I’m in the middle switching careers and I’m seriously considering consultant work. It seems to match the skills I enjoy using most and it sounds very interesting. The problem is that I can only find information on the large companies or independent consultants, neither of which is an option for me. The large companies don’t have offices where I live and I will not be relocating. I don’t have the experience to set up my own shop. So, does anyone have experience working for smaller firms?
What kind or field of consulting work would you be going into?
I worked for a small engineering consluting startup for about a year. We did structural analysis and design work for the ag, automotive, construction equipment, and computer hardware industries. It was not, to say the least, a successful effort; although we did a lot of good work and had a good reputation, our customers were pretty fickle (especially the automotive guys, who are always shopping for the best deal) and our expenses (hardware, software licensing, supercomputer time, travel, et cetera) really did us in. It was a fun row, but very hard; I put in 70-80 hour weeks regularly before the big burn, and that was just to get 40 hours of billable work.
Would I do it again? Not like that. If I were to go back to consulting, I’d want three or four steady customers and I’d work alone or with a trusted partner, buying computer time and licenses by the job rather than as overhead. (That wasn’t an option at the time but most vendors offer that now, albeit at a premium.)
It’s not for the faint-hearted, and whether you’re working for another company or on your own, you are always expected to sell the company and bring in further work, whether you get a commission for it or not. If you’re a lone gunman, then it’s up to you to do the marketing, financing, sales, collection, et cetera. This is the book I referenced most often when trying to decide whether to continue consluting work independently after the company went fuzzy-side up, and my conclusion (based upon the market and my own abilities) was a big, fat “No”. But your situation may be different.
The best advice I can offer you is to learn about your industry–not just the topic on which you are consulting but how work is sold, who you need to go to for approval, et cetera–and keep a level head. Some months money may be flooding in from a big contract, and others will be drier than Deadwood, SD in August. And remember, you’re a conslutant, a whore on the metaphorical business street, so don’t be to proud to pimp yourself.
Stranger
I worked as a software consultant for several years. Maybe about 20 percent of the jobs I landed were actually consulting jobs where the company needed a certain expertise to get a project completed. The other 80 percent were jobs that no employee would take. I had to work on projects that were a year behind schedule, a million dollars over budget, based on obsolete or butchered systems, for a terrible boss that no one would want to work for. I got paid well, and I got a lot of good experience, but it’s not going to be all “consulting” work if you’re working in the consulting field.
My background is mostly in the healthcare industry, although I did some work with manufacturing software implementation. When looking through websites on consulting, I was really attracted to strategic problem solving. I found this primarily on the large company websites, where small teams of people would work together to create solutions for a client. So I guess I’m looking for input on management/strategy consulting instead work that concentrates on a particular field.
My father ran a consulting business for many years.
We worked with many, many people who decided to become independent consultants. Every single one of them failed. I’m talking about 30 or 40 people; the failure rate was 100%, except for my Dad, who did things differently, as I am about to describe.
The pattern of failure was always the same; the person would officially hang out their shingle. Business would be fine for six to eighteen months as work poured in from their contacts. That would start to dry up and within 18 to 30 months their income would drop below a sufficient level to keep themselves going. Then they’d find a real job. Most of them wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did had we not been giving them consulting work.
If you are planning to get into consulting as a career, I strongly suggest you find a large consulting house and get a full time job there. If you want to do it on your own you aren’t ready and it is virtually certain you will fail. But it’s certainly possible, and so I give you my list of Ten Things My Father Did That Allowed Him To Succeed Where Nobody Else Did:
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He didn’t quit his job at first. He incorporated in 1985 and kept his full time job for seven years, using all his vacation and weekends to build his business. This allowed him to build a client base and invest in his company’s name and reputation without having to use consulting revenues to keep the family going.
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He never borrowed a penny. By working on vacations and weekends, the corporation built up a substantial nest egg. When you face uncertain cash flow you don’t want debt payments.
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He invested everything back in the business. No fancy cars or vacations.
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He had a good, honest accountant, a good investments man, and a good lawyer. Trustworthy, experienced men. Their contributions are worth far more than what they charge.
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He incorporated and kept personal and business expenses strictly separate. (Not that he didn’t do things like write off part of the mortgage and such, since the office was in the home, but it was all done above board, in accordance with the tax laws, and on the corporate books. Again, having an honest accountant helps here.)
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He found other consultants with specific skills and offered them to his clients, making his business much larger than it otherwise would have been. the other consultants
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He invested in infrastructure. He built a proper office in the house. He was light years ahead of the competition in terms of computerization.
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Despite #5, he did not get an office. For an independent consultant, spending money on a storefront is basically financial suicide. Do not do it.
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We did not charge the customer for materials, we did not charge for telephone calls, we did not even charge by the hour. All jobs were agreed to prices up front; if it took us longer to do it than we’d planned, we sucked it up. If the customer was not satisfied we worked for free until they were. We never pulled a consultant bait and switch (where you send your best people to the pitch meeting and then assign your biggest goobers to the actual work.) He wouldn’t even charge for dinner if he could get home from a trip by 6. We were strictly, almost ridiculously ethical.
