Archive for December, 2009

I had been the CFO of a public company. My idea was that I would start a business consulting practice serving several smaller companies by becoming their part-time CFO.

I documented all that I had accomplished as CFO and created my first marketing story and brochure. When I told my story to everyone I could get to listen, I got lots of compliments but no business. I had made two mistakes.

 The first mistake was that I assumed that the problems that smaller companies had were the same as my previous public company. They were similar, but not the same. I had to change my story of my business consulting practice so that it was clear that I understood and could solve the problems of the smaller companies.

The second mistake was that I focused too much on me, rather than my prospect. When I tweaked the marketing story from what I had accomplished to what my previous companies had accomplished with my help, my business consulting practice finally started to gain more traction.

For most us who have started a business consulting practice, our first client was actually the easiest one to get once we figured out where to look.

The reason is that most of us have a network of people who know and trust us. Even if you have not focused on networking in a while, you probably can come up with at least 10 people in the business world who know and trust you. If each of these people know at least 10 people, you have a working network of 100 business people. When you start your consulting practice, this is the group of people you should be focused on reaching.

Of course, if you what to jump start your consulting practice, start your networking fast and furious. It will pay big results.

The vast majority of people who start their own business consulting practice do so for the same reason I did. We got tired of the corporate rat race and wanted to have our own business where we could set our own hours and decide how much we wanted to work and earn.

If you want to save a lot of time and frustration, you should decide quickly what type of consultant you want to be. Generally, business consultants fall into one of three categories:

•  Independent Contractor – You are basically filling a role that would be filled by an employee, but are not on the payroll. This type of consultant is the easiest to migrate to from the corporate environment.
• Specialized Business Consultant – You have a particular skill set that makes you an expert in one specialized field. To be successful starting a specialized business consulting practice, you should have or develop tools and systems that would not be generally available and used by your clients.
• General Business Consultant- You have a broad business background that you want to use to help entrepreneurs. To be successful starting a general business consulting practice, you should have or develop tools and systems, such as MyBizPath, to help business owners achieve their goals by making changes across their business.

Becoming an independent business consultant is no different that starting any other business. Planning and thinking through the different possibilities shortens the time to success.