Practice What You Preach: Building and Gaining Credibility with Clients
Jinfo Blog

By Lesley Robinson

Item

I would love to say that I set out on my independent consultancy career fully equipped with a 5-year strategic plan, divided into short-, medium- and long-term achievable goals. To be fair to myself, I had written a makeshift business plan, but on reflection, not much of it was grounded in reality. I left my final, permanent full-time post knowing that I had a short-term contract offer on the table and that was enough to help me make the decision to jump from payee to ... full insecurity.

This contract was going to occupy me for three days per week for at least six months. This allowed me to achieve three key goals:

• Make the leap from secure employment
  
  
• Get myself up and running in my home office
  
  
• Give me two days per week to focus on marketing myself and trying to secure further clients.
  
  

One aspect I was clear about from day one was that I wanted to be a 'true' consultant and hunt for my own food. A significant part of my background is grounded in management consultancy and so my own business model was to go out and build my own client base rather than work through agencies. I had won my initial contract from my own contacts and that set me off on the right foot. There is nothing as motivating or exhilarating as winning a contract through your own efforts.

Building expertise

There are many ways to build expertise. The key ways I have done this are by: taking on challenging projects, ensuring I keep up with industry trends, keeping abreast of developments in business management more generally, joining relevant committees and getting involved with conferences. It is true that you learn something from every project, whether it is an ideal project or not. You could be improving your project management skills, learning how to present ideas, refining the proposal process, managing clients better or trying out a new way to negotiate your fees. There are so many aspects to finding, winning and delivering projects that it has to be a continuous learning process.

Early in my independent career, I was keen to push the boundaries and take on projects that were slightly out of my comfort zone. This approach really helped me to build expertise. As an example, an early project I took on was for a firm of architects. It was a review of their national information service, which was spread across their seven UK offices. The project involved working with the information teams, running workshops with the service users, interviewing the board of directors and other senior managers, and carrying out some benchmarking with other architect firms. Apart from having a microscopic knowledge of architecture, I hadn't run that many workshops before, was working with information staff who didn't want the review and was asked to make recommendations that would effectively rewrite some of the core business processes.

I tried to position myself as an external business advisor who could see issues from different angles and who would consult widely within the business to deliver the best outcome. This inclusive approach helped to get a range of stakeholders to buy into the final solutions and also taught me a vast amount about how to manage a whole range of people with different expectations.

Staying ahead

As your experience in consulting grows, it is vital to keep up to date with industry trends. An effective way of doing this is by attending conferences and seminars. This helps you to discover the best speakers in your specialist area and hear them in action. Conferences are also great places to network with people; not only your peers but potential clients.

Cost can be a prohibitive factor in attending conferences, and a way to conquer this is to become a speaker yourself. You can start small by facilitating a workshop session which may run alongside the main conference, offering a master class in a topic you are passionate about and then build up to chairing a panel debate or giving a full paper to the main conference. This pushes the boundaries of your comfort zone further, but it is an excellent marketing tool, an effective way of being seen and heard, adds credibility to your brand and positions you as an expert.

Joining relevant committees is also a useful way of staying ahead and getting involved in your industry and beyond. I am a member of the Central London Branch Committee of the Institute of Directors, which is the biggest branch in the UK with 10,000 members. This is invaluable for meeting a much wider range of people and really understanding broader business issues. As part of this committee, I organise several events and seminars each year, which brings me into contact with politicians, chief executive officers of the FTSE 100 organisations, entrepreneurs and a whole host of people who run their own small businesses like me. You can't beat that for networking, exposure and excitement.

Committee involvement takes time and energy, but it is a hugely rewarding experience. It also teaches you how to interact with different kinds of people. On a consulting assignment, I will be talking to a cross-section of people in the organisation such as those in IT, marketing and finance, as well as the core staff, support staff, the CEO and the board. Meeting and talking to such a wide range of people at a non-threatening industry association event can really help you to understand and be aware of the different perspectives people take and the issues that executives face.

Recognition

'Oh yes, I have heard of her.' They may not be sure how they have heard of you or when, but if your name rings a bell with someone, your marketing has worked. The most powerful marketing tool is being seen and heard. There is nothing like experiencing the real thing - apparently. If people see me speak or run a workshop and they like what they hear, they are more likely to keep me in mind for when they need consultancy help. Of course, this can work the opposite way if someone does not like what they hear. It's a gamble but it mostly works in my favour. After all, people buy people. We are all more likely to buy something from a person we have seen and heard and like, rather than someone who may look good on paper but is an unknown quantity. It is very subjective but it gets the doors open.

