Tools, Tips and Resources for Consulting Firms

This Tool Shed contains information, tools, templates, concepts and ideas that most often fly in the face of well-established orthodoxy. So, unless you are willing to have your thinking seriously challenged and your beliefs provoked, you'd better paddle off to some more peaceful waters, and not waste any of your precious time at this site.

However keep this in mind from Mark Twain: "The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot."

Every truth passes through three distinct stages: First it is ridiculed. Then it is opposed violently. Finally, it is accepted as being evident. If you read something here, and you say to yourself "maybe", then implement it on a small scale.

Just try it for a few days or weeks on a small scale, and monitor your results. Forget stories, excuses and the typical "too busy" bullshit. As the Nike slogan says: "Just do it". If it works, keep it, if not then toss it and move on. Just keep taking action. Look, Babe Ruth did not become the Home Run King by quietly sitting in a corner, being busy preparing for the earth-shattering event. He kept striking out at that ball and some worked out nicely.

Published Articles in Magazines

Small Business Canada - 20 Fantabulous Ways to Raise and Safeguard Professional Fees. Read article here.

Forum - Year End is Coming: Does That Mean It's Client Abandoning Time Again? Read article here.

RainToday - 10 Ways To Increase Your Fees And Improve Your Performance Part 1. Read article here.

RainToday - 10 Ways To Increase Your Fees And Improve Your Performance Part 2. Read article here.

Forum - Hiring the Right Dudes or Dudettes for Occasional Project Work. Read article here.

Forum - Time vs. Value: Which One Do You Get Paid for? Read article here.

BC Business - Cracking the Billable Hours Ceiling. Read article here.

Business Services West - Stop Time-Based Fee For Service Professionals. Read article here.

Business Services West - Ten Ways to Increase Client Value, While Reducing Your Time and Effort of Delivering It. Read article here.

Special Reports, E-books, White Papers, Black Papers

Getting Started In Consulting For New Immigrants In Canada...

Moving to a new country and starting a new life and career always present some difficulties. Just think of it. You set your eye on a career you wanted to pursue. Then you got on the path to get the relevant education and experience. Then you graduated, and then decided to move into a new country.

Then having landed in the new country you realise that your credentials are not recognised. So, you have two options in the new country:

1. Either you go back to school and start re-learning what you've already learnt before and pay a small fortune for another fancy certificate. And then you hope that with local credentials, life gets easier. Or...

2. You unceremoniously appoint yourself as an expert in your field, acquire some clients and start charging them for your knowledge to solve their problems and to earn a living.

I have gone through the immigration process twice. First, when I defected to the United Kingdom from the then still communist Hungary as a penniless, English-less refugee in 1988, and then when I moved to Canada in 1998. At that time I arrived in Canada with a few more pennies in my pocket, but also with a bundle of certificates from the UK, which the Canadian "institution" plainly refused to recognise.

In this booklet you find some specific ideas to start your own consulting practice in Canada. Some stuff applies to British Columbia only, but most of what you read can be used all across Canada. Follow the link to download your copy of Getting Started In Consulting For New Immigrants In Canada.

Buyer's Guide for Consulting Services...

Hiring a consultant is always a big decision for buyers. The question is always whether or not the collaboration with the consultant will be a good investment for a lucrative return or just another expense. There are many books written on the legalities of working with consultants. This buyer's guide is more about the soft issues, like attitudes, mindsets and behaviours when seeking outside help.

At the end of the day you can have the best legally brilliant contract but a legal document won't buy another person's commitment and dedication to your success. And the traditional "procurement" approach to hire consultants is just an early call for disaster. Yes, legally everything may be in place, but emotionally you have to adversaries trying to screw each other wherever and whenever they can.

This booklet outlines how to collaborate with consultants not merely how to demand certain number of hours of work and a certain pounds of deliverables from them. Follow the link to download the guide here.

