Often consultants will tell a company, team, agency or non-profit that they can make them more efficient or effective. The company or organization will say something like, but we already are effective. Of course the consultant says: “I can make you more effective!”

You can see very quickly how this can turn into silly rhetoric and indeed it is a bit of trickery that consultants use, it is akin to a take-away close sales tactics. Indeed is it both a little bit of BS, consultant ego and forward looking projections. In fact how would the consultant know he can make them more effective or efficient before he even has a look inside their business model?

One thing that the late Dave Thomas, Founder of the Wendy’s Hamburger Chain use to say is that he would not allow anyone to give him advice unless they were a multi-millionaire or unless they had more money than he did. Interesting, and I am sure this did not mean he did not listen to his frontline employees like Ray Kroc, Founder of McDonalds always told his executives to do, but I am sure Dave Thomas was right for his way of doing things. You might even buy his book; “Franchising 4 Smarty Pants’” and quickly read through it, I hope that is the title, I just don’t remember and the book was not very good and it is simply not worth my time to look it up.

If a consultant starts bantering around buzz words or starts talking about the “Law of Effectiveness” as one would be consultant recently did with me. Ask them to prove their successes, name names, companies and show you? Ask if the consultant himself is effective? For instance what did he achieve lately? If they cannot show you, tell them to shut up and get out of your office and when they leave do not listen to their dribble about how they can make you better. Just hand them a mirror and tell them to make themselves better.

This may seem like a silly question, especially if you’ve already started your consulting business and have a website.

The question really is, does your website draw clients to you? Or, does it confuse them about your services?

All too often professional websites pontificate about the principles of consulting and do little to “educate” potential clients about the problems the consultant specializes in solving.

Marketing is a Consultant’s Real Full-Time Job!

From our viewpoint, which is all about marketing, anything you do that doesn’t move the potential client along the road to hiring you is a waste of resources. As a consultant, your “product” is an intangible service – difficult perhaps to describe and equally difficult for the client to grasp. Regardless of your consulting expertise, your real job is marketing it and yourself.

And, since you get paid for doing work for clients, you need dedicated marketing assets that work for you even in your absence.

Planning Your Website So It Plays a Key Role in Your Marketing Process

A well-designed website will serve as a collection point for inquiries, some of which should eventually become paying assignments. All your other marketing activities: social media, email marketing, direct mail advertising, networking and publishing should drive the potential prospects to that website. There they will learn about the problems you solve, your process, your credentials, your connections. There they will decide whether or not to move to the next step in the buying process.

So before you pay a designer to make an “attractive” website for you – or you attempt to create your own site – here are some things to think about:

1. How will prospects find your site?
2. Will your home page be all about you, or will it be about the prospect, giving examples of problems you solve?
3. Will you know who views it, and when they did?
4. Will you know what visitors to your site were most interested in and what they would like to know more about?
5. Will your website be so comprehensive and complete that potential clients will be left with the impression that they know everything there is to know about your services?
6. Are your clients more likely to use a mobile device than a PC to search for information?
7. Do you plan to add information to your website on a regular basis in the form of a blog or updated case histories, etc.?

These are only a few of the questions you should be addressing before designing the site if you expect it to really produce inquiries for you.

The Website Is a Critical Component of The Consultant’s Sales Process.

There’s no substitute of course for the face-to-face meeting. But there may be a number of touch points of communication before you actually get to that point. Together, all of your marketing efforts should work in concert to move potential clients smoothly through the funnel of your sales process.

Today we are going to talk about what your perspective should be as you continue to build your consulting business. It is important to keep in mind that all great businesses are built with consistent and deliberate action over time. There will always be quick fixes available and your discipline to reject those quick fixes is what allows your business to grow.

What I believe. I believe that great businesses are built, no matter the industry, no matter the niche. Great businesses are built and your consulting business is no different; if it’s going to be great, then it has to be built in a great way. Great businesses are the result of consistent, deliberate action taken over time. Much like Rome, great businesses aren’t built in a day or a week. They begin with a Big Picture, an end goal, that directs the day to day efforts of the business.

Why I believe it.

McDonald’s. McDonald’s is a classic example. It is a well-known, worldwide business. The original concept for McDonald’s was founded in 1940. Today, McDonald’s is over 70 years old. We recognize McDonald’s for its efficiency and status as a household name. However, the company’s prowess was not realized in one, seven, or even twenty years. For 70 years they have been consistently building the McDonald’s identity and now we know it for its end product.

Los Angeles Lakers. If you’re a sports fan, then you are familiar with the basketball franchise the Los Angeles Lakers. You know names like Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jerry West, and Kobe Bryant. Even if you aren’t a basketball fan, you probably know those names because that’s how popular this particular franchise has become. The Los Angeles Lakers were founded in 1947 and the franchise is over 70 years old. The franchise isn’t well known because of the players that played for the team. The players are well known because the franchise’s consistent effort. After consistent, deliberate action taken over time, the LA Lakers are now franchise known across the world. This didn’t happen in a day. It didn’t happen in a week or a month. It happened over time.

