How Business Consultants Work: Research shows that a person’s appearance strongly influences other people’s perception of their intelligence, financial success, trustworthiness, and authority.
These perceptions can heavily affect the chances of landing a date, client, job, or promotion.
So, it’s no surprise that many people hire image consultants to improve the way others perceive them.
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Image Consulting Business: https://jprtax.com
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Image consultants ask questions like:
- What style of clothing best represents the way this individual wishes to be perceived?
- How can I help this individual improve their communication skills?
- Which behavioral changes and body language techniques can this individual employ to project the image they desire?
- How can this individual improve their business etiquette to appear more confident and trustworthy?
How Business Consultants Work
Some image consultants specialize in a specific area, such as etiquette, communication, or clothing, while others offer a more comprehensive approach.
At the lower end of the price spectrum, image consultants typically offer their services remotely.
But for high-end clients, they may travel to the client’s location to work with them in person.
Similar to marketing consulting, formal training has no influence on someone’s ability to succeed as an image consultant.
Clients will typically be attracted to the online image presented by the consultant and want to emulate them in some way.
How do you grow your small business consulting practice? What skills do you need?
Here are steps on How Business Consultants Work
Whether you call yourself a consultant, coach, advisor or mentor.
These steps will help you develop skill sets as well as grow your business.
I’ve been a small business consultant a long time.
And these are the essentials that have worked for me. I think they’ll work for you, too.
How Business Consultants Work
A small business consultant works with clients on strategy, planning and problem solving.
And helps clients develop business skills and knowledge.
These topics range from designing a business model or marketing plan.
To determining which marketing techniques to use and how to use them.
You’ll often help clients learn how to plan and implement projects.
A small business consultant gives advice, teaches skills.
And brainstorms with the client to produce practical results and enhance strategic thinking.
How Business Consultants Work
A small business coach helps clients to create success by focusing on personal development: time management, self-sabotaging behavior (like procrastination and distraction), finding clarity, decision making, and getting into action. When you put on your coaching hat, you don’t give advice. Instead, you help the client find the answers from within themselves.
How Business Consultants Work
There is a lot of confusion between what the ICF (International Coach Federation) calls a “small business coach” and what the rest of the world thinks a “small business coach” is. Don’t get hung up on titles unless you want to strictly follow the ICF definition. You can call yourself a consultant, advisor, mentor or coach, and most clients will understand that it means you’ll help them solve problems and grow their business. Pay attention to the outcomes the clients seek. (If it helps, I call myself a “coach-consultant” to show I use both coaching and consulting techniques when working with clients.)
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How Business Consultants Work
You need both consulting skills and coaching skills in order to be effective and provide real value. I have been working with micro business owners and solo entrepreneus for over 20 years and I rarely find one that doesn’t need both coaching and consulting.
How Business Consultants Work
It’s true: they almost never approach me and ask for straight coaching. They ask for consulting. They ask for practical advice and brainstorming. But in the search to find solutions and to map out a strategy, a small business owners will stumble unless they do both the personal development work and the business development work that leads to success.
1. Start with your own skill-building.
You cannot be an effective consultant if you don’t bring value to the small business owner.
Be relentless in your ongoing education.
You become more in-demand and can charge higher fees based on the your wider the breath of knowledge and expertise.
How Business Consultants Work
2. Check your experience level.
It’s rare that a small business owner will entrust their business to a small business consultant who has never owned a business before.
Or to a consultant who doesn’t have a high level of expertise in a specific topic area.
An expert is defined as having 10,000 hours of experience with the topic they claim as their expertise.
If you use a traditional 40-hour workweek as your ruler.
That means you need at least 5 years’ full time experience with your small business topic in order to call yourself an expert.
How Business Consultants Work
3. Determine your Big Why.
Before you get down to the nitty-gritty of designing your business and getting clients, figure out why you want to be a small business consultant, and why you want to help these owners. Why this specific target audience? What is your motivation? Knowing this will keep you going when you hit the inevitable speed bumps along the way to buiding your business and serving your clients.
How Business Consultants Work
4. Determine what “success” looks like for you personally.
Keep your eye on the target. The definition of success differs from person to person.
Take some time to visualize all the ways that a successful consulting practice will manifest in your personal and professional life.
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5. Write a business plan.
Go through all the same steps you would go through with a client, and work on your own business model design. Things to consider: what legal format you’ll use, what are your mission and vision statements, what are your offerings, your pricing and profit models. Include the resources you will need to succeed, like money, time, skills/knowledge, equipment, and people resources. Set goals and milestones for the next 1 year, 3 years and 5 years. Read my blog post about what should be in your business plan.
How Business Consultants Work
6. Write a marketing plan.
There are many small business consultants out there. How will you be remarkable and stand out from the crowd? How will you connect with your audience and build rapport and trust? Will you use traditional marketing techniques only, or combine traditional and internet marketing? Which of the 100+ available techniques will bring the best results? How much will you invest in marketing (in both time and money)? What are the goals of your marketing? Read my article about how to choose the best marketing techniques for your consulting business.
7. Learn coaching skills.
You will be working with human beings who have their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Learn deep listening skills and how to ask meaningful questions to get clarity and provide focus. Learn how to hold clients accountable for implementing their action plans, and how to deal with difficult client situations. You’ll find that you work as much with the business owner’s mindset as you do with the practical logistics of running a business.
How Business Consultants Work
8. Choose a focus or niche.
Determine if your specialty requires you to have a license or certification (financial and tax advisors, legal advisors, insurance advisors). Will you focus on a small topic area, like email marketing strategies, or will you be an expert who can help clients with a wide range of challenges and projects? Will you work with a particular size business based on number of employees or revenue? Will you work only with local clients, or will your consulting business be national/international?
