10 steps to launch a predictable, consistent, and successful solo consulting practice

[00:00:09.140] - Melissa Lieberman

You.

[00:00:11.900] - Emily Stringer

Good afternoon, everyone. I see we have quite a few participants joining us. We'll give you just a moment here to get settled in and then we'll get things underway. Thank you for your patience.

[00:00:35.910] - Emily Stringer

We're already up to 132, Melissa, great attendance.

[00:00:40.540] - Melissa Lieberman

Okay.

[00:00:41.590] - Emily Stringer

All right, it looks like we're starting to level off here right around 150, so we'll go ahead and get things started for everyone. Big welcome. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Welcome to Today's webinar: Ten Steps to Launch a Predictable, Consistent, and Successful Solo Consulting Practice featuring Melissa Lieberman, executive coach and founder of Melissa Lieberman Coaching, LLC. My name is Emily Stringer and I will be your moderator this afternoon.

[00:01:12.000] -  Emily Stinger

A little background on me, I work as a program manager in MBO's marketing department and I have served in an advisory capacity to independent consultants using our services for the past 12 years. In total, I've spent 14 years with the organization. Here at MBO Partners, we are contractor engagement and compliance specialist and are the chosen workforce optimization partner for over a third of the Fortune 100. Our mission is to make it easier for large enterprises and independent talent to work together. We make it easy for independents like you to start, run and grow their businesses through our unique dual-sided platform. Leverage the MBO platform while you work with one of our enterprise organizations. Find your next project in our marketplace or share ideas and earn cash in innovation challenges on Mindsumo there's something for everyone here at MBO. MBO has always been committed to advancing the next way of working, and we are far from done. We will continue to drive change on the ground, delivering innovative solutions that enable both organizations and talent to thrive in a constantly evolving workplace. Now for a few housekeeping items before we get started.

 [00:02:30.350] - Emily Stinger

First and foremost, please ensure that you are muted throughout the presentation. Secondly, at the end of today's presentation, we will host a formal Q&A session. You can use the Q&A function to send us any questions you would like Melissa to answer. Third, we will be emailing a slide deck and recorded copy of the entire webinar to all registrants within the next week. Finally, you can follow along virtually in several different places. Visit us on the web at www.Mbopartners.com/insights. Follow us on Instagram @mbo_partners, or follow the great realization, or MBO partners on LinkedIn. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce you to our speaker today, Melissa Lieberman. Melissa is an executive coach who specializes in helping independents grow their consulting practices into predictable and sustainable engines without working more or building a large team. Prior to becoming an independent, Melissa was a software executive who built a SaaS software company from the ground up to exit, serving Fortune 1000 clients across the globe. She's also an Accenture alum. Melissa is the author of the international bestseller Grow Your Consulting Business, The 14-step roadmap to make your independent consulting goals a reality. And she is also the host of the "Grow Your Independent Consulting Business" podcast.

[00:04:00.890] - Emily Stringer

Melissa, at this time, it's my pleasure to turn it over to you.

[00:04:04.440] - Melissa Lieberman

Amazing. Thank you Emily. I appreciate the introduction and you getting us all situated here and I'm excited to dive into this topic today. I've been a consultant or an independent consultant for almost twelve years now. I know you've had your own business also in conjunction with working at MBO and excited to share all of the content today. For those of you who are excited to start and launch a business, and also for those of you who might already have a business and want to strengthen some of the foundation. So that's what we're going to be focusing on today. The ten steps to launch a predictable, consistent and successful solo consulting business. If you're considering consulting, these ten steps that I'm going to share with you today will help you to have a clear plan to launch your business in more of an MVP style, minimum viable product so that you're not falling into the trap that a lot of consultants fall into, which is really getting ready for a long time. Building websites, doing things like that that are just unnecessary if you're brand new and if you're already an independent consultant. These ten steps will help you to revisit the fundamentals and strengthen some of the systems that you've got in your business so that you've got a more repeatable pipeline, so that you've got higher quality, higher paying engagements that you're attracting and are able to continue building upon what you've already started.

 [00:05:37.320] - Melissa Lieberman

So that's how I framed this up for you here today. And before we dive into the specifics, usually I wait to give you this till the end, but sometimes people have to drop off, so I'm going to give it to you now. And at the end also, Emily mentioned my book. She was just showing me a copy of it a moment ago. This is it. It's a true full book on how to grow your consulting business. And if you would like to download it for free, this is the link and I think Emily's going to put it in the chat as well. You can download the entire PDF for free so that is my gift to you here today. It will help you to take what we're talking about and apply it in a deeper level. So with that, let's dive into the topics, those ten steps. The first thing I want to ask you is, what do you want to take away? You're spending an hour here with us today. This is an hour of your time, which I know is so valuable. What do you want to take away from today's call? What would be the one or two things you want to walk away with from a tangible perspective that will help you to move forward toward your goals?

 [00:06:50.980] - Melissa Lieberman

So if you want to put that in the chat as we go, I'm going to come back and make sure that we're touching on those things. If you have questions, you can put those in the chat as well. Emily will interrupt me if they seem in the moment, or we'll wait for anything that isn't as needed in the moment. We'll have a Q&A part at the end as well. All right, so with that, let's talk about first and foremost, is consulting right for you? And then we'll dive into those ten steps. But I love to start off this type of presentation with really just getting a level set about independent consulting. A lot of times, people, I find, fall into independent consulting in one or two of two ways. It might be that this is truly what you want to be doing and you've been really thinking about it for a long time and maybe haven't had the push to pull the trigger. Or you may be in between corporate roles and really thinking about is this something you want to do for the long term and not go back into corporate? Those are typically the two types of reasons that I see when independent consultants start their business.

