haul. Ignore the tire-kickers. Find 1 or 2 decent people that you trust and keep connecting with them.
5. Be the Glue — Define one common goal with these folks and make it happen. For example, aim to run an event, workshop, training course (whatever) by a specific date. You have to have targets, otherwise nothing will happen. It will just be talking shop.
6. Action Plan — doesn’t need to be fancy. List what needs to be done, assign names, and dates.
7. Examine your USP – I know this sounds lame but you have to differentiate yourself from the competition. This is the key. If you become ‘that guy’ who does, for example, Facebook training, Social Media business communications, Proposal development for biotechnology or whatever, then laser focus on this. Your aim is to dominate this one area. You have to become ‘that guy’.
8. Promotion — once you’ve all your ducks lined up, start getting the message out. Write guest articles in blogs, contribute to events, share information on LinkedIn, send free White Papers to people in your target market – do whatever it takes to promote yourself (and your colleagues) so that you become you become ‘that girl’. Girls, when I say ‘that guy’ I mean both guys and girls. You know that, right?
9. Personal branding – get your site, business cards, sharp suit etc in place. People still judge on appearances. If you look successful…
10. Network — Look for places to get out and meet people. People do business with people they meet. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy. Find fast ways to meet up and find out where it’s happening.
11. Stick to the plan — If you keep this up for 3 months, you’ll change your perception of who you are and also by meeting people, you’ll learn new things. While the web is great, the human touch is what counts.
12. Follow the leader — Tom Peters, Chris Brogan, Richard Branson, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ have all helped me in different ways.

Tip – if you’re a single mom, link up with other parents who want to run their own business and take turns minding each other’s kids:  that way you both get one night a week to get out there and network.

Chris Brogan made a very interesting observation recently when he said that he tries to be there ‘before the fire starts’. What he meant was that everyone wants to help (i.e. sell you something) when things go wrong but it’s the people you know before it happened that count. I bet there you’ve been in that similar situation yourself. It’s the people you already know that you trust. See: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust

One last thing – the harder you try, the luckier you get. Take it one step at a time. Remember the turtle and the hare. Use everyday opportunities as ways to close the gap between where you are and where you want to go.

What’s your first step?

What advice would you give to those who want to start as a Business Consultant? What’s the one mistake they must avoid? What’s the best tip you ever got on starting your own business?

It’s not the questions you ask that matters, it’s the way you ask them. Technical writers, business analysts, and developers all ask questions. They want answers. And some are better than others. Some ask many times to get the definitive answers. Others think they have the answer but, on closer inspection, have overlooked some vital point. So, how do you ask the right questions?

How to Run Structured Interviews & Improve Task Analysis

When working on business transformation and outsourcing projects, I’d spend endless hours interviewing people.

The more I did it, the more mistakes I saw in my interviewing techniques.

I wasn’t getting the answers I wanted. I was losing time and getting bogged down with thorny SMEs. My manager suggested I look at Structured Interview techniques.

• Structured Interviews are a quantitative research method commonly employed in survey research. It helps ensure that each interview is presented with exactly the same questions in the same order. We used it for Process Design work and developing Action Plans.
• Answers can be reliably aggregated and comparisons made with confidence between sample subgroups or between different survey periods.
• Structured interviews allow you to collect data for a statistical survey, for example, data can be collected by an interviewer rather than through a self-administered questionnaire.
• Standardizes the order in which questions are asked of survey respondents, so the questions are always answered within the same context.
• Minimizes the impact of context effects, where the answers given to a survey question can depend on the nature of preceding questions.
• Used as a qualitative research methodology. These types of interviews suit focus group studies in which it helps to compare/contrast participant responses in order to answer a research question.
• For structured qualitative interviews, interviewers develop an interview schedule which lists the wording and sequencing of questions.

Later, I organized workshops on Structured Interviews where we showed Business Analysts how to interview SMEs and glean the information they needed.

How To Ask Questions for Technical Documentation

Tom Johnson also discusses how to ask questions, for example, to define the topics for an application, ‘Regardless of how many topics you decide to include in your help, asking questions is a tool that can serve you well in all areas of life.’ http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2010/02/17/the-art-of-asking-questions/

How To Ask Questions

Some things to consider are:

• When to ask Open v Closed questions, i.e. which is the most appropriate.
• How to interview groups, i.e. how to ensure that quieter types get heard and not bullied/intimidated at workshops and
• How to verify what the person said is what they actually meant to say..

The final one is much more difficult than you’d think.

How do you interview people?

What mistakes do technical writers make when interviewing? Do they ask too many questions? Or assume they have the information? How do you cope with difficult people at interviews?