Those who can, consult Part 1: What do I offer?
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.
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