[00:08:04.700] - Melissa Lieberman

For me. I resigned from my corporate job and the company asked me to stay on as a consultant. It was never really something that I thought about intentionally, but I became an accidental consultant, and that's what started the journey for me. So as you're thinking about, why would you want to be a consultant? What is the driver for you? What does it look like to be an independent consultant? And I think it's important to recognize there are a lot of incredible benefits of being an independent consultant. And there's also some things and new skill sets that you're likely going to have to learn in order to be successful because most of us don't have the breadth of responsibility in our corporate roles that is required when you're running a business, a solo type of a business. So let's just be real here about what the good, the bad, the ugly are in terms of being an independent consultant. And I'm going to start from the bottom and then we'll work our way up. Overall, you have more autonomy. You can have more autonomy, you can have more flexibility, and you can have really the ability to own your own destiny, to work with the types of people you want to work with, doing the type of work you want to be doing and making any amount of money you want to be making.

[00:09:28.790] - Melissa Lieberman

But what it does require is your ability to juggle client delivery with all the other functions in your business. You're responsible as the business owner now for not only to be the consultant who's delivering the work in your business, but you're also wearing the hats of the person marketing your business to create leads, the person selling the work, the person doing the administrative functions. You may hire a bookkeeper or those kinds of things in the back end. I highly recommend that. But ultimately, you're responsible for your finances and for your own IT. All of this, it's all on you and it's your responsibility. But at the same time, you get that autonomy that goes with it. And so as we walk through this today, it's really important to set this stage because you get to own all of these functions and make the most of them. So I'm curious if you put it in the chat, where are you an independent consultant right now, or are you thinking about being an independent consultants and why? If you want to share those, I'll come back to them as we go and make sure that we're making this an interactive process as well.

[00:10:42.240] - Melissa Lieberman

So let's talk about a few more context-setting slides, and then we'll dive into those ten steps. What does it take to succeed as a business owner? We think about things like, obviously, you need to have the capabilities, you need to have the experience to consult in whatever the function is that you're consulting in with your type of ideal clients. But around that surrounding those capabilities and your experience. Whether you've been a consultant at Accenture or Eny or Deloitte or Mackenzie, whatever you've done in the past as a consultant, or maybe you've been an internal someone who's worked in the industry for a long time and you have that out on the ground expertise and experience to bring to the table whichever of those two angles, if not both of them, you're bringing those capabilities to bear. But around that are so many other tangible and intangible qualities that you want to be building up in order to succeed as an independent consultant. And those are things like moving out of an employee mindset into a business owner mindset and self-identity where you're thinking about things as a business owner. Let me give you an example.

[00:12:03.030] - Melissa Lieberman

You may have been subordinate in the past to the types of clients that you're working within an org chart. You may have been subordinate to the people who are now buying your consulting services. Now you're a business owner, you're a peer to those individuals. You're an advisor to those individuals who are engaging you to take on work. So you're starting to think about and build a different self-identity for yourself. You can no longer rely on the brand name of your former company, whatever that was, to help you get a foot in the door. Now you're building your own reputation as an expert and a thought leader in whatever part of the industry that you're in. So you're really wanting to, from a success perspective, think about purposefully building that self-identity. We're going to get to some of the more specifics here in a moment, but I think it's really important to set the stage about what it takes from an emotional perspective and from a mindset perspective to be successful as an independent consultant. It also takes a lot of courage. A lot of courage. You're going to be rejected, you're going to fail, and you're going to want to build up that courage and that resilience to keep going, even though things aren't going to go the way you expect them to go all of the time.

[00:13:23.950] - Melissa Lieberman

And then finally having that commitment to, as we talked about before, you may be between corporate roles and exploring independent consulting as an avenue, for example. Or you might be newer to independent consulting and not exactly sure what you're getting yourself into. Having that commitment to say, I'm going to figure this out, I might go back to corporate in a year or in two years, but right now I'm committed to figuring this out and not letting yourself kind of waver back and forth between should I do this or not? Is going to be a really important component to your success. I've touched on the willingness to test and fail is so important. You're not going to succeed at everything. You're not going to be good at everything when you first start out, especially marketing and selling yourself. And so getting yourself into that headspace can be really important. So those are some of the components that it takes to succeed as an independent consultant. Now let's talk about the evolution of a consulting practice and then we're going to dive into those very specific ten steps. The evolution of a consulting practice can look like being dependent on other channels.

[00:14:35.900] - Melissa Lieberman

For example, to start off with, it might be marketplaces like MBO that bring a lot of that work to you from when you very first start out. It might be that you're relying on recruiters or agencies or your immediate network to land those first type of engagements, which is great, that's a great place to start. Let's hit the low-hanging fruit for you to land those first couple of clients and we'll talk in more detail here in a moment about what that looks like with specifics. Then you start building your reputation. You start figuring out what is it that you want to be known for. What is it that you want to have a reputation around? And you start making yourself known to your network for a certain type of work that you are doing and the niche that you're providing and the specialization. And you start having more control over your pipeline and the types of clients you're attracting and the type of work you're doing and the way you're able to price for that work. And then ultimately you start moving up the ladder, becoming more known for what you do. So it creates inbound opportunities where people are messaging you, emailing you, calling you, saying, hey, I've got this problem, can you come take a look at it?

