Management Consulting Business Startup Guide

For those of you with an area of expertise, whether it is in human resources, sales or marketing here's a management consulting business startup guide. Most people have a specialized area of expertise but aren't really aware of it.

But if you've had any experience at all with anything especially in new innovations like search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing, you may be a good candidate for a management consulting business startup venture. All you need to know is just how to start a business consulting.

Starting a management consulting business is no different than starting any other business. You have to do sales, marketing, customer service as well as running the back office for your business.

Identify Your Area of Expertise

This is the most important step in knowing how to start a business consulting. Where have you had experience and training in? Where can you add the most value to your potential customers? What area of expertise is most needed in the areas where you work? These are basic questions you must answer before you start up a consulting business.

Consulting Business Website

Getting a professional looking website for your management consulting business is a major step in how to start a business consulting. Let's face it, consultants more than most businesses need a professional looking website to have some credibility. If you have a shabby amateur looking website, you won't have a great start to starting a business consulting.

If you're on a budget there are some very cheap options for getting a nice looking website done. I use wix.com. You can build a very nice looking flash website for free. You can upgrade to premium for a price.

One problem with the free version that your URL is an extension of the wix.com URL. That means your consulting business website will look like this: wix.com/yourname/companyname. That still looks unprofessional. Here's a little trick I use to get a free wix website, make it professional and keep the costs down.

I build a free wix website using one of their amazing templates. Then I buy a domain from godaddy for $10/year. I forward that domain name to the wix URL. You won't be able to get technical stuff like analyze your website traffic, but you won't need to worry about that in the beginning when you are still in start up consulting business mode.

The free version of wix includes a bit of advertising about wix, but it's small and if you find the right template, people will barely notice it. So getting a great looking website, even if it's free, is a great place to start in learning how to start a management consulting business.

Another major step in knowing how to start a business consulting is marketing and promotion. This is probably the most challenging part for most people. Here are some suggestions to help you get started.

Networking Current Contacts

There are people in your current network of contacts that could help you find some consulting work. Make a list of everyone you know then think about opportunities to approach them about your services. When you do this, you'll find that you know a lot more people that could use your consulting serves than you realize. Additionally, as you contact these people, you may be able to get referrals to other contacts and companies that could use your services. Networking your current contacts is the first place you need to start when learning how to start a business consulting.

Linkedin

Linkedin is a great tool to get consulting business. 80% of human resources professionals say they use this to find and recruit new employees. The great thing about Linkedin is that you can leverage your current contacts and contacts' contacts to find new business. Just make sure your profile is 100% complete and have your friends and colleagues write recommendations for you. Getting on and using Linkedin is essential in learning how to start a management consulting business.

Many people learning how to start a management consulting business have found Twitter to be a very useful tool in starting out. Many consultants are using it successfully to get new clients and promote their consulting business.

First get a twitter account and do a few twitter posts to get some initial content. Then find followers.

There are two ways to go about this and you should use both. First start following people, as many as you can. Many of these people will follow you back. It's a numbers game. If you follow 5,000 people, maybe around 500-1000 people will follow you back.

Then start searching for people who are in your field or would need your consulting services. Begin to follow them. Not all of them will follow you back and that's why it's important to interact with their tweets. As you build relationship this way, they will slowly begin following you as well.

In the midst of getting followers, make sure you are tweeting things pertinent to your consulting business. This is a great way to build your credibility as a consulting in your field as well as get future clients. You must have credibility as you learn how to start a business consulting.

Here's another free method when you start your consulting business, article marketing. Ezine is probably the best article directory for this method. They have a very high page rank which means they get visited a lot and your articles are most likely to get indexed by major search engines like Google.

Ezine allows you two links that you can put into your article that will lead people to your website if they find your article helpful and want to know more about your consulting services.

As you start a management consulting business you will need to write and speak a lot on your area of expertise. Using article directories like Ezine will help you practice and get your free promotion at the same time.

Getting the sales process down is one of the most important things in knowing how to start a business consulting. There are several initial steps that you must make and then play it by ear depending on the situation. The consulting business is all about being creative and adding value you to your client and you have to exhibit these qualities in the sales process.

Before you even begin to go out to do sales for your consulting business, you must first identify your area of expertise, industry and services.

Area of Expertise

You have to know what you're good at and what specialized skills and experience you bring to the table. Do a brainstorming session about yourself. No one usually has just one specialized skill so you must write them all out so you know what you're working with. You might find that you have a specialized skill you didn't know about during this exercise that you end up using in your consulting business.

