Start by asking the people around you for feedback. Consider asking the following questions to a colleague, fellow student, or family member:. And what if you want to build and hone these soft skills? There is only one thing you can do really: practice, practice, practice. Get comfortable with failure. Wallow in self-pity? Not all will be the right ones. Seek out experienced resources, such as your mentor or your boss, to understand where you went wrong and how you can fix it.
Lee to sign us up for a leadership development program at his firm. For the entire duration of the meeting, I tried to convince him to hire us by showcasing our previous achievements.
Today was all about getting acquainted and asking the right questions, so Mr. Lee could decide if we are worth his time and if he would like to meet us again and further the conversation. Your focus was on sales. If my boss had not taken the time to debrief, I would have never understood why we did not hear of Mr.
Lee again. Meetings turned out to be very different from then on. You have to be patiently ambitious. As a consultant, your job is simply to help people bridge the gap. The value you bring to the table is the ability to help someone move from their current state to their desired state.
At this point, you can either keep investing your free time and capital in guessing, experimenting, and hoping something works OR you can bring in someone with a proven system for scaling small businesses Everybody wants to reach their desired state.
If you can help them bridge the gap, whether it looks like scaling a business, losing weight, or overcoming porn addiction, you can build a highly profitable consulting business. Your goal is find a specific, significant challenge that people are ALREADY facing and then become an expert at helping them overcome that challenge. And as long as there are people wanting to solve that problem, there will be a lucrative demand for your services. Often, the value you provide will come from personal experience.
In some cases, outside views are the most accurate. As long as you can help real people overcome a challenge, you can get paid as a consultant regardless of how you develop your method.
Because they have devoted their entire career to specializing in the ONE thing we most want help with. The life coach may be fantastic. They might be really good at what they do. But there is zero chance they are better at helping people lose weight than someone whose career is focused on that specific area of expertise. You will never become really good at helping everyone, but you can become amazing at helping one specific type of person.
When you are at the top of your niche, generalist consultants are no longer your competition. Prospects will literally beg you to work with them at any price, and you get to pick and choose who you work with. Instead of needing to deliver a time-consuming service, you will be paid simply to offer your advice, and you will get paid significantly more than competing service providers, because YOU are the go-to expert in your specific area. The first thing to think about is the industries you know about or are interested in.
What are you most familiar with thanks to your career and past experiences in general? Are there any niches or areas that you have always been really fascinated with and explored on an amateur basis?
Grab a pen and paper, and write down five industries, niches, or groups you know right now. Examples: plumbers, newlywed couples, young women experiencing binge eating issues, accountants, etc. What do real people in these niches want and need? What are the main challenges they are struggling with? What are the questions they are always asking? You will likely need to get outside of your own head in order to figure this out.
The third thing to think about is your own set of skills and talents. What skills do you have? What are you talented at and could master fairly quickly? What are some things you have wanted to try and feel like you could pick up easily? Now I can see the niche. But I need the skills to actually help the plumbers get clients. There are so many available options, and starting a consulting business with no experience is not out of the question. You can teach yourself how to solve the problem by learning online lead generation.
Or you could find someone else who is an expert at online lead generation and learn from them. You could even outsource the solution to an online marketing agency and charge a markup. The overlap of these three things is your niche. This is where you are most potent and most powerful. A lot a people believe the most important things in business are the skills you have. We live in a generation where people are going to university for like 20 years and getting all of these different letters to put behind their name.
They have no real-world skills, and no way to take their own destiny by the horns. And as a final note, how you communicate the value you bring is very important. The whole point of choosing a niche and solving those problems is that you have a specific value proposition to offer, so be sure to communicate your new value proposition in specific.
A lot of new business owners have no game plan for making this happen. Quite frankly, this is a really horrible, emotionally draining place to be. If you want to run a successful consulting business, you must use a proven, rinse and repeat process for attracting and converting clients. Here at Consulting. Every piece of this process involves a different skill set that has to be mastered or outsourced to someone who knows what they are doing.
Out of that people, people sign up for my training, and after watching my value video, 16 schedule a call with me and fill out my survey. No guessing required. I know exactly how my business is functioning and I can get clients on demand.
See how powerful that is? How about double that? We had one student at Consulting. Right now, Facebook is the number one place to get clients for your consulting business. Facebook allows you to select the location, ages, and genders you want to target. You can even select their job title and general interests.
They arrive at our landing page. A landing page is a website page designed to convince incoming visitors to give you their contact information.
This page should serve as an extension of your Facebook ad. If we invited plumbers looking to get more clients in the ad, we should make our promise on the landing page relevant to plumbers looking for more clients. You are simply going to offer the visitor something free in exchange for their contact info. Since we want as many people as possible to give us their info, I like to keep it really easy, and just ask for their email address. Is your goal in becoming a consultant to: replace your current job with an eye to return to paid employment if the right opportunity arose?
What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are the things only you can do? This can include: determining start-up costs forecasting operating expenses calculating your hourly rate calculate your daily breakeven point. As part of your marketing plan ask yourself: Who are your clients? Does your consultancy lend itself to both the public and private sectors? What sales and marketing strategies will you put in place to get your foot in the door with prospects?
Who do you know who can introduce you to your ideal clients? Get to know your potential clients and their needs before accepting the work. Think back to your business plan. Have the right systems in place when preparing quotes.
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