An Insider's Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice


Book Description

Whether you’re a beginner just starting up a consulting practice, or a veteran looking for ways to invigorate your existing business, An Insider’s Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice is an invaluable resource. Featuring real stories from consultants in diverse industries, the book offers simple yet powerful ways to: Identify a market and narrow your focus • Make a smooth transition from employee to independent consultant • Sell effectively even if you’ve never sold before • Establish visibility through speaking, writing, and networking • Build credibility by leveraging the credibility of others • Set prices based on value • Develop a marketing strategy and divide your time between marketing and delivering your services • Keep plenty of work in your pipeline • Adapt and thrive in any market condition • And much more Complete with the results of an original survey of 200 successful independent consultants, this handy guide provides the kind of real-life advice you need to build a thriving business.




Consulting on the Inside, 2nd ed.


Book Description

Are you an internal consultant—a staff member who serves in a consultative role within your organization? Then you need this hands-on guidebook to help you better understand your role and improve your performance. Whether you're a change agent, trusted advisor, or someone who serves in varying capacities, it's important to design your job, develop a formal agreement, and build your practice. Consulting on the Inside provides a solid background for internal consultants and serves as a roadmap for cultivating a successful career. You'll learn how to: maintain an outsider's objectivity while applying an insider's knowledge of the organization build relationships but be up-front about challenges and issues design your role to fit the client's needs and the organizational situation handle roadblocks and deal effectively with difficult clients market your consulting services within the client organization. You'll find a thorough examination of the eight phases of the consulting process, a comprehensive analysis of the differences between internal and external consultants, and success stories demonstrating the personal qualities you need to build trust and relationships. Consulting on the Insidealso provides a complete toolbox for getting the job done, including tips and techniques, checklists, forms, a sample hiring agreement, and ready-to-use agendas...




Inside the Technical Consulting Business


Book Description

Join the thousands of professionals who have already gotten Insidethe Technical Consulting Business -- and discover how to channelyour technical know-how into an exciting career as an independentconsultant. This Third Edition of Harvey Kaye's bestselling guidegives you the focused, no-nonsense help you need to start and runyour own consulting practice in today's ultracompetitiveenvironment. What's inside: Setting up your consulting business.The lowdown on finances, record-keeping, office space, taxes, andchoosing the form of business organization that's right foryou. Insider's guide to proposals and contracts. Gives plenty ofexamples to use in your own consulting practice. Marketing secrets your boss never told you. Tips on creating demandfor your services and keeping your clients coming back for repeatbusiness. PLUS ALL-NEW MATERIAL ON: * Creating your personal strategic marketing plan. A step-by-stepguide to developing and maintaining your competitive edge. * Learn from the pros. "Meet the Pros" interviews show howsuccessful consultants handled some of the very problems you'relikely to encounter. * Building successful client relationships. The inside scoop onkeeping clients happy while protecting your own professionalinterests. * The technical challenges of consulting. A consultant's primer onproblem-solving, coping with the information explosion, andorganizing for maximum productivity.




Consulting Success


Book Description

How can you take your skills and expertise and package and present it to become a successful consultant? There are proven time-tested principles, strategies, tactics and best-practices the most successful consultants use to start, run and grow their consulting business. Consulting Success teaches you what they are. In this book you'll learn: - How to position yourself as a leading expert and authority in your marketplace - Effective marketing and branding materials that get the attention of your ideal clients - Strategies to increase your fees and earn more with every project - The proposal template that has generated millions of dollars in consulting engagements - How to develop a pipeline of business and attract ideal clients - Productivity secrets for consultants including how to get more done in one week than most people do in a month - And much, much more