#9 may sound like I’m preening, but I’m not; it was an astoundingly successful business strategy. The sad fact is that Dilbert’s right; most consultants will add on any charge they can conceivably justify, hide costs, tack on extra hours, undersell, etc. By adopting a super-ethical approach he began to differentiate himself from the competition. Consequently, we looked incredibly good by comparison just because we didn’t try to screw everyone. Our repeat business was incredible - the exact thing other consultants could not get. That repeat business was of vastly more worth than little screwings would have been.
- He got out of soft “management consulting” stuff and developed more and more actual technical skills and resources. His push was always towards delivering services that had tangible cash value.
If you want to just do “Strategic planning” you will fail. Period, full stop, end of story. 99,999 out of 100,000 people who try that end up finding other work. Companies are not going to pay you big bucks to deliver platitudes and use consultant words like “paradigm.” Those days are long gone. You need to look for what companies are going to need in the future and learn that and work on delivering THOSE solutions.
It is the nature of my job that I visit 50-100 different businesses every year and work with thier senior management. These people are getting more careful with their money, not less. You’d better be able to show why spending $1000 a day on you will improve the bottom line. Not to ask the obvious question here, but if your clients are running a business, why would you be better at “Strategic planning” than they are?
If you cannot describe what it is you plan on doing for companies other than “strategic problem solving” you are not ready to be a consultant.
Continuing with the negative tone of this thread…
This sounds like what Arthur Anderson used to do. I worked around AA people on a couple projects, they were MUCH more concerned about the politics of a project than the technical details. One of their favorite tricks was to weed out the resistance in the client company, have them fired or transferred, then replace them with AA people. AA was a disease. I got to a point where I wouldn’t accept a project if AA was anywhere near it.
But that’s all sour grapes from my past. You might want to ask people that had “your” consulting firm work for them, and see what they say. It would probably be best to ask in an anonymous situation, like in a newsgroup.
Coming at it from the other direction I’ve just closed the consulting arm of my company to take a perm role (I’m changing careers and want to get more experience in project management before I go back to consulting in a year or two, and the company has well-established export and game businesses to keep it going).
Most of what I am saying will echo RickJay.
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Don’t be too proud to take whatever work is going. (I know two consultancies which started at the same time as us and failed because the people in charge would not take projects under £5K, and only wanted bluechip work). I filled in the gaps between large projects with data entry, 5 page websites etc. The important thing to do is to build up a portfolio of satisfied customers who can give you references. Its also to keep the cash coming.
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Use whatever contacts you have - I had worked for a media company and used my contacts there to get business from other media companies, which built repeat business. Do you have any healthcare contacts you could use in this way?
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Don’t overspend - if you are looking at getting something for the company make sure you really need it. Don’t buy top of the line IT equip either, it depreciates too quickly.
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Before you even think of starting make sure you have enough money to live on for the first six months, preferably a year. Don’t take money out of the company to live on. Instead reinvest it, or hold it to smooth out income variations.
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Get a good accountant. Our first one wasn’t, and nearly sunk the company in the first year. Our current one has saved the company more than he charges.
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Don’t give up your day job until the company is established, and has repeat customers.
I’m UKbased, so most of the specific advice I could give may not be relevant. Be careful of the large consultancies - they may be good to get experience in, but they aren’t wonderful to work for, and don’t always know their field very well.
Good luck whatever you decide to do.
Tirial
Sounds like you are looking to work for a small firm, not set up your own practice.
I have worked for a variety of consulting firms large and small for about 8 years now - supply chain management, litigation consulting, management consulting, ecommerce, etc. Basically no matter what kind of consulting you do, they all have a number of things in common:
-Expect to work long hours and frequent travel
-Most firms aren’t wonderful to work for. You are usually at the beck and call of every manager or partner who wants you to work on something at 6:00 pm.
-Most usually aren’t managed very well.
-Consultants tend to be a superficially social bunch. Most work is team oriented and we often socialize outside of work - team dinners, happy hours, etc (mostly because our schedule prevents us from maintaining relationships outside of work). I say ‘superficially’ because they always feel forced to me and are rarely maintained for any length of time once people leave the firm.
-Most work is actually pretty tedious. Really it’s only the senior folks who whisper insitefull advice to CEOs. The lowly staff consultants mostly generate spreadsheets and powerpoint slides at 1am.
At my office, we call them senior managers and partners. Not the spreadsheets, but the powerpoint slides. Slide presentations are a crutch to these people. They can’t say hello without a slide.
Don’t be a consultant if you don’t like marketing or sales. That will be why I’ll shortly (when my pension vests) be considering leaving.
My experience with consulting is that it quickly becomes a lot like being unemployed.
Don’t give up the day job, or looking for one, while you search for clients.
I recommend the book Flawless Consulting by Block. He explains how to take on a consulting role as a career or as a staff person in a company.
