“I forgot how to pack!”

My wife and I don’t travel as much as I imagined we would when I retired in 2018. Part of that is on me. I travelled for a living for almost forty years and the last thing I was interested in was another trip on an airplane or another night eating the Marriott grilled chicken salad at 10:00 p.m. Then came Covid.

But now we are starting to travel again, which caused me to notice that I had lost a core consulting skill – packing! I literally used to spend ten to fifteen minutes packing a suitcase for a week away. This time I was spending hours to pack for four days, yep hours.

I remember the movie depicted above, Up in the Air, Where consultant Ryan (George Clooney) schools newbie Natalie (Anna Kendrick) on how to pack – “small carry on suitcase, separates, suit jacket that doubles as a blazer, two pair of shoes that go with everything, one in your bag the other on your feet.“

I remember learning that my HUGE Tumi garment bag was completely impractical, too big for aircraft hanging closets (remember those?) and too loose for the luggage belt, straps got caught.

I remember telling newbies “buy the best rolling carry on you can afford and never check luggage.

• Get your shirts laundered starched and folded so you can just throw them in your bag, The front will stay unwrinkled, which hanging shirts stuffed into any kind of bag will never do.
• Have one clear travel toiletry bag that you never unpack except to refill shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, shaving cream, Tide stick, and emery boards.
• Spare cufflinks, and collar stays. (If you wear a French cuff shirt, learn to make cufflinks out of big paper clips and carry some brass ones.)
• Leave the three pound gold Rolex at home. It annoys teammates and clients and is a personal safety risk.

In your briefcase, in small clear plastic bags:

• First aid kit (every size band aid, antibacterial ointment, butterflies, alcohol swabs and q-tips)
• MacGyver repair kit (duct tape, paper clips, wire. twine, super glue,)
• International electric plug converter.”
• Organize your hard drive so you can find anything near instantly and carry as little paper as possible.

Where you live and where you stay

Some firms are local or do work regionally so where you live isn’t as important, but when you fly every week a two hour drive to and from the airport gets old very quickly. Likewise some firms have arrangements with a particular hotel chain, so teams stay where they are told, but if you have a choice:

• Near the site is better than near downtown or the airport.
• A hotel restaurant that opens at six and stays open till ten pays dividends.
• A workout club that has no hours is preferable. Plan your workouts for early morning as the end of the day is often unpredictable.
• Some consultants do cleaning and laundry at the hotel and leave their bag over the weekend. Don’t expect clients to pay for that and expect some comments if you keep wearing the same clothes.

Clubs and Miles

Airline clubs are worth the expense if you travel internationally a lot or fly on often delayed  routes or have meetings  or otherwise work at airports. Otherwise save your money.

Airline loyalty programs aren’t as good as they once were, but they still allow you some “free” personal travel. The key is not to obsess about miles by taking inconvenient stopovers or other promotions. Also periodically check your ego investment in ”status.” Yes, you are more likely to find overhead space for your carry-on if you board before group 1, but in the grand scheme of things, how important is that really?

Up in the Air again

I think everyone considering a job in consulting should watch this movie. OK, the kind of consulting they do is despicable, assisted downsizing i.e.,  hatchet men who fire people for managers without guts. However, the characters have some real epiphanies.

Ryan (Clooney) is a doofus whose life goal is to become an American Airlines Advantage ten million miler. He is good at firing people because he has enough empathy to help people through a difficult time. He expends all his emotional energy in his job and is completely disconnected from family, and anyone who might care about him. He considers himself self-sufficient even speaking to groups telling them eliminating emotional “baggage” is the way to be happy.

Natalie (Kendrick) is enamored with technology and thinks you can do this work by email and Zoom. She also struggles to maintain a relationship with her boyfriend.

Alex (Vera Farmiga) seems carefree and self-sufficient like Ryan, but she’s living a lie.

I won’t totally spoil the movie for you. Let’s just say the characters grow.

The reason I suggest every new consultant watch it is that consulting can be a lonely life. You must be comfortable spending large chunks of your time alone. Oh, yeah, you’ll have some work friends, but teams change when a project ends. And the last thing any of those people wants to do on a weekend is meet socially with the people they just worked fifty hours with over the last week.

So you need to cultivate friendships, relationships with neighbors, and plan time with family.

• It may be surprising that many consultants are introverts. Schedule your decompress time, then make yourself see family and friends.
• Do things with people, make memories. Don’t just “hang out” because you need to decompress.
• Don’t make your spouse your social director. There is a reason most lifer consultants have been divorced at least once. I do know some consultant couples, usually second marriages. Some are happy.

Mostly don’t let the consulting lifestyle go to your head. Develop other interests, grow outside of work. Discover what things others are interested in. You’ll be more interesting, more able to help clients, and maybe even a better person.

I chose to become an independent consultant twice in my lifetime consulting career. I must have liked it because I was independent in various forms for twenty-three of my thirty-seven years in the field.

The first time my boss gave me the opportunity to go on contract for a year, work about half-time, control my schedule and attempt to save my marriage. I did some of those things, but I didn’t work half-time and I didn’t save my marriage. I did control my schedule some and while I didn’t say “No” enough, I loved the autonomy. After the year was up I supplemented work with my former firm with new local clients so I could be close to my children as they grew up and stayed independent for eight years.

