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Tools, Tips and Resources for Consulting Firms
This Tool Shed contains information, tools, templates, concepts and ideas that most often fly in the face of well-established orthodoxy. So, unless you are willing to have your thinking seriously challenged and your beliefs provoked, you'd better paddle off to some more peaceful waters, and not waste any of your precious time at this site.
However keep this in mind from Mark Twain: "The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot."
Every truth passes through three distinct stages: First it is ridiculed. Then it is opposed violently. Finally, it is accepted as being evident. If you read something here, and you say to yourself "maybe", then implement it on a small scale.
Just try it for a few days or weeks on a small scale, and monitor your results. Forget stories, excuses and the typical "too busy" bullshit. As the Nike slogan says: "Just do it". If it works, keep it, if not then toss it and move on. Just keep taking action. Look, Babe Ruth did not become the Home Run King by quietly sitting in a corner, being busy preparing for the earth-shattering event. He kept striking out at that ball and some worked out nicely.
Published Articles in Magazines
Small Business Canada - 20 Fantabulous Ways to Raise and Safeguard Professional Fees. Read article here.
Forum - Year End is Coming: Does That Mean It's Client Abandoning Time Again? Read article here.
RainToday - 10 Ways To Increase Your Fees And Improve Your Performance Part 1. Read article here.
RainToday - 10 Ways To Increase Your Fees And Improve Your Performance Part 2. Read article here.
Forum - Hiring the Right Dudes or Dudettes for Occasional Project Work. Read article here.
Forum - Time vs. Value: Which One Do You Get Paid for? Read article here.
BC Business - Cracking the Billable Hours Ceiling. Read article here.
Business Services West - Stop Time-Based Fee For Service Professionals. Read article here.
Business Services West - Ten Ways to Increase Client Value, While Reducing Your Time and Effort of Delivering It. Read article here.
The Curse of Karl Marx: Why Most Freelancers Under-Charge For Their Services And What To Do About It?
Live workshop I held on 29 May 2010 at the FreelanceCamp 604 conference in Vancouver, hosted and organised by The Networking Hub.
Podcast Version. Right click the link and click "Save As".
Free Consulting Ammunition Vault
Black papers, audios, videos, newsletter archives
Getting Started In Consulting For New Immigrants In Canada...
Moving to a new country and starting a new life and career always present some difficulties. Just think of it. You set your eye on a career you wanted to pursue. Then you got on the path to get the relevant education and experience. Then you graduated, and then decided to move into a new country.
Then having landed in the new country you realise that your credentials are not recognised and your experience is ridiculed. So, you have two options in the new country:
1. Either you go back to school and start re-learning what you've already learnt before and pay a small fortune for another fancy certificate. And then you hope that with local credentials, life gets easier.
Or...
2. You unceremoniously appoint yourself as an expert in your field, acquire some clients and start charging them for your knowledge to solve their problems and to earn a damn good living.
In this booklet you find some specific ideas to start your own consulting practice in Canada. Some stuff applies to British Columbia only, but most of what you read can be used all across Canada.
Buyer's Guide for Consulting Services...
Hiring a consultant is always a big decision for buyers. The question is always whether or not the collaboration with the consultant will be a good investment for a lucrative return or just another expense. There are many books written on the legalities of working with consultants. This buyer's guide is more about the soft issues, like attitudes, mindsets and behaviours when seeking outside help.
At the end of the day you can have the best legally brilliant contract but a legal document won't buy another person's commitment and ion to your success. And the traditional "procurement" approach to hire consultants is just an early call for disaster. Yes, legally everything may be in place, but emotionally you have to adversaries trying to screw each other wherever and whenever they can.
15 Pillars Of Agile Practice Management
Practice Development Strategies For Premium Consulting Firms From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm: The Military Commando
In this white paper you can read about 15 concepts which I regard as vital when we're building a premium consulting firm. For this I use concepts from agile project management and operating principles and practices of military commandos that are probably the most "effective" teams on the planet.
In many places in my writings I compare consulting firms to Special Forces commandos. While in industrial organisations, like in regular armies, we find narrow specialists in isolated silos, in the best consulting firms, just like in Special Forces commandos, we find cross-trained deep generalists who can think in context.
Why Many Consulting Firms Consistently and Persistently Undercharge For Their Services... and What to Do about It
It's a brief overview of why consultants should charge for the value they deliver to their clients as opposed to the amount of time they work with them.
