{"id":863,"date":"2019-01-11T19:10:33","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T19:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/?p=863"},"modified":"2019-01-11T19:10:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T19:10:33","slug":"are-you-driving-your-consulting-business-or-is-it-driving-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/11\/are-you-driving-your-consulting-business-or-is-it-driving-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you driving your consulting business (or is it driving you)?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was reading Seth Godin\u2019s post, \u201cProfitable, Difficult, or Important?<\/a>\u201d, and it struck me: that\u2019s a tension I\u2019ve felt throughout my consulting career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the tension was inside my head, it showed up in my business model,[*]<\/a> which means it eventually showed up somewhere else. You guessed it: In my bank account!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, early in my second consulting practice (I\u2019ve had three), we focused on what we thought was important: serving small nonprofits. That proved to be both difficult, and, as you might guess, not very profitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"Illustration<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But we thought we were brilliant. We secured third-party funding, which made our services almost free. We reasoned, who wouldn\u2019t want that? Well, as it turns out, a lot of small and very fragile organizations wanted that. They killed our key performance indicators. And, unfortunately, the process of working with them proved to be exhausting as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not dumping on small or fragile nonprofits. It\u2019s just when you\u2019re getting your practice started and your business is small and fragile too, that\u2019s not exactly a winning combination. At least it wasn\u2019t for us. We, or at least I, needed to get over my Mother Theresa complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDifficult\u201d was baked into our business \u2013 chief executive search and transitions. CEO turnover involves a challenging organizational change process on top of the difficult task of finding the right candidate. Call me crazy, but I read an article about a guy who reduced the process of building backyard swimming pools down to just 22 steps. I thought, \u201cif he can reduce something as complicated \u2013 at least to me \u2013 as building a swimming pool to a relatively few replicable steps, dang it, we can simplify this executive search and transition process!\u201d So, we did a whole lot of process mapping, streamlining, and putting strong systems in place and improving them constantly so that we were getting the best possible repeatable results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Flowchart
One of our early process maps for executive transitions.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s \u201cprofitable.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until my business partner and I (me anyway) wrapped our heads around the idea that profit isn\u2019t an evil (or \u201cjust\u201d a necessary evil!) that the business began to thrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was a hard lesson for a couple of nonprofit guys. This was after a business coach introduced us to the idea of paying ourselves first: making the business work for us instead of us just working for the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sense that the business of consulting works best when these three elements of tension are balanced. Focus too heavily on profit, and you could look sleazy. Focus too much on the difficult, and you end up killing yourself working. (That\u2019s how it showed up for me.) And too much focus on the important can take you down any number of rabbit holes, depending on how you define \u201cimportant.\u201d In short, focus too heavily on any one of them and your business can become misdirected. You can end up with a business model created by default rather than by design \u2013 a business model that\u2019s shaped by your assumptions and circumstances rather than consciously created by you as the leader of your business. And a business model that ends up driving you instead of you driving your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Have a new consulting business? Wondering if you’re starting off right?<\/strong> Consider registering for the next Launching Your Consulting Practice<\/strong><\/em><\/a> class. Two veteran consultants (with over 40-years experience) will walk you through, step-by-step,  the A-Z of the business of consulting. Online. Self-paced. Includes weekly group coaching calls. Click here to see if it\u2019s right for you<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[*] At the simplest level, a business model is a link between the value or impact that your business creates, who it creates that value\/impact for, and how it gets paid to create that value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\nhttps:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/whats-next-for-your-consulting\/\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was reading Seth Godin\u2019s post, \u201cProfitable, Difficult, or Important?\u201d, and it struck me: that\u2019s a tension I\u2019ve felt throughout my consulting career. Although the tension was inside my head, it showed up in my business model,[*] which means it eventually showed up somewhere else. You guessed it: In my bank account! For example, early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1395,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accelerate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goingsologoingbig.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}