An Insider's Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice

An Insider's Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice
Author: Bruce L. KATCHER Ph.D.
Publisher: AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0814414370

Whether you’re a beginner just starting up a consulting practice, or a veteran looking for ways to invigorate your existing business, An Insider’s Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice is an invaluable resource. Featuring real stories from consultants in diverse industries, the book offers simple yet powerful ways to: Identify a market and narrow your focus • Make a smooth transition from employee to independent consultant • Sell effectively even if you’ve never sold before • Establish visibility through speaking, writing, and networking • Build credibility by leveraging the credibility of others • Set prices based on value • Develop a marketing strategy and divide your time between marketing and delivering your services • Keep plenty of work in your pipeline • Adapt and thrive in any market condition • And much more Complete with the results of an original survey of 200 successful independent consultants, this handy guide provides the kind of real-life advice you need to build a thriving business.

Consulting Success

Consulting Success
Author: Michael Zipursky
Publisher: Consulting Success
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9781775041115

How can you take your skills and expertise and package and present it to become a successful consultant? There are proven time-tested principles, strategies, tactics and best-practices the most successful consultants use to start, run and grow their consulting business. Consulting Success teaches you what they are. In this book you'll learn: - How to position yourself as a leading expert and authority in your marketplace - Effective marketing and branding materials that get the attention of your ideal clients - Strategies to increase your fees and earn more with every project - The proposal template that has generated millions of dollars in consulting engagements - How to develop a pipeline of business and attract ideal clients - Productivity secrets for consultants including how to get more done in one week than most people do in a month - And much, much more

The Everything Start Your Own Consulting Business Book

The Everything Start Your Own Consulting Business Book
Author: Dan Ramsey
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2009-10-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1605509914

Consultants work in all fields. They operate from offices and from home, work for investment firms and as personal trainers, or have expertise as accountants and wedding planners. The independence, flexibility, and potential income it brings make for an exciting and satisfying career. And it’s an increasingly popular one for highly skilled, motivated professionals who’ve been laid off in this unstable economy. This guide features tips and tricks to help beat the competition, including how to: Set—and keep—personal and financial goals Organize important paperwork Price and market specific services Create advertising and publicity plans Grow a business, from finding a partner to managing employees Minimize and eliminate business risks Consultants are paid well for their advice—if they know how to operate a successful business. With advice from experts in a variety of areas, this valuable guide helps you create the business of your dreams!

Start Your Own Consulting Business

Start Your Own Consulting Business
Author: Entrepreneur magazine
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2014-05-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1613082673

Leading entrepreneurs into the multi-billion dollar consulting industry, the experts at Entrepreneur show you how to capitalize on your talents to help others achieve their business goals. Coached by experts, learn to define your market, find and keep clients, obtain licenses, set rates, monitor cash flow, hire staff, prepare contracts, agreements, and reports, and more. Includes new interviews with successful consultants, updated answers to frequently asked questions, and a completely refreshed list of the top 20 consulting businesses.

The Consulting Way

The Consulting Way
Author: Erik Gausel
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2013-08-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475998090

If you want to become a better consultant or are seeking to learn more about entering the consulting field, this guidebook offers the perfect starting point. Whether youre considering your options after college, looking to switch careers or already working at a consulting firm, youll find a trove of invaluable information here. You can learn how to develop interpersonal skills that can help you succeed; improve your project management skills; approach the problem-solving process; present recommendations; and communicate clearly. Not everyone succeeds as a consultant, but its not because they arent smart enough. It usually boils down to a misunderstanding of the consulting rolebeing unaware of what to do and when to do it. In this business, timing can mean everything. Discover tips and strategies that can help you succeed as a consultant in this guide to consulting essentials. Its time to separate yourself from competitors and further your career with The Consulting Way.

The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients

The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients
Author: David A. Fields
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-03-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1683501659

This deeply insightful guide to understanding what clients really want is “an indispensable resource for consultants” (Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Never Eat Alone). Independent consulting is a potentially lucrative enterprise—but the reality seldom matches the dream. Most solo consultants and boutique consulting firms are perpetually within six months of bankruptcy due to the sputtering unreliability of their new business engines. The problem, according to international consulting expert David A. Fields, is twofold: 1) lack of a consistent, proven plan, and 2) fundamental misunderstanding about what clients want in a consultant. Fields, who has helped hundreds of consultants and boutique firms worldwide build profitable, sustainable practices, replaces the typical consultant’s mindset of emphasizing expertise and differentiated processes with a focus on building relationships, engendering trust, and solving clients’ existing problems. In The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients, Fields synthesizes his decades of experience into a step-by-step approach to winning more projects from more clients at higher fees. From nuts-and-bolts business advice and tactics to a deeply insightful breakdown of the human side of a very human profession, Fields, named one of Advertising Age magazine’s “Marketing Top 100,” delivers a comprehensive guidebook that is at once highly approachable and satisfyingly detailed. “If I could have just one book on client strategy, this book would be it.” —Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Triggers