Scientific Advertising

Once upon a time in the early 20th century there was a man who was an expert at increasing almost any business' sales. His name was Claude Hopkins. And in today's hyper-competitive world of commerce his advice is even more relevant than it has ever been before. His great secret to acquiring new business was to educate the market and prospects.

You can no longer just walk in, scream "Buy my stuff. It's the best", and walk out. You have to take time and effort to educate your prospects about how they'll be better off by using your services, so they can attach a perceived value to your offer.

The problem with many professional services providers' marketing today is that they approach the topic from the wrong end. They want to "get".

"How can I get their money?"

"How can I get them as new clients?"

"How can I sell them something... right now?"

And using this idiotic "what can I get" process, they often end up alienating themselves from the marketplace.

When it comes to marketing your services, this book is a must read. It neatly summarises the approach and the mindset you must acquire in order to attract business instead of chasing it. Anyone who is involved in promoting any kind of business must read this book and implement the principles. Follow the link to download your copy of Scientific Advertising.

15 Pillars Of Agile Practice Management

Practice Development Strategies For Premium Consulting Firms From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm: The Military Commando

In this white paper you can read about 15 concepts which I regard as vital when we're building a premium consulting firm. For this I use concepts from agile project management and operating principles and practices of military commandos that are probably the most flexible and highest performing teams on the planet.

In many places in my writings I compare consulting firms to special forces commandos. While in industrial organisations, like in regular armies, we find narrow specialists, in the best consulting firms, just like in special forces commandos, we find cross-trained deep generalists who can think in context.

And although Peter Drucker coined the word "knowledge worker" in 1954 (The Practice of Management), 50 years later knowledge workers whose job is to think, are still often resented and are not regarded as real contributors to the economy. After all, there "merely" think don't "work". No surprise here. The regular army resents special forces units and the surrounding elitism. SF soldiers are perceived by regular soldiers as a pompous side-show and maverick show-offs. They are regarded as something slimy, underhanded, illegal, ungentlemanly, dishonourable and plain coward, after all they carry out covert actions. The army is traditionally weary of elites and renegades who colour outside the lines.

And this is how industry in general regards consulting firms. Just read some consulting jokes. And of course, the Arthur Andersen debacle and the never ending lawsuits against the Big Four haven't improved matters either. The prevailing undertone is that consultants are a bunch of dishonest bastards who charge a pile of dough for telling their clients the obvious, what any of their employees could tell them.

Nevertheless, the military commando is probably the most reliable, get-things-done, you-can-bet-your-life-on-it type of team mankind has ever assembled, so in this report we discuss how consulting firms can adapt some principles and practices from special forces commandos like the Navy SEALs (US), SAS (UK), KSK or GSG9 (Germany), BFST (France) or Spetsnaz (Russia).

Why Most Consulting Firms Consistently and Persistently Undercharge For Their Services... and What to Do about It

It's a brief overview of why consultants should charge for the value they deliver to their clients as opposed to the amount of time they work with them. We examine...

The difference between and contractors and consultants

How time-based fees make consultants overworked and underpaid

Six reasons holding consultants back from raising their fees

Five detrimental aspects of time-based fees

Four conceptual mistakes about fees

Ten steps of establishing your value...and getting paid for it.

