What New Consultants Need to Know
1) Pick your best skill and focus on that. When someone has a problem, they want a specialist to fix it not a generalist. The intuitive thing is to try to be all things to all people. From a marketing point of view, it is the worst thing you can do. Put a stake in the ground and stand by it.
2) No one cares about your skills and all the cool things you know how to do. What they care about is some kind of problem they have. Your job is to listen, demonstrate that you understand the problem that you're credible to solve it and how much better they will sleep when the problem has gone away. Period. Once the relationship is established and trust built, other opportunities will surface.
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3) The toughest problem solo consultants face is keeping the pipeline full. Once a consultant has developed some opportunities, they get busy doing the work and when the work is over, there's nothing in the pipeline. This cash flow rollercoaster is devastating. Developing a multi-pillared strategy for reliably generating leads and doing so consistently no matter how busy is of critical importance.
Lanny Goodman is a strategic planning consultant and president of Management Technologies Inc.. Since 1980 he has helped entrepreneurs build highly vital and productive companies. Lanny has developed a unique process to create self-managing companies based on the emerging scientific principles of self-organizing systems. His company works in a very wide variety of industries in the services, manufacturing and not-profit for industries with clients ranging from $1.5m to over $1b in sales. Contact Lanny at www.lannygoodman.com