It was a magic time. My vision was to “change the world of work.” I look back now and smile at how preciously naïve I was. But I had fun, stayed home enough, sub-contracted to my old boss, who was then independent too, and found local clients courtesy of friends. This brings me to my first mistake.

Bone-Headed Mistake # 1: Not saying “No”

I mentioned that during my “save-my-marriage” contract year I worked more than the half-time I committed to and failed at the “save-my-marriage” objective. There were other reasons. I did work less than the hundred-hour weeks I had been working, but the work was interesting and the money more than I’d ever earned so I didn’t say “No” when I slid over half-time. I made the same bone-headed mistake several times in my independent career.

In the lead-up to the 1991-2 recession, I was preaching to my clients about recession-proofing their business, using the example of a trucking firm’s rule FBO 50, keeping at least fifty percent of their business in food, booze, and oil, recession-proof customers. My own client mix was 100% two clients, consulting and radio advertising. These two recession sensitive industries felt the pinch. My revenue went to zero.

Bone-Headed Mistake # 2:Taking your eye off the Revenue Cliff.

During this same period same period I had a rule “always save twenty percent of time for marketing.” I preached this rule to other aspiring independent consultants. But . . .” the money was good and the work was fun” . . .when projects ended and any follow-on fell prey to the recession, there I was starting from scratch with my two main referral sources suffering from a recession.

I dug my way out of that one, but I ended up taking a sub-contract project in Thailand that involved a very strenuous workload and no time available for marketing. The second “revenue-cliff” arrived about the time I was growing tired of independent consulting downsides, smaller projects, fewer colleagues, constant marketing and the loss of autonomy of subcontract work. I joined Gemini Consulting, which was a good path for me, but it  wasn’t until later that I understood the bone-headed mistake that lead me there.

Bone-Headed Mistake # 3: Are you a Gig-Economy Freelancer or a Consultant?

There is no judgement implied here, but you have to choose.

A freelancer does “pair of hands” work, often subcontracting to former employers or small consulting firms. Freelancers tend to be generalists doing whatever needs to be done, trading some autonomy, for the convenience of someone else finding the client.

An independent consultant typically specializes in some core methodologies. She has a process, that is a way of doing the work, including, but not limited to, expert content (industry and discipline -strategy, technology, etc.) or a process methodology (continuous improvement or organization development, etc.). The consultant may work alone or with other independents, but must be good at avoiding Bone-head Mistakes #s 1 &  2.

Truthfully, I struggled with this distinction till later in my career, but my life would have been easier if I’d made the choice earlier. It would have helped me avoid bone-headed mistake #4.

Bone-Headed Mistake # 4: Not Making the ‘Build vs. Buy” Decision Well

This is still a hard choice for me. I like to learn; I am motivated by autonomy. I tend to think I can do anything myself. So I learned to put up this website, rather than hire a web designer as I did previously. Yeah, it took me longer and I didn’t price my time because, well, I’m retired, but it fits a pattern.

As an independent, I did my own administration, billing and bookkeeping, three-finger-typed my own letters, made my own PowerPoint slides. And. . . and this is the important bit. . . When I was overloaded I just knuckled-down to do more work myself when I should have hired another consultant to help.

The second time I became an independent consultant I left a firm after a disagreement with a boss. I took two clients I brought to the firm. I found some subcontract work to supplement and ultimately I took on a partner. Actually Keith found me and we were quite naïve about our collective ability to find new work together. Our break-up was a little messy and a result of poor decision making on bone-headed mistakes #s 1 & 3.

What Keith taught me is the value of hiring help where we needed. Later, when I formed the Results-Alliance and partnered with the late Dr. Richard Taylor, I had learned the value of putting the most skilled resource available on the job.

Independent consultants get stuck, imprisoned by their generalist capabilities and need for personal autonomy and control. They knuckle-down when  overloaded and fail to hire help, You might survive that way, but  you certainly can’t build a firm that way.

Bone-Headed Mistake # 5: Ignoring Self-Development

The best consulting firms offer internships to undergraduates, hire undergraduates, hire the same people back after they go for an MBA, JD or other graduate degree. The firms train consultants in workshops and in planned deployment on client and firm research projects. These firms provide mentors to guide the up-or out-choice, and the direct client development or thought leader choice.

What does the average independent consultant do? “Uh, I read the Wall Street Journal”

Yeah, it’s like that for some who are scrambling to find and deliver work and riding the revenue rollercoaster off the cliff occasionally.

Someone once told me “You are the product. If the client didn’t buy today, maybe they’ll buy the new and improved edition tomorrow, but expecting anyone to buy the worn-down and wearing-out version isn’t very realistic.” Save time for self-development, reading books, taking courses, working with colleagues who are smart and most especially taking time to reflect on and document what you’re learning. That’s what you’ll be offering tomorrow’s client.

Here’s the good news. I made all these bone-headed mistakes,  survived, thrived, and retired to live happily ever after. Yes, really. You can even do better than me if you’re not learning about bone-headed mistakes by making them yourself – again.

