Consultant’s Pyramid, Part 6: Improve Yourself

(Part 6 in the Consultant’s Pyramid series—a short blog series on keeping the project pipeline full).

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!