How to Become a Top Consultant


Book Description

Ten of today's top consultants explain why and how they left the 9-to-5 grind behind, built new careers, and became the best in their field! Become a Top Consultant How the Experts Do it What does it take to build a successful consulting practice? Ron Tepper asked ten consultants in a diverse range of fields and found the formula to be a winning blend of skills, specialized knowledge, strategy, and technique. Now, Tepper shows you how to build a consulting practice of your own simply by following the examples of these ten experts in engineering, data processing, government, accounting, management, sales, real estate, and law. Become A Top Consultant takes you step by step through writing and submitting superior proposals, marketing your consulting services, setting fees, billing, getting help, even moonlighting. You'll learn the basic concepts, practices, specialized skills and consulting requirements for each different field. Best of all, you'll identify easily with the consultants--you'll meet an accountant and a sales trainer, a civil engineer, a football player-turned-headhunter/personnel accountant, an investment advisor who never finished college, and a former real estate salesman who's now a phenomenally successful attorney. They're all top consultants, from all walks of life--the best in the business. And they all started out where you are today. Become A Top Consultant--it's like having a live panel of consulting experts at your service, eager to help you launch your consulting career.







The McKinsey Way


Book Description

"If more business books were as useful, concise, and just plain fun to read as THE MCKINSEY WAY, the business world would be a better place." --Julie Bick, best-selling author of ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW IN BUSINESS I LEARNED AT MICROSOFT. "Enlivened by witty anecdotes, THE MCKINSEY WAY contains valuable lessons on widely diverse topics such as marketing, interviewing, team-building, and brainstorming." --Paul H. Zipkin, Vice-Dean, The Fuqua School of Business It's been called "a breeding ground for gurus." McKinsey & Company is the gold-standard consulting firm whose alumni include titans such as "In Search of Excellence" author Tom Peters, Harvey Golub of American Express, and Japan's Kenichi Ohmae. When Fortune 100 corporations are stymied, it's the "McKinsey-ites" whom they call for help. In THE MCKINSEY WAY, former McKinsey associate Ethan Rasiel lifts the veil to show you how the secretive McKinsey works its magic, and helps you emulate the firm's well-honed practices in problem solving, communication, and management. He shows you how McKinsey-ites think about business problems and how they work at solving them, explaining the way McKinsey approaches every aspect of a task: How McKinsey recruits and molds its elite consultants; How to "sell without selling"; How to use facts, not fear them; Techniques to jump-start research and make brainstorming more productive; How to build and keep a team at the top its game; Powerful presentation methods, including the famous waterfall chart, rarely seen outside McKinsey; How to get ultimate "buy-in" to your findings; Survival tips for working in high-pressure organizations. Both a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most admired and secretive companies in the business world and a toolkit of problem-solving techniques without peer, THE MCKINSEY WAY is fascinating reading that empowers every business decision maker to become a better strategic player in any organization.




25 Top Consulting Firms


Book Description




The Art of Consultancy


Book Description

"This is the practical approach I wish I had come across much earlier in my career." Cynthia Pexton-Shaw Whether you are just starting out, considering or already working as a consultant this book is essential reading, enabling you to understand the needs of your client and to get the result they want.




The Management Consultant


Book Description

Guide for professional management consultants showing how to develop skills and attributes for client-centric consulting.




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




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 Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy


Book Description

"A devastating bombardment of managerial thinking and the profession of management consulting…A serious and valuable polemic." —Wall Street Journal Fresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy and no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant. But soon he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies. In narrating his own ill-fated (and often hilarious) odyssey at a top-tier firm, Stewart turns the consultant’s merciless, penetrating eye on the management industry itself. The Management Myth offers an insightful romp through the entire history of thinking about management, a withering critique of pseudoscience in management theory, and a clear explanation of why the MBA usually amounts to so much BS—leading us through the wilderness of American business thought.




Provoke


Book Description

Explore a new and effective method for seizing opportunity in the face of uncertainty In Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws, renowned strategy consultants and best-selling authors Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach deliver an insightful exploration of how people tend to act tentatively in the face of uncertainty and provide the tools we need to do things differently. Tuff and Goldbach offer up a compelling argument for the proposition that taking a "wait and see" approach is the exact opposite of what helps visionary leaders change the world. Drawing on principles from business and behavioral economics, the book shows readers from all walks of life how to provoke action as a mechanism to advance. In this book you’ll discover: An overview of the assortment of cognitive biases which tend to restrain and distort leadership decision making in the face of uncertainty How to recognize the 'phase change' that occurs when an uncertainty resolves from being a question of "if" to being a matter of "when" Five different models of provocation which can be used alone or in combination to anticipate, drive through and exit that phase change in a way that creates the future you desire How true "provocateurs" shake the foundations of their industries, firms, sectors, and governments by overcoming their need for certainty before action Perfect for leaders or aspiring leaders in all walks of life where uncertainty abounds—which is to say, almost everywhere —Provoke will become your go-to guide to overcoming those natural human instincts that keep us frozen in place and prevent us from seizing our opportunities.