Articles, Wonderings, Ponderings, Hallucinations and Incidental Brain Farts

Resources on Client Acquisition

1. Template to Calculate Your Daily Rates (MS Excel File)


2. Template to Calculate Your Performance Ratios (MS Excel File)


3. Three Elements of Creating the Right Buying Environment


4. Some of the Most Common Client Acquisition Mistakes


5. 14 Ways of Wasting Your Marketing Budget


6. Ten Clients Acquisition Truths


7. Some Pragmatic Lead Generation Methods


8. Top Ten Benefits of Using External Client Acquisition Help


9. Collaboration Fee-Splitting Calculations (MS Excel File)


10. Positioning Professional Service Firms


11. Ten Clients Acquisition Truths


12. Seven Reasons to Pump Your Marketing Muscles Not Your Sales Muscles


13. How a Dedicated Sales Force Can Bring Your Professional Firm to Its Knees


14. The Hidden Dangers of Being Perceived as a Faceless Firm


15. "Unjerking" Your Clientele and to Make Your Business Stress-Free


16. Ten Deadly Proposal Preparation Pitfalls


17. The Book of Boredom, Yawn and Drab: Are You Making These Nine Fatal Mistakes in your Yellow Pages Ads?


18. 18 Ways of Acquiring Higher Paying Clients


19. Are You Missing These Ten Elements On Your Website's Home Page?

Resources on Consulting

1. Year End is Coming - It Is Client Abandoning Time Again


2. Guaranteeing Professional Services


3. Three Roles Consultants Can Take with Their Clients


4. Checking Client's Commitment to Make Certain the Buyer is Ready for the Proposed Change


5. Getting Clear on Clients' Expectations to Maximise Both the Client's and Consultant's Performance


6. Tactics to Build High Octane Relationships


7. Setting Your Professional Boundaries


8. Are You an IT Consultant or a Computer Repair Person?


9. The Value of Zero-Based Thinking to See the Forest Beyond the Tree


10. Creating Long-Term Partnerships with Clients


11. Evaluating Consulting Projects


12. Building and Maintaining Your Consulting Power


13. The Major Differences Between Strategies and Tactics


14. The Six Basic Problems of Traditional Consulting


15. 14 Ways Clients Resist to Consultants' Ideas and How to Handle Them


16. Deliverables in Professional Service Businesses - Part 1: Tangibles


17. Deliverables in Professional Service Businesses - Part 2: Intangibles


18. Input vs. Output-Based Consulting


19. Anatomy of Traditional Consulting


20. Five Ways of Elevating Your Innate Creativity for Higher Value


21. The Four Cs of Change, and How Easily We Can Get In the Way


22. Seven Potential Conflict Sources Between Clients and Consultants

Resources on Firm Management

1. Planning Potholes Professional Service Businesses Can Fall Into


2. How to Foster Firm-Wide Creativity


3. Nine Ways of Attracting and Retaining Loyal Professionals Who Can Sell


4. The Inherent Lunacies of Human Resources Departments in Professional Service Firms


5. Are You Slowly Killing Your Firm with Commission-Based People?


6. Some Basic Flaws of Assessing Resumes


7. Recruitment Made Simple and Effective


8. - and then a Lunatic Invented Full-Time Employment


9. The Fundamental Flaws of Recruiting through Headhunters


10. Seven Ways to Destroy Job Satisfaction in Service Firms


11. Ten Ways of Building Values in Your Firm


12. Six Factors Determining Service Professionals' Productivity


13. Five Indicators of a Troubled Service Firm


14. How Complacency is Created in Service Firms


15. Run, Hide, Even Bury Yourself or You Will Get Trained


16. Ten Reasons Why You Should Keep Investing, When You Say "I Can't Afford It"


17. Creating Your Advisory Board


18. Four Sources of Mismanagement at Professional Service Firms


19. Techniques to Become More Valuable to Clients... And Raising Your Fees Commensurably


20. Are You a Service Slave (Task-Based) or a Service Professional (Value-Based)?


21. Seven Distinctions for Outstanding Professional Service Firms


22. Ten Real Causes of Low Morale in Professional Service Firms


23. Seven Managerial Headaches in Professional Service Firms


24. A Bodybuilder or an Athlete: Are You Growing Your Firm For Show or Dough?

Resources on Values and Fees

1. How Are You Doing with Fee Objections?


2. The Inherent Lose-Lose Dynamics Of Time-Based Per Diem Fees


3. Service Professional or a Service Workhorse: Ten Ways of Increasing Client Value, thus Your Fees, While Reducing Your Time and Effort of Delivering Them


4. Seven Pricing Considerations for Professional Services


5. The Inherent Lunacies of Commonly Used Compensation Techniques

Commando Consulting Newsletter Archive