Transitioning
This blog post was created from Everything Business Consulting podcast episode 69, How to Transition into Business Consulting, Coaching or Advising. To view the episode page, click here.
Are you thinking about taking the leap into the world of business consulting? Well, we’re going to talk about becoming a business consultant and we’re going to bridge the gap between where you are now and what you need to do to take the leap.
What is transitioning?
A transition is a process or period of changing when you’re going from one state or condition to another. For example, you might be coming from being employed, self-employed, owning a business, working in corporate, working for a salary, and want to move into consulting. We are talking about changing your current situation and employment to becoming a successful business consultant.
6 things to consider and prepare when transitioning
1. Prepare - assets
To be a business consultant, you’ll need to gather some assets first to set you up:
A computer, notebook, or laptop
Printer
Mobile phone or landline
Sometimes a car.
2. Prepare - marketing
Think about how you will market to your possible clients, and consider how you will brand yourself, both offline and online. Offline options for marketing include business cards, brochures, signwriting on your car perhaps. Online options can involve a website, which can be as simple as an online brochure for your consulting.
For your online marketing, utilize Google My Business. GMB has the ability to have reviews and testimonials, which is useful if you were to walk in the door and someone was to Google your consulting business, they would see the positive reviews and know that you can be trusted. If you’re starting out as a business consultant, you could look into getting reviews and testimonials from family members, friends, or associates in other capacities that aren’t exactly business consulting. You could’ve worked with them in a professional way, or given them business advice.
You also want to have a clean, professional-looking LinkedIn and Facebook profile. We don’t want someone looking you up and seeing that you’re out partying every single weekend. It’s just not a good professional look, especially if you want to be in this sort of profession.
3. Consider - tools
As a business consultant, you’re going to have a few clients and having tools to help make sure that nothing slips through the cracks and all the details are retained in your system. At a minimum, you’ll need an invoicing tool, because you need to be able to invoice your clients and it also needs to look professional. Julius Bloem, ConsultX Partner uses Google Suite, and David Thexton, Founder of ConsultX currently uses Microsoft Office but is soon converting to Google Suite because it is free and a better system to use.
Ideally, you'll also have a CRM, customer relationship management to retain customer information. Some further tools which are incredibly useful for business consultants is a business diagnostic tool (like ConsultX’s profit leakage calculator), a system to produce business plans, a task manager, and a management reporting tool and software so you can accurately report on a monthly basis as to where the business is going, what results it’s had in the past and measuring those against the forward forecast.
One of these tools I want to go into further detail is the business diagnostic tool and why it is important for a consultant. It is able to diagnose our prospect's business before they become a client and it's a piece of software that enables us to find out what's going on in his or her business and where the key points are, where the problems and the challenges are coming from.
4. Consider - training, certification, and qualifications
Business consulting requires no prerequisites but having some training, certification, qualifications or experience can help you to improve businesses. Further learning can also give you a foundation and framework to be able to work with businesses, as well as increasing your confidence.
There are a few companies that do this sort of training like ConsultX. It’s a system and training that takes you right from the start on how to acquire clients through to the business improvement process. Kind of like an A to Z process and education system.
Other places where you can give yourself a self-taught education around business consulting is through podcasts, like our podcast, Everything Business Consulting. Which is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, we also post each episode to our YouTube channel.
The final place you can give yourself a free or very low-cost preparation is through books. David Thexton’s favorite, The E-Myth is a great example of how useful books can be to help increase your knowledge on business consulting. It is written in story form and goes through the process that a self-employed business person goes through before they start their business. It runs through the trials and tribulations that a lady, Susan, goes through to start her bakery and make it successful. She then brings on a business consultant or coach and describes what follows. The E-Myth is an example of what you will experience in the business marketplace.
5. Consider - getting clients
This is your step when you become a consultant, is getting clients and replacing your income as fast as possible. Everybody knows lots of people, you know family members, people that you work with, self-employed people, Bob the guys that owns the mower center downtown, etc.
You can look for people who can give you strategic referrals like an accountant could give you two or three referrals a month, and a bank manager could give you four or five a month of businesses who are entering financial difficulties. There are many different professions that fit under the affiliates umbrella includes accountants, bank managers, lawyers, merger and acquisition specialists, all sorts of people who work with businesses and who could give you those referrals.
Another place to look for potential clients is through networking and business associations. There are many people in each one and you can find yourself swimming in a pool of very, very good prospects. As a member yourself, they are easy to approach and if you do a speech, you could find people at the bottom of the stairs off the stage waiting to speak with you.
To find out more on client acquisition, visit our podcast episode 14 of Everything Business Consulting.
6. Consider - your current position
Will your current employer allow you to transition from where you are now to business consulting?
In a lot of cases, you won’t be going into competition with them, so most will allow you to transition and hand over your current role to your replacement. This makes it a lot easier for your current employer to have less effect on their business and it gives you the ability to gently transition to consulting.
When transitioning to business consulting, you have three options which will be further explained in the next section. You could start immediately and give it all your attention and effort, or you could transition slower and protect your income a little more, but it means you might not get the same aggressive start.
Some questions to think about are:
How long is your ideal transition?
Is it going to be really quick?
Will your employer allow it to be quick, or do they want to drag it out so they can wring every little bit out of you?
Does that suit your situation?
Would it be possible for your current employer or business to become a client of yours?
Three ways to transition
Immediate transition - 35-50% of people
Immediate transition is really no transition at all, it’s essentially finishing your job on Friday and starting consulting on Monday. These are the people who have been thinking of transitioning for a long, long time. They have a bit of an idea as to what to do, they’ve listened to our podcasts, and they’re pretty much pre-trained almost. They know who their potential clients will be, people they may have already met or know of, or they’ve done the research and made a lead list.
Another important aspect to think about when transitioning is your income, these people who transition immediately might have, need to have, or feel like they need to have some money saved up. Because when you finish on that Friday, your income stops. So these people might have some savings or might be getting a big payout, or they could if been made redundant, which they would get a redundancy payment which could hold them over till their consulting income starts coming in.
Prepared transition - 30-40% of people
These people typically do their training, research, and their setup after hours. So they keep on working for their existing employer for a while and do their training/research/setup with ConsultX and then they are ready for a swift transition to becoming a business consultant.
Long-term transition - 20-25% of people
The idea here is to slowly transition over a period of time from your current situation to business consulting. These people are a little bit risk-averse and would negotiate with their employer to train your replacement over one to two months. This means you can decrease your hours currently and still getting paid. Of course, your employer could see what you’re doing and this is a good way for you to open the door to becoming their business consultant once you’ve finished 100%.
Summing up transitioning
Immediate transition, in other words, jump into it. Finish on Friday, start on Monday, most people do that, with maybe a little bit of pre-work being done. The second one is a prepared transition where you prepare yourself, you do your training, you make lists of prospects and things like that, and you're preparing yourself and then you jump. And then of course long-term transition, which is slowly moving from where you are now to where you want to get to. It might be one or two months, you might be working with your employer, you might be training the replacement for you, but what it does do is it protects your income, right until you're actually consulting and you're earning a consulting fee.