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

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).