[00:15:48.030] - Melissa Lieberman

We're looking for a consultant who has the level of expertise that you have. And you might start doing some speaking and some writing about your own specialization and knowledge that you've accumulated. And then finally you get to the place where you're sought after, where you're not only known for what you do, but you've got such a reputation that you've got more demand than supply, you have more potential engagements than the amount of time that you have available to support those. And you may satisfy those by hiring some subcontract or engaging subcontractors to help you deliver the work. Or you might take on this work, be really selective about the type of work you do, and refer the work you don't want to do to other people. So this is what's possible for you from an independent consulting perspective. And I think it's so important because especially when we're starting something brand new, there's so many different things you've got to learn and get control over and get into place that it can be hard to think about the bigger picture. And that's why I want to really share this with you today. There's so much possible for you as an independent consultant as you're going through these steps in this evolution.

[00:17:06.070] - Melissa Lieberman

All right, with that, let's dive into. I'm going to come back to the slide I just skipped here in a moment, but let's dive into these ten steps to help you get started. Some of these are going to be very tactical, and some of them are going to be higher level. But I'm going to give you first the blueprint here. And then we're going to dive into each one of these in detail. You want to get some basics in place. I put the time frame here for a very specific reason, because some of us are afraid to start putting ourselves out there, and so we stay in the basic stage for too long. And I want to help you avoid that. So I would set yourself a time box for a couple of weeks. Whether you have some of these in place or all of these in place, it doesn't matter. Or you may be already a more seasoned business owner and you want to come back to the fundamentals, go back and look at these basics. So we're going to dive into each one of these in detail here in a moment. But you will start off with the basics.

[00:18:08.750] - Melissa Lieberman

Then we're going to land your first client or your next client, whichever those things are. And then you want to start building that into a repeatable system so that it feels more sustainable for you, so that it feels less overwhelming for you so that it feels more repeatable for you. And you get to the place where you're not having worries about cash flow or the ups and downs and peaks and valleys in the type of business that you're running. That is one of the drawbacks of this business. It can be one of the drawbacks of this business model is that because everything is on you and you land a client and maybe you go all in on that client and you neglect your business for a period of time, then you create peaks and valleys in terms of cash flow. So we want to really be able to help you even that out with that repeatable system. Okay, so with that, let's start with step one. This might sound backwards, but I want to tell you, this is truly the first step for you, deciding that no matter what, you're going to succeed. So many of us take this approach of let's see, let me see what happens, and then I'll decide if I'm.

[00:19:18.110] - Melissa Lieberman

And then I'll know if I'm going to be successful or not at this. It requires you from a mindset perspective to start off with deciding you are going to succeed no matter what and having that certainty. And I will tell you, there are days, look, I've been doing this for almost twelve years. There are certainly days that I wonder, is my success so far a fluke? Maybe I should go back to Corporate. It feels a little bit more easy. It feels more certain. It feels like less pressure. There are days after twelve years of doing this and having my own formula and a book under my belt and a podcast with 160 ish episodes almost, not quite there, but almost 160 episodes, that I even wonder, is this a fluke? Is this success going to go away or am I going to succeed? This is an ongoing process for you to get to the place where, you know, this is part of the game, that you have to decide ahead of time that you're going to succeed, that you're going to make this successful no matter what. I like to set, especially in the very beginning, set yourself a time frame.

[00:20:30.960] - Melissa Lieberman

Tell yourself, I'm going all in on this for the next six months or to the end of the year, or for the next three months, whatever it is for you in your specific circumstances, and set that time frame and give yourself some rules that you're not going to think about. Let's see if I'll be successful, or let's see how the market responds to me, or let me see if I sign a client so that I can feel like I'm going to succeed. It's you deciding, I am successful at this. I am becoming successful at this. In order to set yourself up for that success, anytime you start second-guessing yourself or that naysayer in your mind, that inner critic starts taunting you, you're redirecting that and getting yourself into an experimental mindset. There are going to be things that do not work that you try. There are going to be things that do work that maybe you weren't sure it would work, but you go forward with it anyway and then you're able to build upon that. So you want to approach this with an experimental mindset, not a mindset of I'm going to do this right or I'm doing this wrong.

[00:21:41.470] - Melissa Lieberman

So with that foundation, the next step is for you to set your goals. So when you think about your goals, I like to think about them in four quadrants. What are your financial goals? You may want to start off with replacing your corporate income. That's a common goal that I find most new consultants have. That's a great next step. Or you might get to the place where you want to double that. Wherever you're at, set yourself a financial goal. I meet with so many consultants every week, my own clients who are consultants and people who are not yet my clients that I'm networking with or that type of thing, they know I'm going to ask them this question because I even give them a PDF before we meet about things to think about. And I ask them, what is your financial goal? And they say I don't have one. I don't have one because I'm worried that I might not hit it. I don't know enough to know what my financial goal would be. That's not the way you set a goal. You know this. You've set goals in your corporate life. You've set goals in your personal life.