The reason consultants use tools like Powerpoint, Viseo, MindManager or other graphical software is that it makes it very easy to tell a compelling story (consultant-speak for the advice you are giving your client). Basically what consultants do is take massive amounts of data, analyze it and then simplify it so that people can make decisions.
I actually like marketing and sales (generally at some point, your focus will shift to business development). People who want to be strictly analytical generally don’t last long in consulting.
For clarity, I am not opening my own business. I’m fairly young and recently relocated, so I’m definitely not in any position to sell myself as a consultant. Thank you for all the input though, because now I definitely know I won’t consider doing so in the future (when I’m more settled and experienced).
The larger consulting companies are not an option for me (due to location) and most of what I have read about them is not very positive either. I was hoping there might be a market of smaller companies (20-50 employees) that do consulting work, but would not have the bad culture of the larger companies.
Since this does not seem to be a very promising avenue, however, does anyone have some suggestions on what might be a good career field to use problem solving and critical thinking? I’ve spent the last three years in medical research, but the work was very inconsistent and mostly far below my potential. I really appreciate all the responses I have gotten so far.
I would seriously consider working for Siemens. I worked for them a couple times as a “consultant”, they treated me well and I got to travel all over Europe.
Woo! The Big Question!
I’m not making fun of you–at least, not any more than I do of myself–as I ask myself this question all the time. (More disturbingly, co-workers sometimes ask me, “What are you doing here?” I’m not sure if it’s because they think I’m underutilized or because they want to get rid of me. 
)
I think, in general, most work is below any given employee’s potential; not because employers like to keep you down (though that does sometimes happen) but because your true potential is not utilized in any one job, unless you get the gig as The Professor on Gilligan’s Island[sup]*[/sup]. Personally, I’ve given up on having a job that stretches my intellectual muscles and rely on my distractions to do so instead. And, on occasion, those feed back into the job or at least near to it. Although my nominal job is CADD monkey/designer/occaional structural analyst, I’m also the guy people go to for:
[ul]
[li]Organizing and copyediting their business correspondence,[/li][li]writing Perl scripts to parse through data files,[/li][li]providing off-hand trivia or research on legacy booster systems,[/li][li]pawing through my extensive library of reference books,[/li][li]obtaining useless facts about modern physics and movie trivia,[/li][li]reading sardonic comments about and satire of the latest management idiocy, and[/li][li]Hi, Opal![/li][/ul]
As for a specific answer to your question…I don’t really know. I’d advise not to expect any one job to fully exploit your potential. I’m currently reading What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson; I haven’t decided whether I’d recommend it or not (he’s not one of my favorite writers, either in terms of his topics or his prose) but it does have a lot of anecdotes of various people searching for their “place” in employment and life, and what I’ve gotten from it so far is that most people–even those comfortable and fulfilled by their work–still wonder if they shouldn’t be doing something different.
Stranger
I’ve always been highly suspicious of The Professor and his motives, but I’ll save that discussion for another post.
Agreed, which is why I’ll likely soon be leaving. My boss doesn’t want to lose me, but the only way to move up is to take on larger marketing and sales roles, which I don’t like. Still, I’ll have lasted long enough to vest, and to leave on a positive note.
I’ll second what everyone is saying.
I spent about three years doing IT consulting for a smallish (less than 100 employee firm). Back then, IT consulting was great - got paid when I wasn’t working
However, serious consulting is a lot of hours. A lot of bullshit work. A lot of being scapegoated. And, yes, a lot of sales. You HAVE to be LIKEABLE. Its as much a customer service job as anything else. “Would you like fries with that” but for more than $7 an hour. And now a days its a lot rougher.
Most people work far below their potential. Its a fact of life. You may be best off at a smaller firm where you get to do a “jack of all trades” job. I’d look to the firm - small, enterprenurial - and not the job to find what you want.
Thanks everyone for the input. I’ve been using What Colors Is Your Parachute? and going through all of their exercises. Unfortunately for most of my interests there is either: a) no job market or b) market is completely saturated. :rolleyes:
Anyway, I’ll keep searching and see what I come up with. I did an information interview this morning that gave me some ideas I hadn’t considered before. It’s back in medical research, but a different aspect of it (clinical vs. epidemiology) and in a field i’m more interetsed in.
In the meantime, I continue to rely on SDMB to keep me entertained and informed.
Thanks everyone!
A little late, but a few from the archives:
How do you become a consultant?
stuckinthemiddle
Consultants: how do you deal with a client who…
sunfish
What Should I Charge (Consultant)?
Heart On My Sleeve
Help! Consulting Fees Question
Heart On My Sleeve
Sales folk: SPIN technique (aka consultative selling)…your knowledge/opinion?
Tomcat
Dangerosa is right. A lot of consulting is [MISTRAL SHOW VOICE]Shine ya shoes massa? Reformat ya spreadsheet!? Yassah! Tote dat barge…capture dat best practices!![/MISTRAL SHOW VOICE] You have a lot of bosses in consulting - your team leader, your engagement manager, partners, clients, your performance manager, etc. A lot of the work also seems mundane and tedious at times.