A Career as a Consultant - An Independent Consultant Job from Home.
Career as a consultant with no experience possible?
If you want to build a career as a consultant but no experience is not really a problem because nowadays anyone can be a consultant as long as you can help someone else.
The most important to consider if you want to start your consulting business is to focus on the simplicity of finding a problem in a group of people of your interest.
Test your consulting service to see if someone will pay you in exchange for your service.
Everyone has a problem they want to be solved. The more difficult the problem is being solved, the more people are willing to pay to have that specific problem solved.
Follow my 7 steps below how to start a consulting business & grow your career as a consultant. I share with you what works for me and to other people. A career as a consultant provides a great opportunity to land to high-ticket clients and demonstrate your expertise by providing a solution to your potential client’s pain point.
A Career as a Consultant in 7 Steps
Step 1. Identify what your particular talent is
You need to make an inventory of your existing talent or gift is.
Find what makes you feel strong. If you are naturally good at managing kids and love to volunteer in the school or you probably good organizing baby parties or shower parties – these skills can lead you on how to identify what your potential talent is.
You can also ask some members of your family and friends about your strongest skill or you can take a personality test to see what type of personality you have .
If you cannot identify your talent, learn a few things based on your field of interest.
There is this quote that says… “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” – Orhan Pamuk
If you acquire some knowledge from reading, you can learn something new that other people may don’t know. Reading makes you knowledgeable.
Step 2. Search For Topic in Google Trends
It is important for you to understand that once you decided to start a career as a consultant , you are already a business owner.
And as a consulting business owner, you need to understand that Google is the best search engine in the world.
Google have spent a fortune trying to create the top search engine in the world that supplies the best search results, quickly.
If people are searching for something…
Get me what I want, Now!
Google provides simple and better results for both buyers and for those people who want to start their career as a consultant.
Now, we want to search for our consulting topic using Google Trends. We want to explore what the world is searching for when it comes to consulting.
Go to Google and type Google Trends in the search engine.
Make sure that you have an account with Google.
Enter your search term or the topic you want to start your career as a consultant.
There are actually several types of consultants specializing in different fields. From beauty consultant, bridal consultant, life coach consultancy, career consultancy, implementation consultant, travel consultant, cybersecurity consultant, legal nurse consultant, forex trading consultant, IT consultant, and so on…
Once you enter the consulting topic that you want and click search.
You will see the number of interest over time.
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time.
A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
See below example of a beauty consultant as search term.
You can choose a specific country or choose worldwide .
As well as the number of months you prefer.
If you’ve got a value of 100, that is a good consulting business topic to start with.
You may also want to explore comparing different consulting topics like for example “beauty consultant” and “health consultant”.
The Common Types of Consultants
- Health Care Consultancy
- IT Consultancy
- Marketing Consultancy
- Business Consultancy
- Financial Consultancy
- Environmental Consultancy
- Engineering Consultancy
- Real Estate Consultancy
- Relationship Consultancy
- Alcohol Addiction Consultancy
- Management Consultancy
- HR Consultancy
- SEO Consultancy
- Brand Consultancy
- Digital Marketing Consultancy
- Medical Consultancy
- Project Management Consultancy
- Innovation Consultancy
- Legal Consultancy
- Psychological Consultancy
Scroll down, you will see the breakdown by subregion.
The blue color is a beauty consultant and the red color is a health consultant.
And when you scroll all the way down, you can see the search query like for health consultant, you can see the related inquiry like “lactation consultant”.
Step 3. Find Someone You Can Help
This step is crucial in testing your consulting business idea.
You need to start talking to a small group of people in your interest and you must understand that at this point in time nobody knows you, and they don’t even know your purpose when you are building your career as a consultant.
You need to set aside your desire anything about making money. What’s important is for you to learn where do your potential client’s hang out.
You need to do everything & have a discipline talking to people in order to get a couple of clients and deploy the right questions.
Here Are Some Tips How To Get Consulting Clients - Career as a Consultant
- Create a new Facebook consulting business page where you specify clearly your consulting service
- Contact all the person that you know either by phone, email or via social media (Facebook, Linked-in, instagram, Tweeter)
- Post your consulting service in all of your social media accounts
- Inform your friends and families about your new consulting career and ask if they know someone who need your help
- Look around where you live
- Join some forums that are related to your consulting topic
Step 4. Apply Your Knowledge In Solving A Problem
Start applying your knowledge in solving the problem of your potential clients. The knowledge from the things that you have learned from past experiences, current or previous jobs, expertise, or skill sets.
Understand that there are no successful consulting services without actual experience in the marketplace.
For a new consultant, one of the biggest challenges in getting clients is “no social proof to show”. The whole point of social proof is to build a level of trust between you and your consulting clients.
Every new consultant or even those big consulting companies started with “zero proof”.
When you do consult, the person looking at your offer may not know you yet, or if they do, will they trust you their money?
Whether you have social proof or not, the whole point here is about TRUST.
You can provide trust by going into more detail about what your clients going to get and how well you can explain to them the consequences if they do nothing.
Step 5. Continue Learning To Grow Your Expertise
When you start a career as a consultant, you are offering your clients something of value. The value is how well you can provide the solution to their problem – this is your EXPERTISE as a consultant.
Even if at this point you have a few consulting clients, you will not stop learning.
Also, it’s good to know your limitations and weaknesses.
Your expertise is more about your ability to learn more than it is about what you already know.
Here Are Some Tips How To Grow Your Expertise As A Consultant
Purchase some books about your consulting topic on Amazon.
If there is a particular author or inspirational speaker you prefer, join their online webinars, or buy their online courses.
Continue to expand your learning resources like from Youtube and watching Tedtalks.
Take personal responsibility for your learning by developing an excessive reading habit to continuously broaden your horizons
Step 6. Watch Your Clients Journey
When you starting serving your consulting clients, this is how a consultant be a better consultant.
You will learn a lot more from your client’s journey.
When you monitor and highlight your client’s progress, you also need to take notes of all the actions that he or she has done and not have done.
You need to review your methodology and eliminate those factors that obstruct the accomplishment of your clients’ goals.
You can also learn what type of clients are the most successful when they apply your advice or methods, and what you need to improve in order to grow your consulting business success.
Progress reviews give you a formal opportunity to check with your client and work out why the consulting approach is working and/or what could be improved in your consulting career.
Step 7. Build Trust & Bring Result
Your duty as a consultant is to build trust and bring results. And make sure the client understands the progress they have made.
The effect of bridging the gap between where your client is and his/her desired situation is trust.
Make sure the client understands what to repeat and what to rinse out to make sure they get results.
Before you give any recommendations, you need to experience it yourself in order to make sure what you’re recommending is actually working.
It is harder to make money as a consultant if you don’t have any experience with the consulting topic you pick.
Here Are Some Advise How To Build Trust
- Respect their time. Show up 5 minutes in advance of start time
- Promptly returning their emails and calls
- Conform with your client's work style by establishing some preferences.
- Always keep your commitments
- Listen to their pain points and discover the underlying root cause
- Communicate clearly and openly
The Conclusion
Getting paid to give advice is quite promising, and watching your clients succeed saying “thanks to your advice” is…unbelievably satisfying.
Every consultant cannot escape the learning curve. Knowing exactly what your client’s uncertainty and deliver the unexpected.
Most importantly, if you can bridge the gap where your client is to where they want to be, you can make money as a consultant.
Hopefully, this guide has taught you how to start your career as a consultant and give you a clear guide to get consulting clients.
Follow these steps, and make sure to gain mastery about the consulting topic you choose to become a successful specialist in your field.
Good luck with your new endeavor in building a career as a consultant!