Articles, Wonderings, Ponderings, Hallucinations and Incidental Brain Farts
Resources on Client Acquisition
The blunt and naked reality is that many consulting firms are breathtakingly lazy, lousy, ignorant and impotent marketers. They are bottomachingly good at what they do, but nipplepiercingly hopeless at promoting and sell their expertise even if their lives depended on it. They get so busy doing client work, that until the dreaded feast and famine knocks on their doors, they ignore marketing, and after the knock, they go often into a tailspin.
As management guru, Tom Peters says, "without marketing you're nothing". Based on this statement, it is important to set time, money and effort aside to constantly market your services. But by marketing I don't mean chasing people like a peddler. I do mean creating gravity which attracts buyers to you the way honey attracts bears, so you can pick and choose who you want to do business with.
- Template to Calculate Your Daily Rates (MS Excel File)
- Template to Calculate Your Performance Ratios (MS Excel File)
- Three Elements of Creating the Right Buying Environment
- Some of the Most Common Client Acquisition Mistakes
- 14 Ways of Wasting Your Marketing Budget
- Ten Clients Acquisition Truths
- Some Pragmatic Lead Generation Methods
- Top Ten Benefits of Using External Client Acquisition Help
- Collaboration Fee-Splitting Calculations (MS Excel File)
- Seven Reasons to Pump Your Marketing Muscles Not Your Sales Muscles
- Ten Deadly Proposal Preparation Pitfalls
- The Book of Boredom, Yawn and Drab: Are You Making These Nine Fatal Mistakes in your Yellow Pages Ads?
- Are You Missing These Ten Elements On Your Website's Home Page?
Resources on Consulting
Just as lack of illness is not necessarily means vibrant health, the lack of a full-time job does not mean that you are a consultant. In this section we discuss some concepts about consulting as it is different from being a contract worker (options: outsourced labourer, slave on demand, etc.), or as one of my past university students called it, situational elbow grease.
- Year End is Coming - It Is Client Abandoning Time Again
- Guaranteeing Professional Services
- Three Roles Consultants Can Take with Their Clients
- Checking Client's Commitment to Make Certain the Buyer is Ready for the Proposed Change
- Tactics to Build High Octane Relationships
- Setting Your Professional Boundaries
- Are You an IT Consultant or a Computer Repair Person?
- The Value of Zero-Based Thinking to See the Forest Beyond the Tree
- Creating Long-Term Partnerships with Clients
- The Major Differences Between Strategies and Tactics
- The Six Basic Problems of Traditional Consulting
- Deliverables in Professional Service Businesses - Part 1: Tangibles
- Deliverables in Professional Service Businesses - Part 2: Intangibles
- Input vs. Output-Based Consulting
- Anatomy of Traditional Consulting
- Five Ways of Elevating Your Innate Creativity for Higher Value
- The Four Cs of Change, and How Easily We Can Get In the Way
Resources on Firm Management
This section deals with various issues of growing your firm by recruiting staff. So now beyond being a professional in a certain field, you have to face the leading, managing and supporting your people in their and your success.
This section deals with various issues of growing your firm by recruiting staff. So now beyond being a professional in a certain field, you have to face the leading, managing and supporting your people in their and your success.
- Recruitment Made Simple and Effective
- - and then a Lunatic Invented Full-Time Employment
- Ten Ways of Building Values in Your Firm
- How Complacency is Created in Service Firms
- Run, Hide, Even Bury Yourself or You Will Get Trained
- Creating Your Advisory Board
Resources on Values and Fees
There is a huge difference between performing tasks and creating deliverables for competitive (low) fees and improving your clients' circumstances for premium fees. Are you positioned as a Timex or as a Rolex?
- How Are You Doing with Fee Objections?
- The Inherent Lose-Lose Dynamics Of Time-Based Per Diem Fees
- Service Professional or a Service Workhorse: Ten Ways of Increasing Client Value, thus Your Fees, While Reducing Your Time and Effort of Delivering Them
- Seven Pricing Considerations for Professional Services
Commando Consulting Newsletter Archive
You can find the podcast version of the newsletter, together with other pieces if premium content, inside the Consulting Ammunition Vault. You can request your free access by entering your name and email in the form below...
All other newsletter articles are somewhere above as articles.
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Copyright 1997-2017 Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan & Dynamic Innovations Squad, All rights reserved. Vancouver, BC, Canada
As you grow your people, in return, so they grow your firm