Taking Your Consulting Career to New Heights | Consulting is an exciting business opportunity for those with an entrepreneurial spirit and a can-do attitude. Bringing your skills to bear for the benefit of other companies is a lucrative opportunity for freelance contractors, but navigating the waters of this professional lifestyle can be tricky for those without a plan.
Building a consulting career takes patience and a long vision. But for those who are willing to see it through, a career in this realm can be an exciting and rewarding life decision that you’ll never regret.
With these tips, you can begin to plan for a new consulting business that will launch your personal finances and professional satisfaction through the roof.
The skillset of a consultant who enjoys success is both diverse and deep.
Consulting is a mainstay in the entrepreneurial world. Consultants are brought in for specialized projects within all industrial sectors, and they earn big bucks while leveraging their expertise. A contractor is often a corporate workhorse who has earned his or her skills in the boardroom and behind the scenes. Leveraging professional understanding of best practices for business, productivity, and streamlining solutions is where consulting firms like McKinsey, Accenture, Bain, and Deloitte earn their enormous commissions. These same project management skills are where individual contractors thrive in the consulting industry as well.
Consultants typically possess honed skills that come from years of experience in a niche part of the industry. TV producers, analysts, marketing strategists, and business process professionals all require a highly technical skillset that can only be crafted over years in direct operational roles. Your consulting business already employs these niche talents, aligning your years of experience with a nuanced and independent approach to the problems that face businesses in your industry for effective solutions.
Project Management know-how is crucial in the consulting industry.
One of the most important skills that a consultant possesses is the ability to leverage a project management tool for marketing teams. Consultants are often called in to overhaul a marketing team’s workflow and efficiency in order to optimize company success. Leveraging tools that help your skillset shine is the best way to show yourself as the indispensable project manager that you are. The primary use case for external consultants is in managing large, complex marketing or sales objectives that a business can’t confidently or efficiently create a successful workflow for in-house.
Large enterprises and small businesses alike rely on these partnerships in order to create value and growth, so chasing after lucrative contracts of all varieties is more realistic than one might initially assume.
These needs arise on a revolving basis, so the most important thing for a consultant looking to grow with the market’s opportunities is to hit the first job out of the park. With the help of a number of industry tools, such as OKRs podcasts, Trello boards, collaboration tools, and project management solutions that help create and manage budgets, you can build the perfect consulting platform and leverage one success into many new contracts that will begin to snowball into enormous success for you and your personal brand.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a unique component of a project manager’s ultimate quest for success. OKR workflows are the secret sauce to the impressive growth of firms like Google. Essentially, the breakdown of an OKR employs two layers of goals (the objective, and the key results) in order to measure progress in real time and allow for mid-stream adjustments to workflows to tweak misaligned goals.
Another resource that many consultants take advantage of is additional educational opportunities. Many choose to leverage their corporate experience into one of many consulting MBA programs in the United States. An MBA program might be the perfect cap to your resume when it comes to selling your service and creating new business relationships within your industry. MBA holders are well-equipped for the corporate world and have often developed a keen sense for negotiation and project management during their MBA education.
Project management and the tools of the trade are crucial to the skillset of a consultant. Make sure you know where your strengths lie and set yourself apart from the pack!
Identify your target audience and embrace your reservoir of talent.
Project managers and professional consultants know how to lead from the front and work as a supporting team member. Whatever the job calls for, a consultant must be able to execute in a variety of roles and functions. But positioning yourself for these jobs requires you to do some soul searching in order to maximize your sales pitch and closing effectiveness. Consultants must be able to sell themselves as a key asset for small businesses, and even large and medium sized enterprises. While the job market for consulting work is loud and large, there is also quite a sizeable competition vying for the same contracts as you.
Real estate firms like Venterra Realty Management know this all too well, and learning from the real estate field of play is often a great way to improve upon your sales pitch and market presence. Real estate management firms must sell themselves as all-purpose property assets to landlords and tenants alike. Venterra is a skilled negotiator in this regard. In order to build a client list that will provide a valuable profit, real estate managers must be able to demonstrate that they can take on the entire managerial responsibility of a landlord.
The same approach is necessary for your consulting pitch. You must demonstrate that your invaluable leadership and project management capabilities will allow for a hands-off approach. Coming in as a hired gun isn’t always easy, but leveraging your deep reservoir of talent will help you to lead the team members that are assigned to your project in order to achieve great things for the company.
Consulting is a fantastic business opportunity for business professionals who have spent years building their talents and analytical abilities in a variety of industries. In order to grow your own market presence, you will need to learn to sell yourself as a key component of business success and streamlined access to profitability. The path ahead is truly paved with gold for those who can accomplish this.
