How to Overcome the Odds and Be a Successful Consultant 

Exhausted reporters covering forest fires invariably point to signs of rebirth, small green shoots emerging from the devastation. The appearance of independent consultants from the wreckage of downsizing and artificial intelligence implementation is a similar sign of hopefulness. 

There’s a surfeit of meaningful advice out there to help those now in the hunt. Search “how to be a good consultant,” and you are presented with a bromidic barrage, including such Captain Obvious advice as being a good listener, deploying critical thinking, and establishing trusted relationships.

According to the author having been a consultant for a decade and a half, plying his strategic, marketing and branding wares, he has some hard-won advice to share, both in terms of how to build a pipeline, and what the best project work looks like.

1. The How: Don’t expect, expand.  Are you expecting consulting projects from those you have worked with in the past, including those you’ve supported? Good luck with that illusion of reciprocity. The perception of debt is usually one-sided. No one wants to admit that their success isn’t attributable to their own celestial greatness.  Don’t stew when the work you believe you are entitled to doesn’t come knocking. Instead, expand your network using proven techniques.  Entrepreneurship is a muscle that needs to be developed, especially if you were cosseted in the safety of a large but stunningly un-beneficent enterprise.
2. The How: Write deep and pointy proposals.  Proposal writing at its best is an act of imagination. As you use it to problem-solve, speak in a natural voice that captures your personality and doesn’t default to corporate speak. Express a strong point of view. Don’t hide behind wishy-washy qualifiers and caveats. Think of a proposal as an early form of a recommendation. Give prospective clients a walloping sense of the value you bring, and what it will be like to work with you. 
3. The How: Don’t bend your experience to fit, when it doesn’t.  Often, you won’t have spot-on domain experience. Rather than contorting yourself into an untenable position by making forced, unconvincing connections between previous work and a potential client, demonstrate the power of not being caught in industry shibboleths.
4. The What: Start with a hypothesis, but a malleable one.  You’re an expert, right? Act like one. Develop a hypothetical mapping of the problem and the solution. The same applies whether your consulting gig is marketing, supply chain, human resources, or finance.  Somebody internally couldn’t meet the challenge, or they were too busy, and now they are turning to you. You are the bright shiny outside object that you hated so much when you were inside the system. Seize that window of permission.  Of course, your hypothesis may change but don’t be over-directed by the client.
5. The What: Maintain your half-sider status.  You must know enough about the company and the competition to speak with the authority of an insider, but you must simultaneously maintain the wide-eyed ignorance of the outsider.   Your superpower is something that no one inside the walls of your client possesses: the ability to ask the big dumb question that is an insight in disguise.
6. The What: Ignore the ‘next phase.’  The joke is that a consultant starts selling the second phase of a project on the day that the first one starts.  Don’t do that. The best way to stay engaged is to avoid the obvious “you need me around” ploy. Clients are smart. They are onto that game.  Make it clear that you want to solve the problem, leave the roadmap in your client’s hands, and let them follow the GPS instructions you’ve built. Plus, to my earlier point, it’s best to expand your client base than be too narrow.