[00:22:44.980] - Melissa Lieberman

You might even be helping your own clients set their goals. You've got to set a financial goal, a target to go toward. If you don't hit the goal, the skill set you want to be building is one of curiosity. Why didn't I hit the goal? What can I do differently to hit that goal next quarter, for example, versus trying to manipulate a goal that you can hit that makes you feel good? So think about what is your financial goal? What is your lifestyle goal? What do you want your schedule to look like? Do you want to work ten months out of the year now? Do you want to work four days out of the week now? What is the goal from a financial and lifestyle perspective? And those two things don't have to be in conflict. What is your goal from a fulfillment perspective? What types of clients do you want to work with and not work with? What types of engagements do you want to work on that are fulfilling for you? You're doing this type of business so that you have the autonomy to take on the type of work you want to be doing and not decline the work you don't want to be doing.

[00:23:55.060] - Melissa Lieberman

So really getting clear with yourself, what are the goals around all of these? And then you may have something else that's important to you. So what is that other bucket in your own business that makes sense that you want to be pursuing? And I like to use the driving principle here, if anything's possible, what do you want? If anything's possible, what do you want? You can have these four components together. They don't have to be sacrificing one at the expense of the other. So getting really clear with yourself about what you want. So tell me in the chat. Tell Emily and I in the chat, what are your goals. If you had to choose one or two right now, even if you're even contemplating starting a business, or maybe you've started one already and you don't yet have goals, you have the goal resistance we were talking about. Put those goals in the chat. And as you think about the rest of the webinar that I'm sharing with you today, the rest of the content I'm sharing with you today, how does the strategies and the tactics and the answers you're coming up with, with these next several steps that I'm going to give you flow back into the goals that you want to be achieving?

[00:25:05.550] - Melissa Lieberman

Okay, I'm just going to give you a checklist. Now, this one's really simple. And let me tell you, I was working with a brand new consultant-client who I started working with this week, and he's been in business for five or six years now and he's still using his Gmail account. So I'm just giving you this checklist so that you can go back through this if you've been in business for a long time or you're brand new, and just make sure all of these things are short up. It won't take you very long, but it definitely helps you to make sure that you're coming across in a professional manner and that you are a business owner. You're not operating your business off of Gmail. Or I had one the other day that was an AOL account. I didn't even know they were still in business or that was even an option to have an AOL account. So you do not want to be operating your business off of that type of an email address, right? You want to have a business account, you want to have a bank account, you want to have a business profile on LinkedIn, so you have a logo there.

 [00:26:10.470] - Melissa Lieberman

Just take some steps, if you haven't done this already, to get yourself into the place where you're really thinking about yourself as a business. You're not thinking of yourself as a contractor. You're thinking about yourself as a business owner who's running a business. It happens to be a business of one, and you're doing it in a professional manner. These things are not very costly. Most of them are low-cost or free. And getting yourself into that place where you're operating and thinking of yourself as a business, this goes into that business owner self-identity. If you download that, we'll share with you a PDF at the end. That gives you even a greater checklist even of how to get started with your business. But this gives you a starting point here. Okay, the next step, step number four, create an MVP offer. Minimum viable product. Minimum viable product. This doesn't have to be overly complicated. Again, you want to just spend a couple of no more than a week or two on this, but getting yourself clear about what it is that you want to do and what you don't want to do. So, for example, it can be really difficult to go to market and it can be very competitive.

[00:27:30.050] - Melissa Lieberman

If you go out and say, I'm a project manager, I'm a project manager. That was one of the first things that I was doing for my corporate clients when I started out as a consultant. I was doing a lot of project management, program management, quite frankly, things that I could have done. I was doing things that were things that I had done probably ten years prior in the course of my career. I'm not talking about what it is that you're doing. I'm talking about how you want to describe yourself as you're starting to network, as you're starting to talk with people that you know about what it is that you're doing and just getting pretty clear about it so that they understand and can relate to what it is that you're saying. So let me give you some examples. And it's a combination of what are the types of problems you solve. What are the outcomes you deliver, who is your target clients and why do these things matter to your ideal client? It will help you to land the types of roles that you're looking to land, whether it's through a marketplace or a recruiter, or your warm network.

 [00:28:35.980] - Melissa Lieberman

Getting really clear about, getting really clear about that. So let me give you a couple of examples. These things also can go into your LinkedIn profile, right? And into the way that you're verbalizing what it is that you do. Okay, so I'll give you a couple of examples. I specialize in helping series B tech startups operationalize their implementation methodology so they're more profitable, increase client retention, and are able to scale to a billion dollars. Something around that. Those are the elements that might get someone really more excited to continue a conversation with you. Or you might be a fractional chief marketing officer who helps e-commerce platforms build and execute marketing strategy to increase their lead quality and conversions. Like really think about what it is that you want to be doing, who you want to be working with, and why the type of work that you're wanting to do matters to those types of clients and having that type of MVP service offering and positioning created for yourself so that it helps you to update your LinkedIn profile and those outward-facing assets as well as helps you to ground the types of conversations that you're having with your network so they understand what it is that you're doing and then can either have follow on conversations because they have that type of problem in their organization, or refer you and connect you to other types of companies and people who have the types of problems that you're solving.

 [00:30:13.900] - Melissa Lieberman

So be careful. Don't over-perfect this. It is something that's constantly evolving and you're refining it through conversations, but it helps to have a starting point for yourself. And you can do this through market validation interviews. You might go out and talk to three or four people in your network and ask them, what about what you do really stands out. I was just working with an independent consultant a moment ago, and she does a lot of high-tech type of payment consulting, so helping companies to set up their e-commerce-type payment solutions and systems. And she's been having conversations with people in her network, and they've reflected back to her how her experience and knowledge is very specialized in her industry. She didn't realize it because she's in her own head, and it's hard to see where you're different. And so that's why those kind of, I'll call them market validation interviews. But it's just simply a conversation with people who know you really well and can help you to refine what it is that you do that's unique, that other people that you might not necessarily recognize for yourself. Okay, let's move on. Let's ask you the question now.