9. Decide if you are going to advise them, or do the work for them.
Some consultants are more like mentors and advisors, who work with the small business owner to do planning and strategy work. Other small business consultants provide a specific service as a sub-contractor, to augment the client’s staff (such as part-time CFOs, website designers, and copywriters).
10. Learn the problems that most small business owners have
Formulate a strategy to define and solve those problems. When I work with my mentoring clients and the students in my consulting classes, I outline the top 29 problems that my clients commonly need help with. Use readily available strategies, tools and assessments to help solve these problems, or create strategies of your own. Consider putting together your own consultant’s toolkit.
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How Business Consultants Work
11. Deeply understand the area
Deeply understand the seven areas of a business model to help your clients in the areas that are causing the most damage or have the best return on investment if they make a change.
12. Systemize your own business
Systemize your own business so that you have maximum efficiency. Use templates, automation and sales scripts. Take time early in the setup of your business to create these systems to free up your time and attention for more important tasks. Hint: you’ll then teach these efficiencies to your clients.
How Business Consultants Work
13. Get help with the administrative and marketing work.
Outsource the tasks that you do not want to do, that you are not an expert in, or that take away from your revenue-generating time.
14. Get your ego out of the way.
While your work can and should be meaningful to you, you are not a consultant to pump up your own ego. You are a consultant to serve your clients. You are going to advise them, help them to determine the pros and cons of each course of action, and then allow them to make their own decisions. You cannot stop them from making unwise decisions or from not following through on an implementation plan. Equally, if your client has a big win, it may be partly due to your advice, but much of the praise needs to go to your client for making it happen. Decide in advance what a “successful client engagement” means to you.
How Business Consultants Work
15. Be honest about your own areas of personal development.
No one is perfect. Sometimes we procrastinate. Sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes we let anger or fear get the better of us. Sometimes we don’t communicate as well as we could. Discover your weaknesses and either learn how to overcome them, or hire staff to help deflect them.
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16. Choose marketing techniques that bring qualified leads to the sales conversation.
Track your marketing relentlessly. If your marketing isn’t bringing the desired results, revamp it. Do not choose marketing techniques because they are a hot trend if they don’t bring in leads or help build your brand recognition.
17. Learn problem solving, decision making, project management, and time management skills.
These four skills will provide the backbone of the assistance you will offer clients and help you run your own business successfully.
How Business Consultants Work
18. Learn from the masters.
Why reinvent the wheel? You can discover savvy shortcuts by paying attention to the leading consultants in your industry. In any small business consulting niche there are always several people who have risen to the top of their profession. Study their offerings, their marketing methods, the way they run their businesses, and the way they work with clients. Determine if those methods would serve you and your clients, too.
19. Develop communication skills.
Communication skills are essential in almost any field, but they are especially important in a field where you are selling yourself all the time to businesses. One of the best ways you can improve your oral communication skills is to work in retail.
It’s also important to to take communication classes in college, such as speech, debate, or business writing. They can help you develop your communication skills.
How Business Consultants Work
20. Make a point to work on your communication in everyday conversation.
For instance, pay attention to how fast you’re speaking and try to speak slowly. Also, make sure you are enunciating your words and speaking at an appropriate volume in any group you’re in. If you’re not sure what you sound like, consider recording yourself and listening to the recording.
It’s also important to actively listen in any given communication. If you’re listening, you can respond to what the person is actually saying, which makes the person feel important, a quality you want when you’re trying to sell yourself or your business.
21. Be a leader.
Often in business consulting, you will be working on your own, even if you are a part of a larger consulting company. However, when you go into a business, you will need to be a leader, as that business will be looking to you to help improve the way it works.
One way you can improve your leadership skills is to run for leadership positions while you are in college and high school.
22. Go out for student council.
Run for a leadership position in Future Business Leaders of America.
These positions will help teach you leadership skills.
How Business Consultants Work
23. Work on your organizational skills.
When working as a business consultant, you’ll likely need to manage more than one business at once.
Because you’re working on several businesses and multiple projects, you have to be extremely organized.
One way to be organized is to use the tools at your disposal.
Email organization, online calendars, and other project management tools can be a big help.
24. Develop your own systems
Another way to work on organization is to develop your own systems.
So that your files are organized in such a way that you can always find them.
How Business Consultants Work
25. Be able to work to a deadline.
Business consultants often must meet tight deadlines to cater to their clients’ needs.
Therefore, you must be able to work under stress and to deliver the work when you saying you’re going to do so.
Going to college is actually fairly good preparation for working on a deadline.
Since you must manage several classes at once and turn in your work on time.
However, when you get out in the world, your job will often depend on you making those deadlines.
How Business Consultants Work
26. Be prepared for long hours.
The Bureau of Labour Statistics estimates that about a third of management analysts, a subset of business consultants, works more than 40 hours a week. That means you’ll need to be prepared to put in long hours, especially when you’re first starting out.
This position will also usually require you to travel because most of the time, you won’t just be working with businesses in your area. Because much of your work is done with the client at their place of business, you’ll need to travel to where they are.
Conclusion:
Business consultants provide management consulting to help organizations improve their performance and efficiency. These professionals analyze businesses and create solutions while also helping companies meet their goals.
I’ve been helping small business owners to grow their business and get the outcomes they want. I teach my techniques to other small business coach-consultants to help shortcut the learning curve and create an effective and efficient consulting business for yourself.