Empire State Building. The Empire State Building, an iconic structure in the US, is another example. We all know the Empire State Building; it used to be the tallest building in the world. It is no longer is the tallest, but it still has its iconic presence. The Empire State Building took two years to build and cost 40 million dollars in expenses. The point here is that your business is no different. It takes time to build and it takes time to reap the benefits of your consistent, deliberate action over a course of time.

Relevance to you. As a company, we want to make sure that our perspective is to help you focus on becoming a business. We want to help you become the Empire State Building, LA Lakers, or McDonald’s of your niche. We want to help you focus on being a great consulting firm. We want to help you understand that great businesses take deliberate energy. You have to focus on a particular picture and outwit the inevitable distractions that will show along the way.

We live in a world with so many magic bullets and quick solutions you begin to believe that somewhere, somehow, there is an immediate solution available to your complex problem. The solution that we offer you may in fact be simple, but it may not be quick to execute. We want to help you keep the leadership patience that helps you stay focused on the end goal you’ve articulated. Your Big Picture is worth pursuing and taking deliberate action toward over time.

A recent survey of 100 IT professionals responsible for data centres commissioned by data centre specialists Sentrum highlights the trust gap between independent consultant and client. Statistics from Sentrum’s 2009 research showed that 52% of IT managers in large companies expressed an interest in receiving advice and recommendations from specialist consultants whilst in 2010 that trend has increased to the point where 88% of IT managers said they would turn to independent data centre consultants for advice on designing a data centre. 42% of the organisations questioned stated they now felt the need to secure the ‘expert’ advice of consultants – a further 35% admitted that they lacked the detailed knowledge required to complete data centre projects in-house.

So far, so good – but what about execution?

Whilst 97% of the companies surveyed said they look for outside expertise in design or management, just 2% take the original recommendations without change. 9% of those surveyed admit they change the recommended specification frequently and while it is easy enough to put this down to the client not having a clear scope, a more worrying 58% admit this happens quite often.

Where is it going wrong?

There is obviously a clear issue here – consultants are providing advice that does not seem to fit the client’s objective. This can be caused by many factors including:

• A vague brief or unclear design objective
• Lack of understanding and management buy-in
• Consultants attempting to reuse existing designs to save time
• Consultants not being clear enough when discussing pitfalls

“The gap in understanding of technical and commercial issues from the project outset between technology and business leaders is a common cause for scope change mid-project”, says data centre consultant David Griggs. “Whilst the CEO and CIO have a vision of a super-efficient, low-carbon facility with reduced operating costs, the CFO needs to understand there can be a significant increase in capital expenditure to achieve this.”

5 tips for a to get the most from external expertise

1. Establish a relationship early on with a design partner. A good one will be happy to discuss some high level concepts with you, without charge
2. Use their experience to help you finalise your C level exec briefings and come up with some realistic design objectives
3. Using off the shelf designs and proven technologies can keep costs down
4. Once the initial design is produced, roadshow this quickly to identify potential hazards
5. A staged payment model will ensure commitment from the consultant throughout the project life-cycle. Negotiating such a model can avoid punitive upfront charges.

Read more about the survey on the Sentrum website.

Well, they can surely use off the shelf business leadership training content if they want to add another valuable service to their clients.

As a business coach or a consultant one of your best weapons is asking questions. To be a successful consultant you must dive deep into your clients organization and ask questions the verify answers to really analyze their situation. This will allow you to come up solutions and help you in advising your client on how to plan and execute to address opportunity areas. So what are the reoccurring opportunity areas that you see time and time again? Answer: Employee training, growth and development, leadership and business training, and many “training related” areas I’m sure.

I know because I have had many business coaches and consultants (especially small business consultants) come to me for guidance in that area. It’s a common opportunity area for small businesses. Most small businesses focus more on operations and revenue than they do on their employee’s growth and development. What they sometimes fail to realize is that the employee is more of an asset to invest in they understand. Soft skills or interpersonal communication skills is absolutely one of the most important traits of a customer focused business. If your employees do not receive training in this area of person-to-person contact then they are destined to have shortcomings.

Now most consultants and coaches just advise their clients to invest in some career training or soft skills courses. They may refer their clients to a few colleagues of theirs (like my colleagues do for my firm) and then move on to their next client or follow up with that client with questions about how the plan is going and if they took the training advise. What if you as a coach or consultant had your own business leadership or career training programs to offer? Don’t worry about developing a training program from scratch for every client. You would have to grow a complete training staff to do that anyway. Why not invest in some off the shelf courseware to offer your clients?

What is off the shelf courseware? This is a training program in a box really. It may be one topic or many or a cluster of topics that fall into your clients opportunity areas of employee training and development. Imagine handing you’re client a course that’s ready to go and that they could use to facilitate the soft skills training or business leadership training needs of their organization with just a few edits or customization so that it appears to be their own training product/program. Off the shelf career or business leadership or soft skills training courseware should be a must have for every business consultant or business coach out there. Instead of just advising a client to get that done because it’s needed and an area for them to improve their business – why not give them what they ask for and you advise them to do as well?

