Consulting Retainer Engagement Toolkit

How Consulting Firms Can Lend Their Collective Brainpower In The Most Lucrative Ways

As a consultant, have you had enough of labour-intensive retainer contracts in which you have been regarded as a part-time labourer? Have you ever thought about how you can rent out your expertise to clients on an as needed basis?

Well, you most probably have.

So do most consultants, but many of them base their retainer agreements on a...

Big Earth-Shattering Conceptual Error That Costs Them A Truckload Of Dough

It comes from the fact that many consultants regard themselves as manual labourers, and they set up their retainer engagements based on the wrong criteria.

One of these wrong criteria is the number of hours they perform manual labour.

Unfortunately many consultants have bought in to the idea that one of the main reasons why clients hire consultants is because they need extra muscle power to do work that their own people have neither time nor inclination to do.

So, under the concept of retainer engagements, many consultants pre-sell their calendars on a piecemeal basis hour by painstaking hour.

And through incorrect agreements that consultants make with their retainer clients, consultants often paint themselves into some nasty dark corners of life where their only companions are stress and frustration.

Yes, they can work like that under these adversarial circumstances, but sooner or later the shit hits the fan, and consultants start feeling that...

Something Seriously Sucks Around Traditional Consulting Retainer Engagements

And this is when they feel that running a consulting firm is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with occasional stops at tedium, misery and counter productivity. And later a final stop, very often after a massive heart attack or some other stress-induced illness, the coroner's slab of steel in the morgue and then, after a bumpy ride in an odd-shaped car, a plot in the bone yard.

Many years ago when I was a member of the Canadian Association Of Management Consultants, I attended a number of networking and educational functions, and I was surprised that many members couldn't attend functions either in the early morning or the later afternoon.

At 7:00am they were already "on call", and at 7:00pm they were still on call. The way they sold their retainer services called for all day standby service in case clients call. They were disallowed to engage in other kind of client work because that would prevent them from instant response.

The main mistake these consultants made was that they've followed...

The Conventional Wisdom Of Consulting Retainer Engagements

A large chunk of the consulting profession is disgruntled MBAs. They get their credentials but soon realise that the jobs they could get often demand too much from them for too little reward. So, they start out in consulting.

But they bring their MBA thinking with them, which, for some miraculous reason, include the mindset of performing commoditised activities FOR people who are too lazy to perform them for themselves. Essentially, they become intellectual handymen.

What also happens is that consultants believe that during the sold retainer hours they have to stand by in case clients call them. This is actually not a retainer gig but more often than not permanent on-call situation with the following two flaws detrimental to consultants' profits...

1. Consultants make themselves available during the sold hours, but if clients don't use those hours, our hero doesn't get paid. Clients want to have the consultants on standby but want to pay only for "visible" physical work


2. Consultants are careful to sell one time chunk only to one client because they want to stay flexible and ready to start dancing instantly when clients start whistling

And on the top of all this raging lunacy, consultants also believe that the value of their contribution lies in the number of hours they spend poring over analyses, crafting flow charts and blabbering away in rooms with dimmed lights in front of PowerPoint slides.

That is, they erroneously believe that they deliver value to their clients by performing various busy work, that is, being impressively efficient.

Maybe Efficient But Definitely Not Effective

Consultants use retainers to fill up their calendars between projects. Project work can go up and down, but if you have some good retainer gigs in place, you can keep your income on even keels, so you never have your balls in the vice grip of the dreaded feast and famine cycle.

Clients use retainers to gain situational access to special expertise. As a result of this retainer access, decision-makers can make higher quality decisions, and those better decisions can leave to more effective ways of solving problems or seizing opportunities.

Where many consultants err is that they focus on selling busy-ness not just-in-time executive support.

But what's this fuss about efficiency versus effectiveness?

One distinction between efficiency and effectiveness is the "How?" and the "What?".

Efficiency is about doing the same thing the same way but working longer, faster and cheaper. The question is: Are we doing the thing right?

Effectiveness: What should we be doing? Are we doing the right thing?

So, joining the executives, many consultants too focus on efficiency, that is, doing the same thing but doing it harder and longer.

And very often, at the end of the retainer period, executives complain that nothing has really happened and the whole retainer gig was a waste of time, effort and money.