[00:31:35.310] - Melissa Lieberman

What is your offer like? If you had to just describe what it is that you do, how you want to be known for as an independent consultant, as you're starting out here, or as you're optimizing your business even further, what is the one thing that you want to be known for, and how would you describe that? You could put that in the chat as well. We're building a playbook as we go here. So I'm asking you these questions so that by the time we're done here today, you've got some really good fundamentals in place that then you can build upon further. Okay, now let's talk about pricing. This is a question I get from almost every consultant. How should I price what I do? And I want to point you to one of the MBO resources. It's their bill rate calculator. So I put the link there, and Emily might throw it in the chat. I just sprung that on, so. But the link is up there. It's a great tool, and these are some of the basics of that tool. And you want to be thinking about a few things. When it comes to pricing.

[00:32:37.790] - Melissa Lieberman

Ultimately it can be very valuable for you to get to the place where you're not charging by the hour or any time-based billing, where you're charging based on value. That is. Ultimately, if you think about that evolution I gave you at the beginning, you want to be thinking about getting to the place where your value is really clear, what you offer is really clear, and you're charging off of that value versus off of the time you're spending to deliver for a client. But the easiest way to get started is to charge by the hour or by the day to start off with as you're landing those first couple of clients. Or you might be a more seasoned consultant and you're wanting to shift into a different type of service offering. For example, maybe you've been doing some project management so far and you want to move into something that feels more strategic. You can go back and leverage this type of a tool to get a few of those clients under your belt and then start moving into different types of pricing models. So here's a very simple calculator for you which is based off of what you've been previously making, or what you want to be making and thinking about what was your salary, what were your bonuses.

[00:33:51.580] - Melissa Lieberman

Did you have any stock options or other type of equity and getting a good sense of what that number was? In this case, example, I gave you 280 and then adding on 40% for other costs. So you're going to have insurance, you're going to have taxes and things like that. So getting yourself to that full comp amount, like in this case, 392, and then dividing that down by how many hours you want to be working. I probably should have put 30 here. In hindsight, you really want to keep some time available to work on your business as well. So let's say it's 30 ish hours a week and then how many weeks of the year that do you want to be working? Make sure that you give yourself vacation, for example. So in this case it came out to about $200 an hour. And that can be a good starting point for you. Just keep it simple. I would recommend going and using that MBO bill rate calculator you can type in. It's not this exact calculator, but it's similar. And you'll put in some data points and it'll give you a number as well.

[00:34:54.970] - Melissa Lieberman

So that'll give you a starting point from a pricing perspective. Then you want to create yourself a one-pager. Go on Canva and find something that looks sort of similar like this. I recommend sometimes you're required to have a resume. Sometimes if you're on a marketplace, they might ask you to have a resume. But you want to be positioning yourself as a company, not as someone who's looking for a job in all the situations where you can. So think about what you're doing from a business owner perspective and position what you're doing as a consultant, as a business. And that's why you would have something like this as a one-pager. We're not using this one-pager to sell anything. We're using this one-pager as a leave-behind. Or someone says, hey, I enjoyed our conversation. I want to connect you to this person that I think is looking for the type of thing that you do. Do you have any information? I might be able to send them in advance of that introduction or as part of that introduction, you would give this to them. So again, we're not spending an inordinate amount of time creating these things.

[00:36:00.120] - Melissa Lieberman

We're just spending a couple of weeks having some of these business basics in place that gets us through the first stream. The basics. Now we're going to start down this next couple of steps, which are about landing your first client or your next client, and that involves uncovering those potential clients. And I like to just simplify it, really, which is you're meeting people, you're adding value. I'll tell you some examples of this here in a moment. You're meeting people, you're adding value. You're proposing a next step, and you're learning and adjusting and doing it all over again. If you don't have a client right now and you don't have a pipeline, you're doing a lot of this. Once you land clients, you're doing some maintenance level of this to keep a pipeline going so you don't have gaps in your revenue. So let's talk in more detail about what these mean specifically in practice. Meeting people, talk to people in your network. Sometimes I talk to consultants and they say, well, I don't feel like I have everything together. I don't want to waste a relationship or a call with someone that I already know.

[00:37:14.680] - Melissa Lieberman

You're not pitching anything to anyone. You're having conversations with people and using your consulting skills, which means asking a lot of questions, asking a lot of questions, and getting a sense of what the challenges are of those people that are in your network and why they haven't been able to overcome those challenges. What are their business objectives for the year? Asking a lot of questions to then get to the point where you may have a great solution to those challenges, or you may not. You may want to refer them to someone else who is able to help them. At this point, when you're meeting people, you're not coming at it with wanting to sell them something or having a specific agenda in mind. You're wanting to talk to as many people as possible, to let them know what they're doing, what you're doing, and to get to know them and advance the relationship from there. In those conversations and afterward, you're adding value. You're asking great questions. How much of your time is ever spent just talking with someone and hearing them? That's incredibly valuable for that other person, sharing resources with them. Perhaps you have some kind of a deliverable from a past engagement that you've been on or from your corporate experience, a framework that might be valuable to them, a case study, an example.