Take the time to do this. When I started to do some consulting, I only felt like I had a specialization in sales. But as I got into it, I began to realize that I also had some market research skills from when I did business development for a high tech start up company in the New Market Development Department.

I was young when I was in that position and we did what we needed to do to get the job done. Little did I realize that we did a lot of work that most sales and business people don't do, like market research, marketing, sales model building, pricing, and everything else that goes into going into a brand new market.

Industry or Industries

Identify the industry or industries you will target. What industry or industries have you worked in that you can leverage experience and contacts?

You may also have a specialization in a business function that is broad and utilized across all industries like marketing, advertising or financial accounting. In this case, it will be wise to pick 2-3 industries to target to get familiar with them.

Recently, I've been working with another consultant on a project to overhaul an international humanitarian organization's accounting system. I was one of the hiring managers and we interviewed several great candidates with all the minimum qualifications in accounting and information systems.

However, the one that won out was the consultant that not only had the finance and accounting background but he also had extensive experience in working with international humanitarian organizations. That was a unique background that this consulting business had that got him the job.

Think about the unique experiences in certain industries that you may have experience in that your competition in the consulting business might not have. It will become a competitive advantage for you as you learn how to start a business consulting.

Consulting Services

Do the same exercise for the consulting services that you will offer. Make sure you don't neglect and potential services or underestimate them. Again, it might be the one you end up really pushing depending on your situation.

This is probably the most important section of this article. If you want to successful learn how to start a business consulting, you must be generous with your expertise and advice for a couple of reasons.

First, you should start a consulting business in a spirit of wanting to help people and businesses succeed and you should have in mind to add value to them and not just make money off of them. If that is your ultimate goal and you only sell your advice for a price, you will not bode well.

Secondly, this will build your credibility and will engender the trust of your potential clients. They will only see you as an expert if you give them advice that is pertinent and helps them. And they can't see that unless you give them some free advice.

So how do you go from free consultation to revenue generating business? There's a couple of ways you can go about this as you find out how to start a business consulting.

Reasonably Free Consultation

You only can give free advice within reason. If you're spending 2-3 hours a day on a potential client that is not within reason. You should tell them that you really want to help them but that you've already put in a lot of time and can't put in anymore. That's reasonable and understandable. If they can't deal with that, then they are just ripping you off and they never had any intention of hiring your or developing a business relationship.

Project Proposal

Use your free consultation as a way to evaluate their business and their situation in the context of what you offer and do a project proposal for them. Find out what their needs are and tell them in your expert opinion where you think they stand as a business and where they need to go. Then proposal a project to help them get there.

There is still value for the potential customer in that you are giving them free advice on where they stand and how to get to where they need to go. Then they can decide to use you, do it themselves or a mix of both.

Let me give you an example. I am a Sales Management Consultant and I specialize in helping technical and scientific start up companies to build and manage their sales department. I'm currently working with a potential customer and giving him free advice. I've interviewed him to get a sense of his business and where he's currently at regarding his sales program.

He already has a pretty good grasp of the benefits and features of his business. His website is almost done and he already has good content to sell his services and it gives his sales people something to work with.

Where he's lacking is his recruiting and management of his sales people. Once I'm done with the interview stage and I get a really good grasp of where he's at, I will tell him what usually needs to happen at his stage of development regarding sales.

I will then craft a consulting project that involves me running a recruiting and sales management program for him and getting it set up. I will tell him mostly on how I will do it and let him decide how much of it he wants to do and how much of it he will pay me to do as a consulting business.

Honestly, I can already tell you by getting to know the business owner a little that he probably won't want to manage the whole thing himself. I can also honestly say that it will benefit him if he pays me to do it. If I felt like he wouldn't benefit from hiring me as a consulting business, I would tell him so and give him as much advice as possible then be on my way. But his guy is charging $300/hour for his services and shouldn't be spending it managing a sales force.

The Consulting Business is All About Relationship

The reason giving a free consultation is so important is because you need to know how you fill help a business in a real way and you can't do that unless you get the ball rolling.  In addition, the business may not hire your consulting business right now, but they may in the future especially if they had a good experience with you on the free consultations.  Additionally, they may even send some business your way from their network of contacts. 

Sales in the consulting business is not the sames as other businesses.  It not just a one time deal or a quick sell.  There's a relationship building and a trust building that's involved and very important in this business and you have to show your potential clients that you are there to add value to them, not just pick their pockets.

How to Start a Business Consulting

These are some of the things that are involved in starting a management consulting business. Look for future articles on how to run consulting projects, how to incorporate associate consultants in your consulting business and how to continue the business relationships that you have built over the consulting engagement.