But if the normal method is so nipple-piercingly ineffective...

Why Don't Consultants Change This Lunatic Approach To Something Better

We humans are comfortable creatures and love our habits. For instance, tell 100 people that unless they quit smoking they die of lung cancer, and what you'll find is that only three of them will quit. 97 will continue puffing away and defying death... for a while... for a short while.

In a nutshell, selling clearly visible and documentable manual labour is a lot easier than selling brain power and intellectual availability to answer questions.

What makes the situation worse is that most consultants locked themselves in the billable hour prison and threw away the keys many many years ago, and now they feel there is no escape.

And since intellectual availability is hard to sell on an hourly basis, they sell manual labour on an hourly basis. Sadly, by following this lunacy, well, also called conventional wisdom, many consultants set artificial financial ceilings to their businesses, not even thinking about...

How To Change This Self-Limiting Perspective

If we want to change something in our lives, we have to admit that something is not good enough. And this is the hard part. We all have egos, and don't want to admit that we've made mistakes.

We often just grit our teeth and stoically accept the mess we're in with a "What? Me worry?" smile.

Then we keep suffering because we want to prove we were right in the first place.

Here is a simple exercise...

Look at your calendar and see how many hours of your typical week is filled with hours when you sit on a standby, waiting prepaid clients to call you. Also, how have you sold these engagements? As time chunks to perform manual labour?

Then you may be ready for a change...

But How To Change This Situation?

So, let's change everything here. Change the terms of your retainer engagements from pre-paid hours of manual labour to pre-paid situational access to your intellect, intuition, insights, experience and connections.

Deemphasise the work itself and emphasise the access to your brain.

Deemphasise your fee and emphasise financial impact on improved decisions.

And to do that in a systematic manner, squeezing 14 years of my retainer consulting experience into it, here is the...

Consulting Retainer Toolkit

How Consulting Firms Can Lend Their Collective Brainpower In The Most Lucrative Ways

So, after many years of doing retainer engagements and helping over 150 consulting firms to offer their services on a retainer basis, I've decided to document my experiences, and put it into a comprehensive package to help other consultants to position, package and promote their retainer services.

In this programme, that comes both in downloadable written (PDF) and audio (MP3) formats, we discuss all aspects of scoping out, pricing and performing consulting retainer engagements. Among others, we discuss...

• From tactical contract worker (subordinate) to strategic business advisor (peer)


• How true collaboration boosts the quality of decisions


• The main problems with traditional retainers


• The traditional retainer structure


• Problems with the traditional retainer concept


• 12 main criteria of retainers. Four of them are...


1. Make sure you stipulate to your clients that your value lies in the intensity of the engagement: Access level and level of responsiveness, not in number of working hours or face time in the clients' offices


2. Access to you is a function of availability. You respond promptly but requests can't become interruptions in your life. You are not on call in a traditional sense


3. Specify in your agreement who can have access to you. If it's more than one person, then charge more accordingly


4. Adjust access and responsiveness level to the fees you charge. The best clients value unlimited access to you at any time with quick response, and they are willing to pay premium for it


• How your past adds value to your clients' futures


• Lots of calculation to establish the value you contribute and the fee you charge


• Properly structuring retainer engagements


• How to chose the time frames for retainers


• How to create high value retainers gigs


• Three ingredients to scoping retainers engagements


• Nine possible constraints of retainer engagement


• How to structure your retainer promotional documents off- and online


• How to market your retainer work


• Determining engagement fees with three options


• Performing retainer work


• Some traits of great retainer agreements


• How to calculate contingency fees and how to make sure you get paid


• How to set fees for retainer engagements


• Flat fee retainers


• Performance-based fee retainers


• How to propose retainer agreements


• How to craft retainer agreements


• Flat fee agreements


• Performance-based fee agreements


• The validity and nonsense of non-compete and non-disclosure agreements

So, if you feel you have too many unpaid valleys in your practice, and would like to even out your calendar, then here is your great opportunity to learn to set up lucrative retainer engagements.

You receive the product as soon as your payment is verified and accepted. The product is a PDF file and a few MP3 audio files. Buy it at ClickBank. ClickBank handles Paypal payments too.