[00:38:40.790] - Melissa Lieberman

Or you may offer to introduce them to someone, thinking about, how can I add value to this person to further our relationship. And then you would propose a next step. A next step might look like, hey, listen, what we were talking about today is really similar to what I do. Would you be open to having another conversation about the specifics of that and to see how I might be able to help you? So you recommend a strategy session or high-level road mapping or some form of a diagnostic or an assessment or a lunch and learn? You might offer to say, look, I would love to come in and talk to your organization or your team or your division or your business unit about this particular situation and share with them methods for which they can navigate conflict in the organization or create a stronger marketing roadmap, whatever it is that you do in terms of your own function, and then finally putting a process in place for yourself, of constantly evaluating how these conversations are going, how you could improve them, what's working that you want to continue doing and build upon. Creating that type of process in your business where you're constantly learning and iterating and improving is incredibly important.

[00:40:05.740] - Melissa Lieberman

Not feeling like you're either good at this or not good at this. Knowing that whatever it is and wherever you're at, you can consistently and constantly improve. Okay, let's go through the last couple of steps and then we'll open it up to questions. Land your first clients. This is selling. This is selling. Most of us don't want to sell anything. I know for sure when I was in corporate, I definitely was usually the beneficiary of something that was oversold that then I had to go fix. Right. You may have been in the same boat where you weren't in the sales organization, but you were receiving clients from the sales organization and had to clean up a lot of things that were overpromised. We have so many things in our head about what sales is like, but at the end of the day, if you think about, and of course, then it becomes even more challenging because we start thinking we're selling ourselves. No one wants to sell our. You don't want to sell yourself? I don't want to sell myself because it becomes even more awkward. We feel like we start making it about ourselves instead of about the clients and what they're trying to achieve.

 [00:41:19.580] - Melissa Lieberman

And so if you think about landing that first client or that next client, from the vantage point of number one, you're not selling yourself. Let's put your business owner hat on. You are not selling yourself. This is not an interview. There are so many consultants who treat this process like an interview. You are not interviewing for another job. What you are doing is, as a business owner to a potential client, asking them a lot of questions, getting a sense of what their challenges are, figuring out creative ways and solutions to offer to them that will help them to achieve whatever their business goal is, and helping to create a relationship with them where they see you as someone that they can trust, that is a true consultant to them, who will help them to reach their business goal or to overcome a problem that they're having in their organization, and ultimately to create a solution that then you're able to agree to that scope. You have a really clear understanding of what is the approach. Why does the approach matter to them? A lot of times I talk to consultants and they tell me, okay, can you review my proposal, and let's talk about it?

[00:42:31.570] - Melissa Lieberman

And I ask them very simple questions about why does the potential client care about this. Why does it matter to them that they achieve this thing, this scope that you've described in your proposal? And a lot of times, consultants don't know the answer. We get really nervous about this process, and we don't actually know why the client, potential client wants to pursue this type of work. And so getting really good at understanding what that is and agreeing to that scope, then providing them with a proposal. You don't want to jump into a proposal till you really understand those business drivers and the inputs that would go into your pricing and then ultimately capturing those learnings. You'll see that as part of every step here, you want to be folding back what you're learning into your business so you can improve time and time and time again. I still do this. I've been doing this for twelve years. I'm still learning. And you will be too. We all are. If you're not, then your business isn't growing. Okay, so you're landing that first client and then you're going to make sure that you balance delivery with running the business.

[00:43:45.510] - Melissa Lieberman

Do not fall into the trap that so many consultants fall into. I skipped a slide earlier about what are the lessons learned. This is the biggest lesson learned, balancing delivery with running the business. You did not just land yourself another job where you're working with that client 40 hours a week. You are a business owner in addition to whatever it is that you're doing for your client. So you want to be balancing these two things, your client journey and building a referenceable client and helping them get the results that they want to be getting. Of course, very important. At the same time, you don't want to neglect your business. You want to be working on lead generation. You want to be working on managing your capacity. How do you take on more than one client at a time? You want to be building your reputation and thinking about your business in a strategic way. And then finally you want to become that business owner. Really thinking about. We talked about that at the very beginning. What are the components of success for you as an independent consultant? And it might sound kind of fluffy, but I will tell you, this is at the heart of everything.

[00:44:54.110] - Melissa Lieberman

You thinking of yourself as a business owner, how you think of yourself. So many of us have impostor syndrome, we think we don't know enough or we could never be good at sales or bad at selling. Whatever it is, the way you think about yourself is incredibly important because you cannot expect your potential clients to see you as a confident, successful thought leader, someone that they would go to as a consultant to help them achieve their goals. If you haven't first thought of yourself in that way, you want to be deepening and strengthening the way you think of the value that you deliver for your clients and constantly iterating that, that MVP offer, building upon that and getting really clear and even more clear as you go about what is the value you deliver to your clients and why they care about that value. And then you also want to be strengthening and deepening your reputation. Doing things like speaking, doing things like writing and thought leadership so that you are building a reputation so you can go up that curve and be the sought-after consultant for whatever that you do in your space so that it makes it easier for you to acquire new business and easier to juggle the client delivery with the running of the business.

[00:46:17.130] - Melissa Lieberman

So those are the ten steps for you to launch a predictable, not just launch a business, but a predictable, sustainable, successful consulting business, and to be able to really write your own journey as you go forward with your consulting business. So before we open up into questions, I also wanted to let you know that on my website I have this downloadable PDF. It's the twelve steps to start a consulting business. So it touches on the concepts we talked about today and gives you a more detailed checklist and more content behind the things that we touched on in today's go. I think Emily will put that link to that in the chat and then I'll give you the link again to go download the book so that you can start putting these concepts into place. And then we will open it up for Q&A, Emily.

