Professional improvement isn’t some silver bullet that will magically double your billable rate. Instead, I look at it as an insurance policy—hedging my bets by leveraging multiple skills. Any day you can pick up a new skill or file away a new nugget of information is a day where you have either become valuable to a potential client, or have become more valuable to an existing client. Both scenarios are vital to your long-term success.

For me, professional improvement almost happens by default. My main method of improvement comes from ever-so-slightly pushing the boundaries of my knowledge on every new project I accept. I never take on anything that isn’t a good match for my skills, but I do take on work that will force me to grow in some small way. I also invest a lot of personal time into learning more about my craft, and developing projects purely for personal reasons. I do not consider this “work”, but it has absolutely helped my career.

Success Measure for Improving Yourself: You can write down one specific new skill or kernel of truth, however small, that you didn’t have yesterday.

Conclusions

As this blog series now draws to a close, I would like to simply wrap it up with a few meta comments on the overall process.

The five tiers of the Pyramid are the five activities I find to be the most beneficial in growing my own practice. There are certainly other activities that you may find helpful as well. The information I have given you is neither a promise of success, nor a recipe for certain failure; these steps merely present a concrete way of visualizing important aspects of consulting.

The best chance of success really boils down to simultaneous dedication to the business, technical, and personal aspects of your consulting practice. If you let any of these aspects fall to neglect, you are likely to lose business, or at least have difficulty reaching your full potential as a professional expert.

Aim high!

Working to add new people to your professional contacts is tough, especially when you have no existing network to build from. Today’s installment is not about selling; you will rarely be successful in selling to a complete stranger. Instead, the goal of today’s installment is to expand your network. When you expand your network, and then serve those relationships, potential customers will crawl out of the woodwork.

How to Make New Contacts

Meet people in whatever way you are most comfortable. However, don’t limit yourself to typical “business” crowds! Some of my best connections have come from truly unexpected places. Meeting people is a topic that has been flogged to death in books and online sources, so I discuss it only superfically. If you need a refresher course, start with Google or your local library. However, whatever you do, don’t procrastinate; start today. Here are just a few random examples to get you thinking in the right direction:

• Get to know the people who share your hobbies.
• Crash an opening night gala for a theater or art show (if you are a fan of the arts).
• Attend local Chamber of Commerce or open business luncheons.
• Join trade shows and conferences as an attendee; you don’t need to be an exhibitor or presenter.
• Converse with strangers in your daily life: shopping, social events, your place of worship, etc.
• On-line communities have some limited potential as well, provided you are still making direct one-on-one contact with another individual.

What Counts as a New Relationship?

The main criteria to consider is whether you have actually made a meaningful connection with someone you did not previously know. At minimum, you will have had a brief conversation with this person, and you will have remembered or surreptitiously written down any pertinent details, so that if you meet again, you will not be starting over. You do not necessarily need to exchange contact details, occupations, or even names. (If it is appropriate to do so, absolutely exchange these details. Emphasis on “appropriate”! Spamming is significantly more annoying in person than it is electronically.) Even if you have only the briefest of conversations with someone, make an effort to remember something about that person or the conversation you shared. Next time, you will already have something in common.

For consultants, meeting new people needs to become an automatic habit, and you will need to do it constantly. Realistically, many of these relationships are not going to go anywhere—but some of them will. Be ready!

Success Measure for Beginning a New Relationship: You met someone new today. You will be able to later identify and recall at least one memorable detail about this person.

Next, we will look at the final tier of the Consultant’s Pyramid: improving yourself. I will also wrap up this series with some closing thoughts. You may subscribe to my RSS feed here.

Plain and simple: people need to know you exist. As a consultant, you’re going to have a really tough go of it if your only visible presence is a web site that lists your services. What reason does anyone have to engage your services? You must create your own history, and write your own story, because nobody else is going to do that for you, at least not until you’re already famous—or up on felony charges.

When you do promote yourself, pick one adjective, then personify that adjective. It doesn’t have to be the same adjective every time. When I write a blog article that gives away useful information, in the back of my mind I’m thinking “be generous”. It’s OK to have a couple of lower-priority adjectives in the mix, but the important thing here is focus. If you try to play more than one role, your promotion will lose much of its potential impact. Do one thing (at a time), and do it well. Don’t make readers guess what your intention is; they’ll probably guess wrong.

Note well: This type of promotion is not selling. If your promotion consists of begging people to buy from you, odds are good you’ll be ignored completely. Promotion literally means “advancement”, which could be interpreted as the advancement of a cause, or a goal. Your goal is to advance your own personal brand. Promote yourself, not your products and services.

Some of you may be making faces at me for these remarks by now. “But Ryan,” you’re thinking, “how will this even remotely help me make a sale?” Most consultants sell in a business-to-business (B2B) world. That world rarely operates on a direct-sell model. After all, most corporate executives aren’t clipping coupons to get a free Catalyst switch with their next SAP installation. No, B2B sales are based on relationships and branding.

