Would like to know if there are there any people / resources that helped you out in this role? Or even any general guidance you could give someone just starting out? Also - out of interest - what is it you do now?
I have one key piece of advice: ask many questions. Be genuinely curious and friendly, and opportunities will continuously emerge.
I’ve landed high-value clients at coffee shops, hotel bars, music venues, or even through random emails. I was not prospecting. I was curious.
Questions are so useful at every layer of abstraction; whether you’re speaking with a server at a restaurant who’s having trouble with their POS, the general manager who’s wasted $10k on Yelp, or the real estate developer who happens to own a restaurant chain.
As a consultant your value is measured by your observations and imagination. Rich, open-ended questions allow you to absorb a vast repository of context and experience from operators. Use your skillset to imagine how things could be better if you were to apply effort.
I’ve had people quite frequently make declarations such as “you’re brilliant” or “you clearly have a lot of experience in this field” without knowing me or without me ever making a statement - only questions. It feels like a cheat code.
The only downside to this technique is you’ll be flooded with opportunities and your time won’t scale. I’ve dropped the ball on a number of awesome and profitable things because I was trying to pursue too many things at once. I’m trying to improve my consistency so I can hire more effectively, but it’s challenging.
Aside, I’ve been working on a crowdsourcing app to help solve this dilemma, as I’ve noted many others share my struggles.
Best of luck :)
* Listening is huge.
* And knowing how to 'hedge' when having opinions also huge. Like venturing an opinion as a question or using "forgive my ignorance, let me ask a stupid question"
You're probably not going to have the 'big idea' that saves them. But rather, your role is often to help the client have the big idea and own it. You're kind of a therapist for them/the org to think through something. You'll never has as much context as they do on their org/tech specific challenges. But you can help them by bringing outside perspective and ideas.
I sort of did a retrospective on my time as a consultant on my personal blog which might help
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/12/22/hack-your-career-wi...
It's been a blast. We've worked for clients in many sectors (telecoms, energy, banking, transportation, employment, luxury, retail, and other more particular activities).
Personally, it has helped to have read books about reservoir characterization and have worked on multi-phase flows in university when we had a client in the energy sector. It has helped me having worked on heart anomaly detection in university when we worked for a health organization. It's helped that I worked on a personal project in telcos and read books when we had a telco client.
You get to do that a lot and build bridges with their domain experts. It allows them to be more precise when you help them frame the problem.
This leads to the following : one of the most important phases is problem framing and scoping. You absolutely have to nail down the actual problem, the "job to be done", what is a success, for whom, etc.
This is refined conversation. I also use what I call negative framing. Example : one client asked us if we could predict and alert about an event that caused losses in the 9 figures 48 hours in advance.
This triggered the spidey senses. What we dit was ask at what point it would be too late to alert them. The client said "It's never too late. Even if you tell me 2 minutes in advance, we can still do things. We have procedures".
A less refined way would be to accept that requirement at face value. Dig deeper. Question assumptions.
One thing we do is we insist and avocate for everyone to be involved in the project. The people we build for. Before the company reorg, execs at the client company used to be our interface. No more. If I'm building something for your marketing people, they ought to be involved.
We continually refined our way. One close way I found to ours was in a book titled "Cracked It! How to Solve Big Problems and Sell Solutions Like Top Strategy Consultants". It's a bit similar.
I tweeted a mini thread: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...
If you want to talk further, my contact information is in my profile. Please add a link to this comment so I could start from the same state.