Consulting Start-Up and Management

Consulting Start-Up and Management
Author: Gail V. Barrington
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-10-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1412987091

Looking to start up your own research and evaluation consultancy? For almost 20 years, Gail V. Barrington has run popular workshops to help professional researchers and evaluators determine if they have what it takes to succeed as consultants. This book makes that helpful guidance, and more, available to a wider audience. Barrington shows readers how to get started, set fees, find work, manage time and money, set up an ownership structure and business systems, manage contracts, and work with subcontractors and staff. With Barrington's advice and encouragement, independent practitioners have the roadmap to success!"I would highly recommend it to anyone starting a consulting career. The author has truly singled out the most important lessons to be passed on, both of the practical type and of those related to consultancy."-George Grob, Center for Public Program Evaluation"This book addresses a big and important gap in the evaluation literature. It provides a clear and concise account of what evaluators and applied researchers need to know in order to succeed in independent consulting practice." -Stewart Donaldson, Claremont Graduate University

Consulting on the Inside, 2nd ed.

Consulting on the Inside, 2nd ed.
Author: Beverly Scott
Publisher: Association for Talent Development
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1607289121

Are you an internal consultant—a staff member who serves in a consultative role within your organization? Then you need this hands-on guidebook to help you better understand your role and improve your performance. Whether you're a change agent, trusted advisor, or someone who serves in varying capacities, it's important to design your job, develop a formal agreement, and build your practice. Consulting on the Inside provides a solid background for internal consultants and serves as a roadmap for cultivating a successful career. You'll learn how to: maintain an outsider's objectivity while applying an insider's knowledge of the organization build relationships but be up-front about challenges and issues design your role to fit the client's needs and the organizational situation handle roadblocks and deal effectively with difficult clients market your consulting services within the client organization. You'll find a thorough examination of the eight phases of the consulting process, a comprehensive analysis of the differences between internal and external consultants, and success stories demonstrating the personal qualities you need to build trust and relationships. Consulting on the Insidealso provides a complete toolbox for getting the job done, including tips and techniques, checklists, forms, a sample hiring agreement, and ready-to-use agendas...

Information Consulting

Information Consulting
Author: Irene Wormell
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2011-10-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1780632851

Information Consulting presents a closer look at what makes information consultants successful and how they develop a productive relationship with their clients. While most of the books on this subject area are providing the experiences of information consulting veterans on 'how do you really do it?', the aim of this book is focused on exploring the nature of information management consulting. This includes the task of the advice-and-guidance variety, such as helping clients to analyze and solve problems or to meet opportunities with the element of 'What should I do?'. The authors have used their extensive international and professional networks to take the challenge of letting the clients speak about their experiences and expectations in hiring information consultants. - Unique client perspective: managers and clients talk about their motivation, experiences and advice in the utilization of information consultants in recent case studies conducted by authors - Current information and guidance based on the authors' wide-ranging practical experiences and empirical data (through interviews and questionnaires) collected from several countries - 'top five' list of consultants ́ qualities is presented

The Seven Principles of Professional Services

The Seven Principles of Professional Services
Author: Thomas McGrath
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780986210716

This book details the prerequisite knowledge every consultant must master when delivering complex professional services. Coupled with the author's and his industry colleagues' real life examples of success and failure, these principles provide every consultant with actionable guidance to improve their service quality. Professional services consultants are walking a dangerous high wire between the success of their customers and the ongoing success of their firm. To maintain balance and walk this tightrope successfully, a consultant needs a strong set of principles that can be relied upon in the heat of a customer engagement. Through detailed analysis of his own experience as a consultant, a customer, and a professional services executive, Shane describes in detail the seven principles of professional services that have led him and others to repeated success. If you have been a consultant for ten minutes or ten years, this book will help you assess how well you deliver your service today and enable you to identify ways to elevate it in the future. Doing so will benefit your customer, your firm and your career.