Promotion improves your personal brand, which increases your exposure, which greatly increases your ability to form new relationships, which dramatically improves the number of opportunities you will be privy to. Some of those opportunities will be an excellent match for your skill set, and you will already know some of the people involved. Selling all at once becomes a lot easier. In fact, odds are good that those opportunities will come looking for you.

Success Measure for Self Promotion: You can put in tangible terms exactly how you improved your own personal brand today.

In the next series post, we will again return to a one-on-one method of expanding your network. You may subscribe to my RSS feed here.

Yesterday, I talked about the importance of billable work. As a consultant, billable work is your product. Products require inputs. Existing relationships—your network—are the fuel that drive new work. Thinking back as far as I can remember, nearly every significant event has come as the result of an existing relationship I had with someone. Web 2.0 is old news—very old news; the world has always relied on networking. Humans are social.

First, you build the relationship, then you find the opportunity.

Surely, you already have some contacts. Make it your goal to turn contacts into champions. Champions are those special people who believe in you and will selflessly try to make others believe in you. A network of loose acquaintances is one thing. However, a network brimming with champions is a network that will literally drag opportunities to your door.

Maintaining relationships needn’t be difficult, but it absolutely needs to be personal and sincere. “Serving a Relationship” means you are a servant. Ask a restaurant owner what they think of a recent news article that affects the food services industry. Ask an existing customer what challenges they’re facing. Share a recent success with a friend—and be sure to listen when they talk about theirs. Give something away that you no longer need. Offer a little bit of time that you don’t think you can spare. Whatever you think your own needs are, practice putting your needs aside temporarily. If success is your goal, the other person needs to be the champion.

When you build relationships, get up from your chair. Some days, I will indeed just send a quick email to someone to keep in touch. Other days, it’ll be a 4 hour visit.

Success Measure for Serving Relationships: Today, you have made a sincere, personal connection with someone in your network. You have given away something of value.

The next post in the series will turn all of this selflessness on its head and look at self promotion. You may subscribe to my RSS feed here.

So, this one should be a no-brainer: billable work is how most consultants¹ generate revenue. If you have billable work for one or more customers that is currently actionable, do it—but don’t overdo it. An all-too-common pitfall among consultants (myself included!) is to get wrapped up in a big project and sink all available time into it. However, even the best of relationships will end for no good reason.

Perhaps the worst time to go looking for more business is the week after your customer has been bought out by a larger company that has already unplugged your servers and routed all information through their corporate headquarters. Yes, it does happen.

No doubt, billable work is king, but even the king needs backup, and, more importantly, succession. When your favorite client falls over, what will you do next? Do only the amount of billable work that will still give you time to complete the rest of your daily routine, and have the emotional reserves to maintain a healthy life outside of work. For me, that translates to about 4 hours of billable work per day. Your sweet spot may be different.

Occasional dips and peaks in billable time are practically unavoidable for consultants, but chronically or significantly overshooting your daily quota can be just as disastrous as working too little. This business strategy is all about balance and sustainability; as an independent consultant, you must switch roles regularly, and that means stepping away from the technical work frequently enough to focus on the other aspects of your business.

Finally, billable work done to a high quality standard is easily your best advertising tool; it often leads to more billable work from the same customer, or at the very least, a glowing reference.

Success Measure for Billable Work: You have completed actionable, billable work today, with time to spare.

The next posts in the series will focus on the other tiers in the pyramid. You may subscribe to my RSS feed here.

Like the proverbial Phoenix, the best marketing truths I have ever come up with are usually the little ones—the tiny embers of truth—that rise from the ashes of the most spectacular failures. I certainly haven’t made millions, nor do I need huge success to fuel my passion for technology. (It has plenty of fuel by itself). My needs are far more modest: a steady stream of interesting projects to work on, and just enough money to pay the bills and have a little fun.

So, through the next several posts this week, let me introduce you to my current daily work routine. It consists of five tiers (activities) that I engage in every day. I think about these tiers in terms of their overall value; if one falters, the whole pyramid will (eventually) crumble. It won’t crumble overnight, so by the time I run low on billable work, it’s hard to identify which of the other four activities were neglected. Every step is vital to continued success and growth.

If you do choose to incorporate any of these habits into your own routine, keep in mind that rigid scheduling may do more harm than good. I suggest you complete these activities in a fluid order; if you always leave the same activity to the end of your day, there’s a good chance that some other activity will consistently pre-empt it.

The second you sense one of these key activities is falling behind, your mission is clear: forget about remorse, and instead make a concrete resolution to correct the imbalance within a day. Follow through. Ultimately, you want to develop and maintain these habits, not be a slave to your day planner.

The Consultant’s Pyramid

• Do Billable Work
• Serve an Existing Relationship
• Promote Yourself
• Begin a New Relationship
• Improve Yourself

The next posts in this series will explore each of these activities in detail. Subscribe to my RSS feed.