Experiences of a Professional Consultant: Transitioning to Consulting and Winning Client Engagements

In this series, we highlight the experiences of a very successful J Curve consultant, Dean Bragg. Dean shares his personal insights from 20+ years as a consultant. He specifically shares his thoughts in three key areas:

• Episode 1: Transitioning to Consulting and Winning Client Engagements
• Episode 2: Servicing the Client
• Episode 3: Overcoming Difficult Client Situations and Keys to Success

For individuals considering a career move to full-time consulting or those who have been consulting and would like to increase their effectiveness, we hope you find this information beneficial.

Consulting has turned out to be a much better career for me than I thought it would when I started in January 2000. Back then, it was not a common path for people in accounting. It was my wife, who is a CPA and former recruiter, that suggested I try it. It seemed to her, I enjoyed projects and client contact better than the month-ends and being a permanent employee.

My pre-consulting experience in public accounting and industry, while crucial to my ability to begin consulting, did not completely prepare me to be a professional consultant.

Transitioning to Consulting

Over the years, I have met and worked with many consultants. Considering myself an amateur observer of workplace psychology, I have been able to detect those behaviors that I thought made some of them very successful, while others not so much. By observing and talking to others, I have also learned a few things that helped me along the way.

You need to be able to handle these differences between being a permanent employee and a professional consultant:

1. Consulting is not for everyone. I happen to like meeting new people, evaluating processes, and solving problems. Some people prefer the stability and long-term relationships of permanent employment. You won’t know whether consulting is best for you until you try.

2. As a permanent employee, I like to say you have a 90-day honeymoon with your new employer before their problems become your problems. As a consultant, their problems are your problems from day one, or at least within the first week or two. Your time to prove yourself is much shorter. You must hit the ground running and bring your A-game to every engagement.

3. You have to guard against going completely native on long-term consulting projects. Of course, you have to fit in, but you don’t have to take part in the office politics and gossip.

4. You have to be a better listener, communicator, time-manager, persuader, and problem-solver than you do as an employee. This is largely due to the compressed time horizon on consulting projects.

5. While I believe you can still maintain a long-term view of your career, you must adjust to having many diverse engagements with shorter time horizons. You certainly have more consulting projects than jobs as a permanent employee. I have had 27 engagements in 21 years that have lasted from a few weeks to 4+ years.

6. You need to plan for and handle the inevitable downtime between engagements. This includes the psychological impact. Remember, one big benefit of consulting is your ability to determine (to a certain degree) how much time you want between engagements. You can work closely with your J Curve contact to manage this.

Winning Client Engagements

For some client engagements, your J Curve contact may be able to place you without a client interview. However, for my consulting projects, you will still need to interview with their client.

I believe the following points apply for both new consultants and old salts like me:

1. Be open and honest with your J Curve contact about what you are looking for in a consulting engagement. They can help with sound advice. You are on the same team.

2. Interview with potential clients a little differently. As a professional consulting, you are no longer quite as interested in the corporate culture, your long-term fit in it, or even whether the client is about to contract or expand. You are interested in the personality of the person you will be reporting to, but not as much as you would be if you were trying to become an employee. You are primarily interested in how you can help the client with their particular need. It is very important that you listen and understand what that need is and whether you possess the skillset to help. It is also important for you to pick up on any indications you believe may make it hard to be successful on the engagement. Discuss those with your J Curve contact. They may have some client insights you don’t have.

3. Do not over- or under-sell yourself. If you are weak in an important area that the prospective client newly articulates in the interview, say so. They are going to find out anyway. It is better to know up front because there is less pain for everyone that way. You cannot be successful on a project when you do not possess a key skill they need and stretch the truth in an interview like a used car salesperson. If you are up front, in some cases the client may be willing to work around this shortcoming, particularly if your other skills are exactly what they need. At least this way everything will be aboveboard going in. They can’t say later that you didn’t tell them.

4. Tell your story. Make sure you don’t just tell the client what your skillset is and how it fits with their needs. Your resume has already done that. If you have a similar experience in your past, relay the story of how you helped your employer (or a previous client) overcome the problem and improve the situation. A story is like a picture that is worth a thousand words. An honest story is so much more powerful to a prospective client than an articulation of skills that are listed on your resume. This storytelling is how I have won some projects that perhaps others thought I would not. If you don’t have such a story, then tell the client how you believe you can help them overcome the challenges they have.

5. If you are truly interested in this potential engagement at the end of the interview, let the interview know in no uncertain terms. Don’t leave them hanging. Remember, this is not an interview for a permanent job. You will not be negotiating back and forth with the client. If you are not interested, be courteous, complete the interview, and let the folks at J Curve know your thoughts about why you are not interested in this engagement.

Read Episode 2: Servicing the Client →