[00:47:14.790] - Emily Stringer

Excellent. The chat is on fire.

[00:47:16.920] - Melissa Lieberman

Ok, I can't wait.

[00:47:17.920] - Emily Stringer

Moving up the screen faster than I can put them in. However, your links are available. We will also, just as a reminder, send out a recorded copy of the entire session today, including these links within the next week for everyone's viewing pleasure. So that will be on the way. Melissa, we have gotten quite a few good questions during this presentation, which is super exciting. So thank you for the great information. I think this was thought-provoking to get everybody at least moving toward the steps to really launch and grow a sustainable business.

[00:47:57.110] - Emily Stringer

So we did have a lot of folks who are asking generally about finding their next project, growing their pipeline, how to convert contacts into real leads. So maybe you could talk a little bit about building that pipeline.

[00:48:12.750] - Melissa Lieberman

Okay, and that's where this process comes into play. A lot of times we think we need something more sophisticated than what I just shared with you. I've had people ask me, should they run ads. What should they be doing? And at the end of the day, it is incredibly, using the most basic process is the most effective to start landing those clients. And what that involves is meeting people who either need what you do or who know people who need what you do. It's as simple as that. It might not be easy, because we oftentimes get in our own heads, but at the end of the day, when you're thinking about who is the type of client, who do you already know who might need what you do? So that's your network. It might be past clients, past corporate clients, past employers, past colleagues, or peers. It might be marketplaces like MBO where you're finding the types of people who need what you do. It might be in your network where they're connected to the types of people that need what you do. You're uncovering those people at the beginning of your business. It's going to look like a lot of phone calls, a lot of Zoom calls, a lot of lunches or coffees.

[00:49:48.880] - Melissa Lieberman

It's going to look like you talking to a lot of people and getting really good at moving them to the next step, which is an opportunity where you're recommending to them. Look, what you're telling me is exactly what I do. I would love to come in and have another conversation with you about the specifics of the challenges that you're facing, and it may be something I can help with, or it might be something that isn't necessarily in my wheelhouse, but I know that we can help you move forward to get more clarity around what your strategy is in this area. Those types of steps where you're having as many conversations as possible, and you're getting really good at having those conversations and moving them into opportunities where then you're able to talk with those potential clients in more detail, understand what their challenges are. Marketplaces like MBO have a lot of, obviously, they have people looking for resources like you to fill those roles. You might also talk with people who are looking for full-time resources and interviewing for them and recommending you as a more fractional type of a resource. There's a lot of different ways to start finding those people.

[00:51:04.710] - Melissa Lieberman

But the question you want to be asking yourself is, who are the types of people that I already know or who know people I already know who have the types of problems that I want to be solving and building my business around?

[00:51:18.630] - Emily Stringer

I completely agree with that advice. Melissa, your network is your network

[00:51:22.540] - Melissa Lieberman

Yes, yes.

[00:51:23.830] - Emily Stringer

I say that more times a day than I know what to do with. I think that's wonderful advice. And really thinking about that active business development and going out and talking to your network versus building your passive business development pipeline, which is where you have marketplaces like ours or talent exchange or Catalant or Toptal, and really having a balance between the two, it's the best way to go forward.

[00:51:48.290] - Melissa Lieberman

Yeah, absolutely. You want to have a couple of different channels so that you're not dependent on anyone and can really fill that pipeline quickly and keep it filled.

[00:52:01.230] - Emily Stringer

Absolutely. So we had a couple of folks who reached out about identifying vendors for various different business services and how to vet those businesses, how to determine if they're really going to drive worth for what you're trying to accomplish. So perhaps you can give a little bit of advice on helping to vet those out and knowing who's legit and who's not.

[00:52:22.730] - Melissa Lieberman

Yeah. Okay, Emily, give me a little bit more context. What type of vendors are they talking about?

[00:52:27.850] - Emily Stringer

So the ones that I'm hearing about would be marketing assistance, legal help, accounting assistance, and even related to software?

[00:52:37.460] - Melissa Lieberman

Yeah. Okay. I'll give you a few resources from a software perspective. If you go to my website, I've got a blog article on tools that you can leverage as an independent consultant. And I know MBO has a lot of those types of blog articles as well. So I would go to some trusted resources to find those types of answers that work specifically with independent consultants. So that's the key here, right? You don't want to be going out and finding like, for example. Well, first of all, I would not recommend hiring a marketing agency at this point in your trajectory, especially if you're brand new. A lot of times it's not even an effective strategy for consultancies that are at a million or 2 million because it is such a unique skill set that you bring to the table and hard for general marketing agencies to really understand and grasp what you do. So there are some things that you want to be really clear about. What is not great to outsource from the beginning or potentially ever. Then the second component is the same thing that I just recommended, and Emily recommended to you to go find clients from a networking perspective and from a referral perspective, you want to be doing the same thing with those organizations as well.

[00:53:59.050] - Melissa Lieberman

I always love to get referrals from my network about who is the best lawyer for my state, for example, to leverage. So you just want to be really careful. I think the biggest trap I find is that consultants jump too quickly into some of those types of outsourcing when it's not quite the right time in their.

