So, you want to be a consultant? Getting started
I started working in federal contracting in 1996. I liked the work, and I stayed in it for almost 20 years at big and not so big companies. There was always someone in my office who dreamed of the day that they could get out of the 9-5 rat race and start their own company. Be their own boss. Do what they want! That person was NEVER me. I liked the security and predictability of being a salaried hand. I liked the structure of company strategy, a boss who told me what I needed to focus on and the clear expectations for success.
Being an employee worked well for me. Until it didn’t. Toward the end, I had a series of short gigs at different companies that ended abruptly for a mix of reasons. After the third time around as I was looking for another employment situation, I took on a little consulting. Then a little more consulting until I had so much consulting that I did not have time left for my job search. Future circumstances might force me back into an employment situation—the need for health insurance being most likely-- but for now I have no interest in being a salaryman.
In this series of blog posts I will not share the legal or administrative aspects of starting a business, but the strategic and emotional aspects of going out on your own. It is based on a presentation I made at APMP in 2020. I’ll do this in three stages…
Starting
Slogging
Scaling
Starting my Business
I have been to plenty of free and low-cost trainings for aspiring entrepreneurs (mostly at PTAP and SCORE) on how to get a business started. I have found that a large number of these sessions are focusing on people starting up businesses that require a certain amount of infrastructure, a building or staff. Meaning you need capital to get things started. Meaning you need a loan. Meaning you need a business plan to get the loan.
While I did not need capital, I did need a plan to provide direction and order to my work. Coming from a marketing background I asked myself:
What am I selling?
Who will buy it from me?
What is my marketing plan?
What am I selling? What is my niche?
My market space is crowded with plenty of service providers and, thankfully, plenty of customers. I needed to figure out is my place in this complicated space.
I thought about these ideas:
What can I do really well?
What do I do that few others can’t or won’t do?
What am I passionate about? What do I always do first on my to-do list?
Which of these things do I think someone will PAY me to do?
These things I considered carefully in the early days of my business as it is easy to keep busy with what pays from week to week. While getting paid is important, I knew that was only one measure of success. I could work to fill up my bank account or work to fill my spirit as well. Working from that place is good my customers as they are getting my very best work.
Who will buy from me? What is my market?
At some point I knew my niche, but I had few customers. I suspected they were out there, but we were not finding each other. More questions to answer:
Who needs what I offer?
What title/influence do they have?
Do I really understand how their company and their job works?
Do I know the specific problem I can solve for them, and how to convince them I can do it?
How will I find people (leads) who will pay me?
How will I convert leads into customers?
For the first two years of my business, I had one client that kept me nearly fully employed doing stuff. While they were a lovely and supportive client, I was not doing what I wanted to build my business on. While I was working for this client, I was attending seminars and talking with people that I thought could be my customers. I was making connections that later became important in the success of my business.
What is NOT my market? I cannot do all things for everyone!
There is a robust market for federal BD consultants who can recite the federal regulations chapter and verse, who have the systems and experience to rip down a 200-page RFP and lead a 20-person proposal team to crank out a proposal that will win a $100 million contract. This is a big and lucrative part of the BD consulting market.
In my start-up phase I tried hooking up with these bigger consultancies that staff these large proposal efforts. I did not have quite the right skills for them, and I never got one of those jobs. Should I try to skill up to those jobs maybe taking a lower-level job to learn the business and work my way up the chain? It seemed a big hill to climb. Comparing myself to these masters of the BD universe would get me down on myself. But even though this is a big part of the BD market, it is not the only part that needs consulting services.
Over time, I figured out that I don’t have to be the best at everything in order to get work.
Still, I sought to beef up my skills according to the needs I identified in my customers. Over the last two years I have spent a great deal of time learning more about the Federal Acquisitions Regulations (FAR) that underpin all federal purchases. When I was an employee I could rely on internal staff for this expertise. But my customers were expecting me to know more about the FAR and knowing more about these regs would help me do better for them. I also cultivated relationships with experts to get advice and feedback.
Eventually I found that small companies just getting started in the federal business need my help and shy away from the large consultancies. Usually they are a start-up, or they are established in the commercial world and are trying to make the transition to federal work. They need someone to help them figure out how to break down a small RFP for a $250K job so they can get their first federal contract. They may also need help getting in front of a few opportunities and do some marketing and research to be ready when the RFP drops. They need someone like me who knows the government contracting lingo and expectations to guide them through the process.
