To most people, consulting sounds like a fun, relatively easy job with no clear description about what it entails. The general mindset is that independent consultants get to make their own hours, work from home, pick and choose what contracts they take, all while making a great hourly rate. While there is no doubt that the consulting industry has seen an upwards boom, here are some not so fun facts to consider before you quit your corporate job.
Increased Competition
Everyone thinks that they can do my job. They look at me with my flexible work hours, yoga pant wearing dress code, and think, ‘what does she know that I don’t? I could capitalize on this.’ While this industry is hot and the money is great, the barrier to entry is very high. Let me repeat, hard to get into. Independent consultants are not only competing with new players calling themselves coaches, trainers, human developers, and big specialized firms with teams of people working with Fortune 500 companies, but nowadays, new technologies can also threaten my services like data analysis and strategic planning.
The Internet Effect
Back when I started consulting, word of mouth was the best way for me to gain new clients. Now I have to work hard to market myself and my services. As a Gen Xer, social media, showing my personality through selfies, and content creation is hard for me! Even though I teach MBA marketing courses, I still haven’t gotten into the groove of establishing a consistent digital footprint that will bring in an endless supply of contracts. So the bad news is that if you are not willing to spend the time on social media, you will need to buy marketing programs to help you and or pay someone to manage your social media accounts. If you can’t make yourself stand out from the competition with a unique value proposition, you will need to constantly rock the Internet.
Unpredictability
As I noted earlier, the competition in the consulting industry intense, and it is hard to predict the when my next contract and paycheck will come along in this business. Here is where I refer back to the last section, you have to constantly promote yourself in order to generate enough leads for future work. I just heard somewhere recently that it takes 100 lines in the water, to get two bites. From those two bites, I might get one Skype interview, and then if I’m lucky I will land that client. This is an extremely unstable way to earn a living, especially when sole proprietors have to pay their own health insurance, office space, all other business-related expenses, not knowing when they will get the money to do so. That’s why most of us, have a side hustle, in this case, teaching college level courses, to establish some type of money coming in, but don’t’ get me started on adjunct teaching for a living as a career, that is a whole different post!
I love consulting, training, and facilitating executive coaching. It enables me to transform leaders, one business at a time. Contact me at [email protected] or go to my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/RobertaPellantConsulting/ to read more of my articles or gain more insights into the life of a Professor/Consultant.