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By Lesley Robinson
I would love to say that I set out on my independent consultancy
career fully equipped with a 5-year strategic plan, divided into
short-, medium- and long-term achievable goals. To be fair to myself,
I had written a makeshift business plan, but on reflection, not much
of it was grounded in reality. I left my final, permanent full-time
post knowing that I had a short-term contract offer on the table and
that was enough to help me make the decision to jump from payee to
... full insecurity.
This contract was going to occupy me for three days per week for at
least six months. This allowed me to achieve three key goals:
- Make the leap from secure employment
- Get myself up and running in my home office
- Give me two days per week to focus on marketing myself and trying
to secure further clients.
One aspect I was clear about from day one was that I wanted to be a
'true' consultant and hunt for my own food. A significant part of my
background is grounded in management consultancy and so my own
business model was to go out and build my own client base rather than
work through agencies. I had won my initial contract from my own
contacts and that set me off on the right foot. There is nothing as
motivating or exhilarating as winning a contract through your own
efforts.
Building expertise
There are many ways to build expertise. The key ways I have done this
are by: taking on challenging projects, ensuring I keep up with
industry trends, keeping abreast of developments in business
management more generally, joining relevant committees and getting
involved with conferences. It is true that you learn something from
every project, whether it is an ideal project or not. You could be
improving your project management skills, learning how to present
ideas, refining the proposal process, managing clients better or
trying out a new way to negotiate your fees. There are so many aspects
to finding, winning and delivering projects that it has to be a
continuous learning process.
Early in my independent career, I was keen to push the boundaries and
take on projects that were slightly out of my comfort zone. This
approach really helped me to build expertise. As an example, an early
project I took on was for a firm of architects. It was a review of
their national information service, which was spread across their
seven UK offices. The project involved working with the information
teams, running workshops with the service users, interviewing the
board of directors and other senior managers, and carrying out some
benchmarking with other architect firms. Apart from having a
microscopic knowledge of architecture, I hadn't run that many
workshops before, was working with information staff who didn't want
the review and was asked to make recommendations that would
effectively rewrite some of the core business processes.
I tried to position myself as an external business advisor who could
see issues from different angles and who would consult widely within
the business to deliver the best outcome. This inclusive approach
helped to get a range of stakeholders to buy into the final solutions
and also taught me a vast amount about how to manage a whole range of
people with different expectations.
Staying ahead
As your experience in consulting grows, it is vital to keep up to date
with industry trends. An effective way of doing this is by attending
conferences and seminars. This helps you to discover the best speakers
in your specialist area and hear them in action. Conferences are also
great places to network with people; not only your peers but potential
clients.
Cost can be a prohibitive factor in attending conferences, and a way
to conquer this is to become a speaker yourself. You can start small
by facilitating a workshop session which may run alongside the main
conference, offering a master class in a topic you are passionate
about and then build up to chairing a panel debate or giving a full
paper to the main conference. This pushes the boundaries of your
comfort zone further, but it is an excellent marketing tool, an
effective way of being seen and heard, adds credibility to your brand
and positions you as an expert.
Joining relevant committees is also a useful way of staying ahead and
getting involved in your industry and beyond. I am a member of the
Central London Branch Committee of the Institute of Directors, which
is the biggest branch in the UK with 10,000 members. This is
invaluable for meeting a much wider range of people and really
understanding broader business issues. As part of this committee, I
organise several events and seminars each year, which brings me into
contact with politicians, chief executive officers of the FTSE 100
organisations, entrepreneurs and a whole host of people who run their
own small businesses like me. You can't beat that for networking,
exposure and excitement.
Committee involvement takes time and energy, but it is a hugely
rewarding experience. It also teaches you how to interact with
different kinds of people. On a consulting assignment, I will be
talking to a cross-section of people in the organisation such as those
in IT, marketing and finance, as well as the core staff, support
staff, the CEO and the board. Meeting and talking to such a wide range
of people at a non-threatening industry association event can really
help you to understand and be aware of the different perspectives
people take and the issues that executives face.
Recognition
'Oh yes, I have heard of her.' They may not be sure how they have
heard of you or when, but if your name rings a bell with someone, your
marketing has worked. The most powerful marketing tool is being seen
and heard. There is nothing like experiencing the real thing -
apparently. If people see me speak or run a workshop and they like
what they hear, they are more likely to keep me in mind for when they
need consultancy help. Of course, this can work the opposite way if
someone does not like what they hear. It's a gamble but it mostly
works in my favour. After all, people buy people. We are all more
likely to buy something from a person we have seen and heard and like,
rather than someone who may look good on paper but is an unknown
quantity. It is very subjective but it gets the doors open.
Once you are through that door, of course, the client now expects you
to live up to your reputation. Your hard work in making yourself
known, seen and heard has paid off, but clients are now very
sophisticated buyers. There used to be a certain aura around
consultancy, but that has now faded and clients want much more input
from their external advisors. In such a competitive world, clients
want you to be able to help them benchmark themselves against their
immediate competitors. For example, a medium-sized law firm hired me
to review both their information and library services and their
records management processes. In both projects, they asked questions
like:
- How are we doing against our competitors?
