Consultants of all kinds tend to have the same core competency.
Consultant is a really broad term—we’re talking about anybody who gets paid to offer advice for a living. Consultants are hired by companies to help them solve problems, save money, avoid embarrassment, and generally do better business.
A freelance consultant is somebody who does this independently, as a self-employed business person, not as part of a larger consultancy. Here at pivot2consulting, that’s our jam. That’s why we exist: to help you become a freelance consultant.
Thinking of being a consultant?
There a few ‘superpowers’ or core competencies that freelancers in general have in common. We tend to have a fairly high level of flexility in approaching work; we tend to have high tolerance for uncertainty; we tend to have an entrepreneurial spirit and we look forward to the challenges that come with those things.
Consultants, in particular, have to have a few superpowers or core competencies in addition to those. First is subject matter knowledge. We need to have enough experience, training, and skill in our subject matter to be an asset to our clients. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to be a PhD (though that of course is an asset in some fields.) You don’t have to be the best in the world; you just have to know your stuff. And ‘knowing your stuff’ is something you can get better at with every assignment you do.
But here’s the most important consultant superpower:
You need to be able to spot patterns.
That’s it. That’s the superpower. Sounds simple? It is, sort of. But sometimes these patterns are deeply hidden, and your job is to ferret them out.
The patterns a consultant needs to find are patterns of thinking, patterns of behaviour, and patterns of spending. Patterns that the people who hire you—your clients—don’t see. Sometimes they’re plain as day to you, looking in from the outside. Sometimes managers and leaders are so deeply embroiled their own day-to-day workings that they never poke their head above the fray and see what they could be doing better.
That’s where you come in. Your job is to say, hey, that thing you’re doing? That you keep doing? You don’t need to do that anymore. There are better ways.
And that’s how consultants make our money. We show them a better way.
Sounds easy?
Well, if those patters are buried deep within data—financial data, technical data, social science data, and so on—it can take you weeks of research to find them. It’s not always easy.
Fortunately, as a subject matter expert, you’ll probably learn to find patterns within those patterns. By that I mean that your clients very often make the same mistakes, or the same kinds of mistakes, fairly regularly. Find one common mistake, or inefficient pattern, in your sector and you’ll see it cropping up over and over again.
Are you the kind of person that spots patterns? If you’re an employee right now, not a consultant, is that one of your superpowers? Are you the person who is always thinking, “Ok here we go again. We tried this. It didn’t work.” Or, “You know that brilliant thing the people downstairs do when money is tight? Why aren’t we all doing that?”
That’s spotting patterns. That’s the consultant’s superpower. If you can spot patterns for someone, show them a better way, and package it in such a way that it’s approachable and feasible and positive, you may just have a freelance consultant living inside you.