[00:54:25.410] - Emily Stringer

Absolutely, And, you know, with the Internet at our fingertips, you have groups on LinkedIn that you can leverage your opinions. You have Reddit where you can discuss literally anything and find recommendations. So the world is your oyster when it comes to that. We've also had folks have really good luck on Fiverr. I heard that from customers, too, Melissa. But for creative services, we've had really great luck hiring other independents. 

[00:54:48.950] - Melissa Lieberman

Yeah, absolutely. There's, I love hiring other independents.

[00:54:53.850] - Emily Stringer

Yeah, absolutely. It's an ecosystem.

[00:54:57.000] - Melissa Lieberman

That's right.

[00:54:57.950] - Emily Stringer

Excellent. We'll have time for probably two more questions here. Let's switch gears and talk a little bit about pricing and monetization. So we had someone who wrote in, curious about pricing coming from a place that charges upward of 400 an hour for me. What are the things I need to think about, though, when I price my services as an independent consultant? Obviously, you're not going to sell your services at the $400 an hour the PwC is, but you might be able to get upward of half of that.

[00:55:33.290] - Melissa Lieberman

Yeah. I like to look at the pricing from two angles I gave you today. The starting point. You need to know what your floor is. You need to know what is the bare minimum that you're willing to sell. Your capacity. That is your inventory. Right. If you think about yourself as a business owner, your capacity, the amount of time you have to allocate to clients is your inventory. So you really want to be clear about what is the bare minimum that you would sell that inventory for, especially when you're starting out. It may be that number, that calculation that I gave you in the beginning, which is it came out to, I think, $200 an hour. And then you want to compare that to what is the. And get really good in this discovery. If we go to this next step about understanding the scope of what they're looking for, getting really good at the questions that you ask those consultants, or, I'm sorry, your clients so that you have an understanding of what the impact of the work is that you're doing, they will likely tell you as you're going through things. This is attached to a $12 million savings goal.

[00:56:46.450] - Melissa Lieberman

This work is intended to increase the amount of revenue that we're driving by 50 million. This is intended to reduce the amount of turnover that we've got in our organization that's costing us x amount. So, getting really clear and you can go. There's an article on my website about the 36 questions that consultants ask their prospects and clients. If you go find that article on my blog, it gives you those types of questions that you can be asking so that you can understand what their budget is, what are the considerations for their budget, and what you might be recommending to them. So building out your pricing framework around those types of things where you know your bottom number, and then also you're understanding the business value so that you can then come back with a proposal.

[00:57:37.810] - Emily Stringer

That's great advice, Melissa. Shameless plug for one of your previous webinars, folks who are interested in pricing. Melissa did a fabulous session called Charge what you're worth with us. So that lives at wW, mbopartners.com, slash events, and you can view all of our prior webinars and check out that content if you're interested in the subject. We'll have time for one more question here. So, on the subject of money, right? For someone who's in a situation where they're spending time advertising and advertising and chasing clients and presenting, but that isn't turning into monetization, what recommendations do you have to help streamline that sales process so more time is spent on monetized hours versus selling hours?

[00:58:27.310] - Melissa Lieberman

Yeah, it really comes down to understanding you've got to be able to diagnose in your business what's going on with your sales process and with your lead generation process. So Emily, if they use the word advertise, that is probably a good first starting point. We're not advertising anything, let's say that you're posting on LinkedIn, you're not advertising your services there, you're not promoting your services, you're not pitching yourself. If you go to the podcast, there's a whole episode about pitching yourself. And the whole point is that you're not pitching yourself. We use that vernacular a lot as independent consultants. And of course, when I say the word, it feels pressure-y to me. I've got to go pitch myself, It feels very high stakes. Instead, you want to be thinking about when you're looking at your lead generation process, what is working and what is not working and why is what you're doing not working and being able to diagnose that for yourself to figure out what else do you want to go test in order to increase the effectiveness of your process. So it may look like you might be doing a lot of networking, but you're not talking to the right people.

[00:59:46.330] - Melissa Lieberman

Ask yourself, how do I get in front of the right people? Ask yourself higher-quality questions. A lot of times we think we ask ourselves the question, why am I not getting in front of the right people? That's not a valuable question to ask yourself. You could come up with 1000 reasons why it's not working. You want to shift the question to how do I get in front of higher of more decision makers? How might I shift my lead generation process so that I'm spending more time of my business development allocation on those types of conversations that will then lead to potential work? So asking yourself and really thinking about and refining what it is that you're doing right now that is leading the good conversations, you want to do more of that and then thinking about what is it that you're doing and how are you spending your time. That's not leading anywhere and being very purposeful about not pursuing that anymore. But I would say you definitely don't want to be advertising yourself. You want to be providing value to your ideal clients so that they're then seeing that you've got the true capability and knowledge and expertise to help them with whatever the challenges they may be facing.

[01:01:05.180] - Emily Stringer

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Melissa. Well, guys, we have reached the end of our time here together. I know there are a lot of questions we didn't get to. I'm dropping my email in the chat, for those that we were not able to connect with. You are more than welcome to shoot me an email, and we will do our best to get all of your questions answered. For those who joined, thank you so much. And thank you to our presenter, Melissa, who always does a fantastic job and brings great information whenever she comes over for a webinar. So thank you all for joining us and we look forward to seeing you next time.

[01:01:38.640] - Melissa Lieberman

Thanks for having me. And if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I just put my name in the chat there and I'm happy to answer questions as well. Thanks, Emily. See ya. Bye.

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