Thoughts On Being A Consultant

Dear Import/Export Compliance Compliance Manager,

I’ve been in the import/export compliance business for a number of years.  Due to certain circumstances in my life, I am weighing heavily the possibility of becoming a full-time consultant.  It looks like you gave that a go at one point.  Can you provide some advice to help me make my decision?

Knervous in Knoxville

Dear Knervous,

You are a braver person than the Import/Export Compliance Compliance Manager, who was forced to become a consultant due to being laid off after his employer was acquired.  It is not a decision to be taken lightly and is certainly not a career for everyone.  The Import/Export Compliance Compliance Manager has about 5.5 months of experience to talk about; maybe some of it will aid you in your decision-making.

Keep in mind that you have been spending your career building your skills as an import/export compliance professional.  You have acquired a boatload of knowledge and you’ve been around the block enough to be very dangerous with that knowledge, able to know what to do in a great many situations and how to build, implement and assess compliance programs.  In short, you are a competent import/export compliance professional.

Problem is, your import/export compliance skills are most likely for naught if you don’t have sales and marketing skills.  That’s right, unless you sign on with a larger firm to handle it for you OR you are in a situation where people have already committed to hiring you before you have even hung out your shingle, you will have to spend a SIGNIFICANT amount of time marketing yourself and finding clients.  Even people who know you may be quite reticent to take you on because, quite frankly, they would be taking a risk with you.  Say they’re happy with their current outside counsel/consultant; why should they take a flyer on you, a new consultant, when the risks of being wrong are so high? 

What do you do to overcome this lack of a client base and being known?  First, you need a professional-looking website for people to reference.  Pepper it with client testimonials if you can because that’s huge in helping people feel confident about your skills.  Second, find ways to get your name out there online such as writing a blog, a white paper, answering questions in online forums and being active on social media.  Third, hit the pavement by attending import/export compliance and industry seminars, getting a booth at conferences, attending Chamber of Commerce meetings and otherwise doing whatever you can to get out there and solicit clients yourself.  You absolutely should not depend upon word of mouth to get clients to come to you.

There will be a ramp-up time to finally feel like you have the hang of being a full-time consultant.  This will include not only getting your website up and running and your sales pitches figured out, but figuring out where you will have an office (or at least a post office box somewhere with an official-looking address, such as at a UPS store), figuring out how to accomplish work at home or in your place of working solo (Import/Export Compliance Compliance Manager favored a co-working space) and whatever else you are going to do to keep yourself sane while you juggle finding new clients with taking care of your existing ones. 

Lastly, think about the schedule.  As a consultant, you’ll have the flexibility to take time off when you want to, but the downside is that you may be expected to be available at any and all times to serve your clients’ needs.  If you’re in the middle of a big important project for one client, but you get the call from another with an emergency situation, you have to properly prioritize and regardless, make sure the work gets done.  This is not necessarily conducive with a Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 schedule, if that’s what you prefer.  And don’t think that you’ll necessarily get paid for travel time either when you go visit a client, even if you had to get on an airplane to do it.  Consultant hourly rates may seem exorbitant sometimes, but believe Import/Export Compliance Compliance Manager, they seem rather small when you’re not necessarily being paid all forty hours or more of the week you’re truly working.

There are other facets of being a consultant, but likely that is enough to give you a good idea of what you might be jumping into.  Import/Export Compliance Compliance Manager has no statistics on the success/fail rate of those who gave it a go on their own.  Whatever you do, do your homework in advance and thus don’t spend too much time flailing around trying to figure out how to actually ‘be’ a consultant.  And it STILL might take a year or more to get to the point where you are bringing in enough business to earn the living you were hoping to earn and, perhaps more importantly, being happy in your new role.  Good luck!