- How far behind or ahead are we in current best practice?
- What is the most widely used technology or software out there
that can help us to deliver our information more efficiently?
These questions take us beyond 'How is my information service doing?'
and focus on how the vital information and records functions
contribute to an efficient business.
Alongside this, clients want to understand how new technologies can
impact their businesses. Web 2.0 tools are a good example. Corporate
clients are struggling with the value of using blogs, wikis, RSS feeds
and other communication tools and want to understand how these 'risky'
new tools can help them. Clients want case studies, reference sites
and first-hand knowledge of the value of these tools to mitigate their
own risk in experimenting with them.
Therefore it is essential for me to do the experimenting and gain
first-hand experience. I need to evaluate blogs and wikis, find ones
to recommend as good examples and also assess how they can work for
me. I have helped a client to set up a wiki around capturing their
organisation's best practice, which was an invaluable experience.
Working with them to build this, I was able to see the process,
overcome any problems and realise the value it could bring to sharing
knowledge. I have also contributed to other wikis and experimented
with my own blog, which have been important steps for learning about
these tools.
Building a network of trusted experts
A fast way to keep up to date with developing technologies is to have
trusted colleagues who are experts in the area. For example, I work
with other consultants who are experts in intranet design and
deployment, customer relationship management systems, records
management, social networking tools and content management. If am
working on an assignment and this expertise is needed, I will bring in
other specialists to help me. Or indeed, we will bid for a project
together at the outset. If you have the position of trusted advisor
with a client, they are generally very open to you recommending
another expert who can help them. This reinforces their trust in you
but it is also a low-risk option for them to find other recommended
consultants.
As well as introducing other trusted experts to clients, I will also
introduce clients to clients. This is particularly valuable during
benchmarking exercises. If a client of mine can demonstrate best
practice in an area of relevance to another client, I will often
connect them to share their experiences and knowledge. This has worked
extremely well with an accountancy firm client and a law firm client
who now collaborate in several areas where they share expertise and
learning and even rotate their information staff between them to
develop their research and analytical skills.
Connecting clients in this way puts you in the position of being seen
as a powerful networker. Rather than diminishing your role - now they
have connected they might not need you - it deepens their
relationship with you and raises your credibility to a higher level.
Once this level of trust has been built up with clients, it makes it
easier to take some calculated risks and maybe test out a few
techniques and ideas during projects that will not only extend your
own skills but could also lead to innovative new ideas and approaches
for the client.
Strengthen your consulting
To continue to be an effective consultant and maintain your
reputation, it is essential to be constantly learning, embedding and
extending your skills. This approach gives you the flexibility you
need to survive. There are two mechanisms I have used to underpin this
approach. The first is through learning how to coach people, and the
second is by devising and delivering my own training courses.
Coaching: As I worked on projects that involved change management - a
change in business processes or people's roles - I realised that not
everyone found it easy to cope with that change. I would work closely
with those who found change difficult and tried to give them the
support they needed. I enjoyed this aspect of an assignment but wasn't
sure I was doing this to the best of my ability. So, I signed up for a
diploma in coaching at City University and studied 'Performance
Coaching for Business'. The course gave me a deeper insight into
coaching techniques and how to get the best out of people as well as
the opportunity to practice these techniques in a safe environment.
This new learning gave me a much more confident approach to bring to
some of the more complex consulting assignments.
Training: As coaching helped to add to my portfolio of skills and
work, so does developing my own training courses. I have pulled
together half-day courses on topics such as how to network
effectively, communications and presentation skills, through to a 1-
day course on the basics of knowledge management and a 5-day course on
information excellence. Training gives you the platform to showcase
and market your skills but it is also an excellent way to practice
what you preach and gain fresh insights and feedback from the
participants. It is also the case that some participants on the
training courses often become consultancy clients, having seen and
heard me in action.
Being a consultant often feels like being in a circus: keeping the
pace and energy high, juggling at least six things at once, multi-
tasking and helping out other team members, keeping the audience happy
and delivering a fabulous overall experience. As with a circus act,
underlying the overall performance is constant practice; the honing of
skills and taking calculated risks to make it all look easy.
Lesley Robinson set up Lesley Robinson Consultancy Services Ltd in
1999, specialising in advising organisations on information, knowledge
and records management strategies, the marketing and development of
information services and the coaching and development of information
teams. She works in both the public and private sectors helping
clients to run their information services more efficiently and
effectively and maximise their value to the organisation.
Lesley speaks regularly at conferences, runs training courses and
writes articles about information management issues. Her website is at
<http://www.lesleyrobinson.co.uk>.
Visit the Online Information Conference on Thursday 6th December at
14.00 to hear Lesley speak in a panel debate about 'Transferable
Skills for Independent Consultants'.
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