College2Consulting


Book Description

College2Consulting prepares you for the grueling and unique management consulting recruitment process. Anecdotes from dozens of consultants at top-tier firms show you how to stand out before, during, and after the interview, ultimately leading to offers from your favorite firms. "This book provides a great overview of consulting and definitely helps in positioning yourself to earn an offer with a great consulting firm" - Booz & Company Consultant "This is the only book in the business that comes from a student's perspective. It's very helpful for someone who doesn't have any background in how to get a consulting job" - McKinsey Business Analyst "This book should be THE book you read if you are planning to go through the recruitment process in consulting and want to know how to survive every step of the process. Not only did it provide detailed tips, the book was in every aspect highly relevant and accurate" - L.E.K. Consulting Associate In this competitive industry, it's not enough to ace the case interview. C2C offers a holistic approach to consulting recruitment. From the preparation process to the paper process to the people process, C2C details effective strategies every step of the way. Preparation - Don't procrastinate; simple preparation tips to help you succeed Info Sessions - Forget elevator pitches and stand out in a memorable way Resumes - Grab recruiters' attention by quantifying your accomplishments Cover Letters - Discover strategies from real cover letters that landed interviews Fit Interviews - Impress industry veterans by preparing for common questions Case Interviews - Learn to develop frameworks instead of relying on canned ones C2C's authors recently went through consulting recruitment and have an intimate understanding of every facet of the process. To add perspective, the authors also interviewed managers, consultants & analysts from the firms below: Accenture Boston Consulting Group Booz & Company Deloitte McKinsey & Company L.E.K. Consulting PricewaterhouseCoopers Together, the team has helped dozens of students land jobs at top consulting firms. About the Authors Charles Benkendorf, C2C author and founder, is a former associate at L.E.K. Consulting, a global strategy consulting firm. He started writing College2Consulting shortly after his consulting recruitment experience in 2008, when he noticed how many people struggled through recruitment; existing resources were too focused on case interviews and did not cover the overall recruitment process. Charles teaches private classes covering the consulting recruitment process from start to finish and provides mock interview services at Northwestern University. He has also taught multiple primers on consulting recruitment at both University of Chicago and Northwestern University in winter and fall 2011. He currently works as a Business Analyst at Ustream.tv, the leader in live streaming video. Reed Walker, C2C author, co-founder, and marketing director, is currently a consultant at Avascent, a strategy consulting firm specializing in developing growth strategies for firms doing business with government customers. At Avascent, Reed is also Avascent's recruitment lead for Duke University and has supported recruitment efforts at Georgetown, Stanford, and WashU conducting resume screens as well as 1st/2nd round interviews. Shannon Clark, C2C editor and co-founder, has published two books, currently works at Abbott Laboratories, and specializes in human factors design and usability of products and websites.




An Insider's Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice


Book Description

An industrial/organizational psychologist, consultant, and speaker, author Bruce Katcher combines his years of experience and insights with real stories from a range of other independent consultants to guide readers on their journey of growing a consulting practice--whether they're beginners just starting up or veterans looking for new ways to invigorate their businesses. In An Insider's Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice, you'll learn simple yet powerful strategies for success, including how to: identify a market and narrow your focus; make a smooth transition from employee to independent consultant; sell effectively even if you've never sold before; establish visibility through speaking, writing, and networking; set prices based on value; develop a marketing strategy and divide your time between marketing and delivering your services; and much more. With applicable data and tangible advice gleaned from the survey results of professionals in a diverse range of industries, you'll not only learn how to keep plenty of work in your pipeline--you'll be able to adapt your consulting practice to thrive in any market.




The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients


Book Description

This deeply insightful guide to understanding what clients really want is “an indispensable resource for consultants” (Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Never Eat Alone). Independent consulting is a potentially lucrative enterprise—but the reality seldom matches the dream. Most solo consultants and boutique consulting firms are perpetually within six months of bankruptcy due to the sputtering unreliability of their new business engines. The problem, according to international consulting expert David A. Fields, is twofold: 1) lack of a consistent, proven plan, and 2) fundamental misunderstanding about what clients want in a consultant. Fields, who has helped hundreds of consultants and boutique firms worldwide build profitable, sustainable practices, replaces the typical consultant’s mindset of emphasizing expertise and differentiated processes with a focus on building relationships, engendering trust, and solving clients’ existing problems. In The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients, Fields synthesizes his decades of experience into a step-by-step approach to winning more projects from more clients at higher fees. From nuts-and-bolts business advice and tactics to a deeply insightful breakdown of the human side of a very human profession, Fields, named one of Advertising Age magazine’s “Marketing Top 100,” delivers a comprehensive guidebook that is at once highly approachable and satisfyingly detailed. “If I could have just one book on client strategy, this book would be it.” —Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Triggers




The Consulting Way


Book Description

If you want to become a better consultant or are seeking to learn more about entering the consulting field, this guidebook offers the perfect starting point. Whether youre considering your options after college, looking to switch careers or already working at a consulting firm, youll find a trove of invaluable information here. You can learn how to develop interpersonal skills that can help you succeed; improve your project management skills; approach the problem-solving process; present recommendations; and communicate clearly. Not everyone succeeds as a consultant, but its not because they arent smart enough. It usually boils down to a misunderstanding of the consulting rolebeing unaware of what to do and when to do it. In this business, timing can mean everything. Discover tips and strategies that can help you succeed as a consultant in this guide to consulting essentials. Its time to separate yourself from competitors and further your career with The Consulting Way.




Insider's Guide to Successful Consulting


Book Description

Many experienced professionals seeking new opportunities outside the traditional workplace choose consulting. But getting started in the field can be difficult. This highly readable book reveals insider secrets for making it in the competitive world of consulting.




Better Data Visualizations


Book Description

Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually. This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.