Once you are through that door, of course, the client now expects you to live up to your reputation. Your hard work in making yourself known, seen and heard has paid off, but clients are now very sophisticated buyers. There used to be a certain aura around consultancy, but that has now faded and clients want much more input from their external advisors. In such a competitive world, clients want you to be able to help them benchmark themselves against their immediate competitors. For example, a medium-sized law firm hired me to review both their information and library services and their records management processes. In both projects, they asked questions like:

• How are we doing against our competitors?
  
  
• How far behind or ahead are we in current best practice?
  
  
• What is the most widely used technology or software out there that can help us to deliver our information more efficiently?
  
  

These questions take us beyond 'How is my information service doing?' and focus on how the vital information and records functions contribute to an efficient business.

Alongside this, clients want to understand how new technologies can impact their businesses. Web 2.0 tools are a good example. Corporate clients are struggling with the value of using blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and other communication tools and want to understand how these 'risky' new tools can help them. Clients want case studies, reference sites and first-hand knowledge of the value of these tools to mitigate their own risk in experimenting with them.

Therefore it is essential for me to do the experimenting and gain first-hand experience. I need to evaluate blogs and wikis, find ones to recommend as good examples and also assess how they can work for me. I have helped a client to set up a wiki around capturing their organisation's best practice, which was an invaluable experience. Working with them to build this, I was able to see the process, overcome any problems and realise the value it could bring to sharing knowledge. I have also contributed to other wikis and experimented with my own blog, which have been important steps for learning about these tools.

Building a network of trusted experts

A fast way to keep up to date with developing technologies is to have trusted colleagues who are experts in the area. For example, I work with other consultants who are experts in intranet design and deployment, customer relationship management systems, records management, social networking tools and content management. If am working on an assignment and this expertise is needed, I will bring in other specialists to help me. Or indeed, we will bid for a project together at the outset. If you have the position of trusted advisor with a client, they are generally very open to you recommending another expert who can help them. This reinforces their trust in you but it is also a low-risk option for them to find other recommended consultants.

As well as introducing other trusted experts to clients, I will also introduce clients to clients. This is particularly valuable during benchmarking exercises. If a client of mine can demonstrate best practice in an area of relevance to another client, I will often connect them to share their experiences and knowledge. This has worked extremely well with an accountancy firm client and a law firm client who now collaborate in several areas where they share expertise and learning and even rotate their information staff between them to develop their research and analytical skills.

Connecting clients in this way puts you in the position of being seen as a powerful networker. Rather than diminishing your role - now they have connected they might not need you - it deepens their relationship with you and raises your credibility to a higher level. Once this level of trust has been built up with clients, it makes it easier to take some calculated risks and maybe test out a few techniques and ideas during projects that will not only extend your own skills but could also lead to innovative new ideas and approaches for the client.

Strengthen your consulting

To continue to be an effective consultant and maintain your reputation, it is essential to be constantly learning, embedding and extending your skills. This approach gives you the flexibility you need to survive. There are two mechanisms I have used to underpin this approach. The first is through learning how to coach people, and the second is by devising and delivering my own training courses.

Coaching: As I worked on projects that involved change management - a change in business processes or people's roles - I realised that not everyone found it easy to cope with that change. I would work closely with those who found change difficult and tried to give them the support they needed. I enjoyed this aspect of an assignment but wasn't sure I was doing this to the best of my ability. So, I signed up for a diploma in coaching at City University and studied 'Performance Coaching for Business'. The course gave me a deeper insight into coaching techniques and how to get the best out of people as well as the opportunity to practice these techniques in a safe environment. This new learning gave me a much more confident approach to bring to some of the more complex consulting assignments.

Training: As coaching helped to add to my portfolio of skills and work, so does developing my own training courses. I have pulled together half-day courses on topics such as how to network effectively, communications and presentation skills, through to a 1- day course on the basics of knowledge management and a 5-day course on information excellence. Training gives you the platform to showcase and market your skills but it is also an excellent way to practice what you preach and gain fresh insights and feedback from the participants. It is also the case that some participants on the training courses often become consultancy clients, having seen and heard me in action.

Being a consultant often feels like being in a circus: keeping the pace and energy high, juggling at least six things at once, multi- tasking and helping out other team members, keeping the audience happy and delivering a fabulous overall experience. As with a circus act, underlying the overall performance is constant practice; the honing of skills and taking calculated risks to make it all look easy.

Related FreePint links:

• "Blown to Bits: how the new economics of information transforms strategy" Reviewed by Lesley Robinson <http://www.freepint.co.uk/bookshelf>
  
  
• "Net future: the 7 cyber trends that will drive your business, create new wealth and define your future" Written by Chuck Martin Reviewed by Lesley Robinson <http://www.freepint.com/bookshelf/seven.htm>
  
  

« Blog