Where is the selling point for the client? There need not be one really. You can give the training to them. You could sell it as an additional product as well, but for the client they get a training program that didn’t have to spend months or years to develop. They can customize it and brand it to their company and facilitate internal training so they take ownership in growing leaders from within. The client doesn’t have to figure it out or spend thousands on seminars, workshops and travel/entertainment expense for their employees. It is really a “no brainer” for consultants and coaches to have off the shelf courseware in their back pocket and as an added benefit for their clients. It’s amazing how many consultants out there who spend more time referring this task or outsourcing it so that others can capitalize on the training opportunity area. Training content or courseware for consultants just makes sense.

Where is the benefit for you the consultant or coach? Well – your clients’ benefit above should the most important. Also, you can purchase training content from some training providers restriction free. It’s called re-usability training. Some organizations focus solely on developing business leadership and soft skills training programs that anyone can use as courseware to re-brand, edit, sell or customize any way they like.

In summary: business coaches and consultants do need training too. They need it not just for them to grow and develop, but they need courseware to add value to their service offerings and enhance their clients’ experience.

When you’re starting a consulting business as a computer consultant who supports small businesses, the utilities that will be most critical for your success will be those that allow you to monitor your client’s systems, and that will allow you to provide instant, remote support for whenever an issue arises.

Fortunately today, the utilities that are available to perform these functions are not only completely reliable and extremely effective, but they’re incredibly affordable… even to the independent computer consultant who is just starting out.

The following are the utilities I use in my own consulting business and the ones I recommend to anyone starting a consulting business of their own.

Network Monitoring:

For monitoring my client’s server(s), I use GFI Max RemoteManagement. Current pricing is about $13/mo per server monitored. You can monitor the workstations as well for as low as an additional $0.10 per workstation per month.

You have the option to completely modify the dashboard and all reporting collateral with your own logo and branding.

If an error occurs on the server or if an alert is generated in the event logs, you can get an instant email alert. You also have the option to have the alerts delivered via SMS. You can also deliver these messages directly to your client, so they can see for themselves the activity and support needs on the server.

GFI Max also gives you a web-based dashboard, where you can easily see any problems on the network (backup failures, low disk space, hack attempts, etc). You can give your client viewable access to this dashboard so that they can see for themselves how healthy you’re keeping their network. If they’re having server problems, it helps you to show them why an on-site (billable) service call might be necessary.

You can use GFI Max to collect a workstation and server inventory in real-time, which you can make accessible to your clients at any time through the GFI Dashboard. Besides helping to justify your monthly fee, this inventory is very useful when regularly reviewed to find anything that might be outdated, which will help to generate additional, billable projects.

You can also generate daily, weekly or monthly health status reports to send to your clients to show them how great of a job you’re doing (or how unhealthy their server might be during their free 30-day trial of your maintenance plan).

GFI Max offers a free 30-day trial. I suggest that if you have even one client with a server and small network, that you tell them that you’re starting to move to a managed service model. Offer to install for them a free, no obligation trial of your monitoring system and let them see for themselves how many problems they may be facing because you’re not currently proactively monitoring their system. Then you can show them how monitoring can increase their productivity and reduce expensive, unexpected downtime.

Even if you’re just starting a consulting business, installing GFI will give your clients the impression that you’re every bit as established and professional as any large MSP.

Remote Support:

For logging onto my end-user’s workstations or to quickly check out a possible server problem, I use LogMeIn.

For many years, I used LogMeIn Free. The product is completely free, it supports an unlimited number of workstations, which are easily organized and divided by client.

The LogMeIn client must be installed on each server and workstation you want to access, so you will need to do an initial on-site setup of the application. But once the product is installed, as long as the client computer is on-line, you can quickly log onto it and work as if you were sitting at the desk side-by-side with the end-user.

A few years ago, I upgraded to LogMeIn Central, which is about $300/yr. It works almost exactly like the free product does, with one very useful addition… I can give every end-user their own access code so that they too can access their office computers remotely. (Without LogMeIn Central, if a user wanted to access their computer from home, I would have to remove their workstation from my LogMeIn account and set them up with their own LogMeIn Free account, or I would have to setup an entirely different remote access product for them to use).

Besides LogMeIn Central, I also use LogMeIn Rescue for $129/mo. This product, while a little pricey, has come in handy on many, many occasions. Rescue allows you to access any computer with an Internet connection, without you having to install the client software beforehand. You simply have the end-user go to the website logmein123.com, they enter a six-digit code that you generate for them and you have instant access to the desktop.

On many occasions I’ve had people (non-customers) call me up out of the blue to tell me about a computer problem they’re having and asking if my company can fix it. I’ve said, “Would you mind if I took a look right now, just to get an idea of what’s going on?” and using LogMeIn Rescue, within 30 seconds or so, they were watching the mouse pointer magically float around the screen as I fixed the problem before their eyes.

This little IT Marketing technique landed me new clients on more than one occasion and has easily made back the monthly fee many times over.

Whether you are just starting a consulting business, or you are already an established IT support provider, these two utilities can provide a very effective… and affordable foundation for providing reliable managed services to any small business client base.