“I know. I’ll become an independent consultant.”

Consultants, corporate staff people, or executives came to this career epiphany before asking my advice. I gave them these five things to think about.

#1 Why?

The first question I asked was “Why?” because it helped me shape the advice.

Consultants felt limited at their firm. Maybe they missed a promotion and in “up or out” world, were headed OUT. Maybe they groused about compensation and said, “if I worked for myself  I could keep all the money.” Maybe they chafed at the power structure and wanted autonomy. These folks understood the work of consulting, but not sales, or how to consult without a team.

Staff people often wanted to be listened to like external consultants. These folks how to do a project, but not how to find one. They had few contacts outside of their firm.

Executives had reached a pension vesting plateau, or their firm downsized and they took a package “you’d have to be stupid not to take.” These folks were often the least realistic about the actual work of consulting, but they did have contacts.

When they articulated “Why” some realized they were being unrealistic; some didn’t.

#2 Who is your first client?

Almost no one wanted to start the conversation here. Very few had a client already. The worst had an eight-page website, six service offerings, had been “in business” for six months, and burned through their severance and called me weeks days before total desperation set in.

I broke through fog with the statement:

“Consulting is about serving clients. If you don’t have a client, no matter what your business card says, you are not a consultant; you are unemployed.”

We discussed how to find a client. Some staff and execs had work with their previous employer; some consultants had subcontract work with a small firm. Getting paid enough was a challenge. Subcontract consultants have even less autonomy than those on staff and when a company hires back ex-employees they often want more work without paying benefits.

I recommended everyone make a list of everyone they knew who might hire them and start making calls.

#3 What are you selling?

In my experience this question was either over or under thought. Consultants and some staff people crafted service offerings encompassing multiple issues. I encouraged these folks to focus. As an independent you’ll be remembered for one or two things.

Executives often expected to be “of counsel,” offering wise advice to other executives. I urged them to think of a business outcome where they have the greatest experience, i.e., new product development, new market entry, turnarounds, operations improvement, etc.

For some I expanded their definition of how they might work. I explained the difference between content consultants who sell advice and process consultants who sell help with a process like continuous improvement, or organization development.

#4 What is your business plan?

Too many didn’t have a business plan. Some told me “I’m not really starting a business. It’s just a way to earn big money with no investment or expenses.” My response wasn’t always kind.

Revenue?

I saw spreadsheets where revenue magically rose at three months.  I asked:

• How will you generate revenue? – it takes three to twelve months to sell a new consulting project. Will you find clients through:
  • Direct sales? How are your sales skills and contact list?
  • Writing? You typically must have multiple publications (HBR articles, books) to make a dent.
  • Public speaking? You have to sell engagements and rigorously follow-up any interest.
  • Referrals? This is how I developed business. I was very disciplined about asking “Who else should I be talking with?”.

Expenses?

I encouraged people to think about:

• Home office or rent – If you are you easily distracted spend the money on rent or shared space (Regus, Industrios, Spaces, LiquidSpac).
• Structure – LLC, S-Corp, Inc, or sole proprietor?
• Phones – I suggest a work mobile phone (separate from personal) and an answering service.
• Printing – many don’t own a printer, and proposals aren’t all digital yet.
• Administration – billing, accounting, documentation, etc. I did my own, but if you hate it or aren’t good, hire to alleviate headaches.
• Travel and accommodations – executives used to traveling first class don’t understand that this is rare in consulting.

#5 Tactical stuff

This is often what aspiring independent consultants want to talk about. I save it for last because until you have designed your business (#s 1- 4) tactical stuff is a waste of energy. The most frequent questions were:

• What should I charge? Consulting day-rates range from $500/day to $20,000 or more. Most independent consultants charge between $1000 -$5000, depending on their experience and client demand. Start with what you need to earn (including benefits, and expenses) and divide by 150 billed days a year to allow for marketing time, vacations, and administration. Then test that figure for competitiveness with some clients and other independents.
•  How do I ensure I don’t just work all the time? Most people don’t ask this, but they should. Schedule downtime after crunches or you’ll burn out. Contract with the client to keep your weekends mostly free, schedule vacations and family time, and be disciplined about it.
• How do I manage project flow so when one project ends another begins? This will never be seamless. If you save 25% of your time to market during delivery you can minimize revenue dropping to zero. Put marketing time on your schedule and (this is hard) don’t cancel it for paid work.
• How do I make sure I get paid? In your initial interviews include accounts payable so you understand the process. Big corporations manage their cash flow on the backs of their suppliers, especially the little guys. Set terms and stick to them. Never let a client slide to two billing cycles without a face-to-face collection conversation.
• Doesn’t it get lonely? It can. Make time for family, friends and neighbors. Build a network of other independents. Partner with some, sharing leads for a finder’s fee, discussing articles or attending courses or conferences.

Independent consulting is not for everyone and, despite what some books on Amazon say, few get investment banker or tech entrepreneur rich. I was an independent consultant for more than twenty years. I enjoyed the autonomy, constant learning, and challenge. Perhaps, with a little planning, you will too.

More about me