This article is part of a two-part series on learning how to be a consultant.

Being a consultant demands a number of skills and characteristics. To really enjoy consulting, you’ll need to find a niche where you feel at home and can use your own experiences to their best advantage. The first thing to do is figure out your own niche and your own collection of abilities. Some of the essential skills and characteristics of first-class consultants appear below.

Essential skills of first-class consultants:

• Marketing
• Prospecting (searching for new clients)
• Self-selling and promotion
• Seeing the ‘big picture’ quickly
• Assessing situations quickly
• Diagnosing client needs
• Translating and understanding beneath the surface
• Writing proposals
• Pricing
• Dealing with business issues
• Training
• Running meetings
• Strategic planning
• Negotiating mutual expectations with clients
• Knowing how to do research (qualitative and quantitative)
• Effective problem-solving
• Thinking ‘outside the box’

Essential traits of first-class consultants:

• Ability to lead
• Excellent communicator
• Decision-maker
• Competitive
• Self-confident
• Self-reliant
• Likes to work long hours
• Deals well with chaos
• Disciplined
• Financially astute
• Risk-taker
• Resilient
• Planner
• Strategic thinker

It all looks a bit overwhelming! But remember, the key is to see which traits and skills you have, which you are developing and which you need to learn. For example, you may be very good at researching but don’t have experience with costing and pricing, which is of great importance. Even though you don’t have experience, you can come up with a plan to get that experience. For example, to increase your experience and understanding of pricing you can:

• Talk with consultants or with clients who typically hire consultants to perform a given service. Ask consultants how much they charge for X; ask clients how much they would expect to pay for X.
• Telephone large consulting firms and ask what they charge for particular services to get an idea of what the big players are doing. Such firms include KPMG, McKinsey and Anderson Consulting.
• Trial and error: Write proposals for your clients, and ask for feedback about proposals you don’t get.

Another area where would-be consultants typically need to gain experience is basic business issues. You may find yourself with a great deal of educational or life experience, but you may not have spent much time being responsible for the management of a business. If you don’t have business experience, it can be challenging and unnerving to jump into consulting. Some ways to gain business experience include taking a short-course in small-business management or finance; talking with friends and family who may own or run a small business; regularly reading key business periodicals, to keep abreast of issues that may affect your business; and seeking the help of a lawyer or accountant during the groundwork phase of your business to make sure you get off on the right foot.

One last example of skill development might be training and running meetings. If you’ve ever been a teacher (at any level), you’ve gained valuable experience training others. You can draw on those experiences as a consultant. However, another great way to gain experience with training, running meetings and many other skill areas is to volunteer for a non-profit organisation of some sort. Such groups typically need help, and you stand a good chance of being asked to do a number of different things while working there. In addition, you may find that serving as an officer for or participating in community organisations and clubs can provide you with the kind of experience you’re looking for.

So, although consulting demands a number of skills and traits, you don’t have to have all of those elements when you begin. Periodically review the list of skills and interests that you develop in this and ask yourself which traits and skills you have, which you are developing and which you need to learn.

Before you can begin your career as a consultant, you’ll need to assess the knowledge and skills you now possess. As most people can tell you, formal education does not always translate directly into skills. However, if you think about it you can determine what your skills might be. For example, a person with a degree in literature can read and analyse but can also do in-depth research, write, argue different sides of an issue, organise materials and so on. In addition to any formal education or training you’ve received, you also have a vast array of life experiences to draw from. Often these experiences can provide you with skills you hadn’t thought about before. Once you start listing all the things you know how to do, you’ll be amazed at their diversity and number. Of course, you can’t explain every skill you have to a potential client, or both of you will be overwhelmed. Instead, you’ll need to focus on a specific set of skills and talents you can offer to the client.

The importance of being specific

Being especially clear and specific about what you can (and can’t) do as a consultant is crucial to your success. There are at least four reasons for being specific:

1. Potential clients come to you when they have a specific problem to solve. They want to know that you will handle the problem. The more vague you are about explaining your expertise, the less likely the client is to hire you.
2. The general public doesn’t know or understand the jargon in your specialised field. They want assurance that you know what they need you to know.
3. People will trust you if you speak their language. This means that if you can explain what you do in words they would use, they will trust you more. Sharing their language demonstrates that you understand where they are coming from.
4. You can’t be clear about what you can do until you can explain it simply. Complexity is good, but people who can’t explain the complex in simple terms for non-experts generally think in unclear ways. In short, the business world is a full of plain-speaking people who value efficient and accurate communication.

Because being specific about your abilities is so important, an essential component of your consultant’s toolbox is what management guru, Tom Peters calls an elevator speech. If you were in a lift with the managing director of a potential client company, could you tell her what you can do for her before she gets off on the next floor? It’s important that you can express yourself clearly in a very short period of time.

Here's a typical example of how an elevator speech was developed. Maggie had just finished her Ph D in speech communication. She had a lot of experience teaching public speaking skills to students, she enjoyed working with small groups and with individuals, she had expertise as a rhetorical critic and as a writing coach, she had an undergraduate degree in public relations, and she enjoyed problem-solving. An initial draft of Maggie’s elevator speech went something like this:

Maggie: Ms. Corporate Executive, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Executive: Nice to meet you too. What business are you in? Maggie: I teach public speaking and also writing, and I have a lot of background in communication skills. I also do public relations. So, I’m kind of a communication consultant…

Obviously, Maggie was confronting a problem many of us face: too many, seemingly disconnected, skills. In an elevator speech, these skills must be coherently organised and shaped into a confident statement of your abilities and your target clients. Let’s look at the revised version:

Maggie: Ms. Corporate Executive, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Executive: Nice to meet you too. What business are you in? Maggie: I’m a communication skills consultant for managers and executives. Specifically, I focus on improving my clients’ presentational and small-group communication skills.

Although any statement will probably be revised many times as your interests shift, this one is clear and workable for the time being.

Why not try working on your own statement?

The bedrock of your expertise and effectiveness as a consultant must come from your own clear sense of what you have to offer potential clients. The purposes of this exercise are to guide you through a self-assessment of your skills and abilities and to encourage you to formulate a one- or two-sentence description of what you can offer. When you complete the exercise, you should have a better understanding of what specific contributions you can make as a consultant, and you should be able to start describing those contributions efficiently.

1. List all of your formal qualifications and credentials (passed the bar, have a teaching qualification and so on)
2. Under each formal credential, list the skills that you've mastered
3. List all of your informal business-related skills (can do legal research, can analyse statistics, defuse conflicts well and so forth)
4. Now, list all of your other skills and experiences (making up recipes, planning good parties, teaching aerobics, keeping a hectic schedule for your family, and so on).

   Setting your skill lists aside for a moment, reflect on what you like to do. You may find this question easier to tackle if you break it up into three areas:

   • Communication (do you like to talk to large groups? small groups? one-on-one?)
   • Problem solving (pinpointing problems, defining, solving)
   • Planning (plotting strategy, organising)
5. Return to your skill lists and look them over. Now circle all of the skills that you would like to use in consulting (such as statistical analysis or project planning). Then group skills together that make sense to you.

Now reflect on this: What clusters of skills do you have? How can you tie them to what you like to do? How can you describe those clusters of skills in one or two sentences? You might be able to assemble three or even four elevator speeches from your clusters of skills. It’s perfectly fine, though, if you have only one. But you do need one to begin as a consultant.

Those who can consult: part 2