Contract consultants and freelancers this month gathered at Top-Consultant.com’s seminar “Becoming a Truly Successful Freelance Consultant” in order to gain insights into how they could optimise the running of their businesses to maximise earnings, achieve an optimal work-life balance and operate in the most tax-efficient manner possible.
Readers’ checklist for freelance success:- Time is your key constraint. Are you optimising your business processes and outsourcing administrative tasks so that you minimise unbillable time and maximise time spent billing clients or at home with your family?
- Many consultants prefer problem-solving to prospecting – but this is to your detriment. Unless you are constantly prospecting and building your personal brand in the marketplace, you will always suffer from an extremely accentuated feast and famine cycle. Do you have systems in place which ensure that every day your name is becoming more and more known in the marketplace?
- To be successful consultants must have both exceptional consulting skills and client relationships that are rooted in trust. Are you doing everything you can to forge strong relationships at all levels within both your client organisations and also the wider sector you serve?
- Do you charge for your time by the day or do you price according to value? To maximise earnings we need to spend more of our time on paid assignments, and be paid more whilst on those paid assignments. So managing your time and learning to sell based on the value you deliver are key skills for all consultants, especially those that are self-employed.
- Do you delegate the prospecting – perhaps by creating your own info product that can be freely distributed amongst clients, providing online content or a news bulletin or running an automated referral-generation system?
- Do you work predominantly through an agency/ responding to requirements that have already been determined by a client... or do you actually help the client to see they have a problem and scope out a project that will solve the problem? If you are only ever working on assignments that have already been set in stone by your client, you will only ever be paid on a “time” basis rather than on a “value” basis. You have turned yourself into a commodity and are competing with hundreds of other freelancers with similar skills to your own when you try to secure that assignment.
Source: Consultant News