How will I find customers, and how will they find me?
I spent most of my career planning and executing marketing communications for clients. I knew how to use market research to develop a brand, a message and use different communication channels to raise awareness, drive change and measure that change. But somehow, when it came to using those skills to get business for my company, I was at a loss!
A person I respect told me once that when you do not know what to do first, start with something you do well. I was a good writer, and I could create copy about my company and my offerings. I converted my past work into case studies and built a website to house it. At the same time, I hired a graphic design firm to help me design a company logo which forced me to think about my brand and how to articulate it.
The website became a cornerstone of my marketing strategy – not that I expected to have a huge amount of traffic running through, but more in the sense that it was set up to be an online brochure for potential customers to check out what I know and what I have done.
But now, what? How would I drive people to my website? Once they are there, how would I convert them to prospects and customers?
There is a great deal of training out there (free, almost free, and more) that can show me how to market my company. Much of it centers around digital marketing, and for good reason. The tools in the digital marketing toolbox are unbelievably powerful if you understand how to use them. Yet most of the training available for small business owners was for people with a physical location or for goods/services that are digitally delivered or fulfilled — mail-order businesses, downloads, paywall-protected content, and subscriptions. Much of this instruction interested me as a marketer, but was not applicable to my business, which is largely based on me getting paid for my time.
That said, the “digital marketing funnel” concept was something I found useful on a strategic if not tactical level. This is based on running many prospects through a process—visit their website, read some content, trade your email in exchange for some content on the websites, engage the prospects in a conversation by emails pushed out, social media engagements and website visits to get them more engaged with your company. Eventually the engagements turn into sales calls, and then deals.
The Marketing Funnel as illustrated by Mia Orantes at District Web Design
Get the Right Tools
I knew at the start that establishing relationships with potential customers and referral sources was going to be critical to my success. An important investment I took at this stage was to get a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to track all my contacts. It was the only way I could keep track of the hundreds of people I would eventually meet, the interactions I had with them and the scheduling of follow-up interactions.
One tactic I tried out that didn’t work was paying for keywords through Google. Figuring out how paid search works and how I could use it was a fascinating intellectual exercise. My search terms resulted in a bunch of website visits, but no new back-and-forth about doing business. Was that because I was not using the right terms to get the right visitors, or was it because I did not have a way to convert the visitors to prospects? Probably both.
Similarly, I have not yet figured out how to make the best use of social media for my type of company. This is partially because I just am not interested in building up a robust social media presence, but also because I have not yet figured out how to get a good return on those efforts.
Face-to-face and phone outreach became a critical aspect of my marketing strategy. To me, this confirmed that holding in-person, direct conversations with potential customers, though hard to arrange, was the best way to learn what I needed to know; then I could talk to them in terms that they understood and valued. Each one of these conversations helped me hone my pitch. I set weekly and monthly goals for how many in-person events I would attend (pre-COVID), how many phone calls I would make and how many blast emails I would send to keep my network up to date on what I was doing.
A mentor encouraged me to get involved with professional organizations as a member and a volunteer. I followed his advice. While I have yet to see this result in anything that has put money directly into my pocket, the connection with professional contacts has been valuable. One thing about employment that I miss is the day-to-day connection with industry colleagues.
Plan for this to take time.
All that being said, getting a company running will take time.
In my start-up days, things did not go well all the time. Sometimes, not even ANY of the time. I had days when it seems like nobody wanted to buy from me. On those days I longed to be back in that regular job with the steady every two-week paycheck. I was grateful to have a spouse who made enough money to keep our bills paid. On the bright side, I did not have a bunch of fixed expenses like office rent, equipment, subscriptions, back-office staff, and marketing budgets. I kept returning to that business plan and marketing strategy to remind myself why I was doing what I was doing in the way I was doing it. After giving the plan some time, I realized that a bad month or a dry stretch didn’t necessarily mean the plan was bad, but that I just needed to give it more time, thought and toil for it to bear fruit.
Feel free to reach out to me on my website and share how this story sits with you? Is it helpful? Do you have any advice about how to do it better?
I’ll have more on this in my next post on the long slog from startup to a profitable and sustainable business.