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But What Is Consulting?
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a
consultant as “one that gives expert or professional
advice.” To really call your self a consultant in
your field, you must be an expert. Being an expert
in your field also means you must constantly
reeducate your self beyond what is commonly
acceptable for your average peers. The other key
factor that defines a consultant is the fact that
they deliver a custom solution to their clients.
This makes consultants specialists in their field.
As you develop a consulting
business for your field, ask yourself what skills
you require to be considered an expert. What
professional journals should you read? What
organizations are supposed to you joint? Etc.
Categories of Consulting
The principal product of a
consultant is his time, you base your pitch to do a
job on how long it will take to complete and, as
consequence, set a rate on that time. When you sell
your time, the labor you are hired to do in general
falls into three categories: Skills contracting,
expert-advice consulting, or departmental
outsourcing.
Skills contracting.
Normally, when you initiate your business, the
easiest type of work to obtain and sell to customers
is skills contracting. In a skills contracting
situation, you usually work at the client’s location
together with client employees and or other
consultants and receive direction from the project
manager. For the reason of this fact, some
consultants considerer this more resembling
temporary employment than “true” consulting.
Expert-advice consulting. As
you make your reputation and turn out to be more
skilled at consulting, you will offer more
expert-advice type consulting. This sort of
consulting is harder to sell, but you can charge
more for this sort of work. The work you do as and
expert-advice consultant typically falls into one of
three types of tasks: analysis, design, or project
management. Analysis requires you to evaluate some
aspect of the client’s business and generate a
report with you conclusions and suggestions. Design
work requires you to produce a design report or
prototype others will use a model to complete
projects based on the design. Project Management
requires you to put together a squad of consultants,
or take over the management of an existing team, to
complete a project. It is not extraordinary for a
consultant to perform all three tasks as element of
a complete consulting package offered to the client.
You might even perform all three of these tasks when
you are the only person on the project.
Departmental outsourcing. As
a result of company downsizing, many companies get
rid of complete departments and outsource the
department’s services to a separate company that
specializes in that particular service. Many smaller
companies, however, may need only one part-time
person to provide the services of an internal
department. What distinguishes outsourcing from
other kinds of consulting is that you are not hired
for one precise task but to provide appropriate
departmental services on demand for a specified
period of time.
Types of consultants
1. Agencies.
This is about Large
consulting organization, this type of organization
usually has a separate sales and recruiting staff
that do nothing but find new clients or recruit new
consultants for its clients.
2. Small consulting
businesses.
A small consulting business
is small enough to subcontract work to independent
contractors (consultants) when they have more work
than they can handle in-house.
3. Independent
consultants.
Independent consultants are
companies made up of one person. They are often
referred to as “freelancers”, but a lot of
consultants unlike to use this expression for the
reason that the word “free” has the psychological
insinuation the consultant does not charge for his
or her services. Several agencies started as one
person and grew as the consultant got more work than
he or she could handle alone.
William Redants
http://www.consulting-infosite.com
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