A Consulting FAQ

“Consulting”, what is it?

Consulting is giving expert advice in your professional field. Consulting is done across a wide range of disciplines including law, marketing, finance, engineering, accounting. Consulting is performed in virtually any professional field. By becoming a consultant you are telling the world that you are an expert in your field.

How do consultants work?

Consultants provide their client, or the company that hired them, with their expert knowledge, or a specific service, for a predetermined length of time. The arrangement is much like any other kind of contracted service. The consultant’s goal is to find a permanent solution to their client’s needs by providing professional advise and the latest information in the consultant’s field. As a consultant you are obligated to give your client your complete and undivided attention and skills in order to deliver on your client’s expectations.

What constitutes a great consultant?

A great consultant is one who is able to give their client, and the client’s organization, excellent ideas and motivation to execute those ideas. A great consultant also has to be prepared to handle complex situations that may even be somewhat hostile. The consultant must skilled in assessing the situation and be competent in knowing what needs to be done in any situation.

What types of consulting are there?

Generally there are two types of consulting, the specialist, and the generalist.

The specialist focuses on one area competency like their professional discipline or their specific industrial niche.

A generalist consults with the bigger picture in mind. The generalist usually goes to work with an company that delivers broader advice to many clients.

What are the requirements to be a consultant?

When an organization looks for a consultant, they are looking for someone with the ability to offer advice, create ideas, have insights into their industry, and share their expert knowledge. The consultant has to be able to provide their clients new and innovative ideas to create and implement an effective solution.

Many organizations interested in hiring a consultant want their consultant to have a college degree in their field. The consultant must have a genuine desire to help their clients in their area of need.

To avoid having to work long hours with people you do not enjoy working with, or that you just aren’t able to get along with, it is very important that a consultant be a people person in every sense. A consultant needs to enjoy working with all sorts of people.

Conclusion

This posting touched on just a few of the common question about being a consultant. Thoroughly research being a consultant before you actively look for clients to be sure this line of work is right for you. You can start with some of the resources provided below.

Resources

• Getting Started in Consulting
• Consulting From Home
• Learning and Managing Social Media for Consultants
• Consulting Now! – a multi-media online training course

Involve The Family In Your Home Business

You can read the various business forums out there and find stories illustrating how someone eagerly started a work at home business of some sort and their spouse began to belittle them, dampening the enthusiasm of the once ambitious entrepreneur. Search Google for “family business forums”.

Does your family participate in your home business or are you going it alone?

Luckily, my partner could see that I am not just a talker, that I do what I say I’m going to do. So their perception changed. It didn’t hurt that I was earning as much from my home based business as I had from my prior day job.

Three years have passed and I have heard too many stories about the failures of home business start ups. I have also learned that most family members, spouses, and friends react in such a way due to ignorance or fear that it’s damaging to the person running the start up. Perhaps some people are just mean spirited, but that’s something I’ll leave to the woman of The View to discuss.

Life is very, very, good for the lucky home business owner that has a family which encourage them. Imagine having a fourteen year old as a part-time assistant… and they want to help. Another plus is their small salary is a tax deduction.

Improving the family’s financial situation and preparing for their future is the number one reason “why” people start a home based business. So with such a strong reason to work from home, why not involve the entire family? After all, it is for them too.

How do you involve the family in your home business?

Create jobs that even the youngest family member can do in the family business. Also remember that doing, chores, watch the littler siblings, taking care of errands, having a turn making dinner, etc., are just as important as doing the home office work. Maybe more important as life skills.

Please don’t give up if you are suffering with a family that just doesn’t understand what you are doing. Keep growing your business and work on helping them to understand what you are doing. Often it will take a lot of time for family members who are not business minded to get their heads around what you are doing – don’t give up on them. Since money talks, you may not be taken seriously by the people closest to you until you show them the money you earn.

With persistence, and consistency, you will win your family’s acceptance of you work from home dream.

Your turn

Now take a moment and leave a comment sharing how your family helps, or hinders, your home business.

Further reading

• The Keys To Family Business Success
• Avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins That Destroy Family Businesses
• 9 Elements of Family Business Success

How I Failed With A Home Based Business, And You Don’t Have To

Do you want to run and operate a home based, or work from home, business? Do you think you have what it takes to run a business?

This is how I failed and my first home based business, learn from my mistakes.

There are seemingly countless home based business opportunities out there, both on and off the internet. You have the options of starting something on your own from scratch, or ordering a turn-key system from someone.

My problem was I got so excited about the possibilities that I didn’t focus enough on the details. All I saw was how much money I could make and little else. Deep down I knew I wouldn’t like doing the work required to succeed in the my work from home business. I kept thinking about the money I could make and told myself I could things I wasn’t comfortable with to become rich.

Basically, I failed because I had set unrealistic expectations for myself. I dreamed of quitting my day job and becoming my own boss. Then I came across one of those opportunities that seemed to good to be true, and it was. Don’t read into that. It was a legitimate opportunity and many people were being successful at it.

The problem is person-to-person sales makes me uncomfortable and this opportunity required exactly that. It required me to advertise and promote my business, and make numerous calls to grow my down line and sell products.

I spent an awful lot of money on advertising. The advertising got results too. But then I had to call each person who responded and try to close the sale. These calls would make me so uncomfortable that after spending several hours on the phone I was so stressed out that I wasn’t able to relax. It even got to the point that I wasn’t sleeping well at night. It got to the point where I just stopped making calls and all that advertising was a giant loss because I wasn’t able to follow up on my leads.

So you can see, it’s important to choose a business opportunity that is right for you, not because other people are making money with it. Focus on building a business that is right for you and the money will come.

Four guidelines for success

1. Be realistic about the business opportunity. If you will be required to do what you are not comfortable with you will not succeed.
2. Ignore the profit potential and choose something you will enjoy doing, because if you don’t like the business activity you will not succeed.
3. We can’t all succeed at the same thing. Just because someone is making $2000 or more a week does not mean you will. Different people can do different things well. Recognize your personal potential and stay within it.
4. Develop a budget for your home based business and stick to it. Never let someone talk you into spending more than you can afford, including yourself!

Further Reading

• Small Business Financial Management
• How to Choose a Home Based Business
• MLM Strategies
• How to Sell Face to Face Survival Guide