How to find balance, manage clients, deal with procrastination, and not go broke.
How to Manage Clients
It should be simple to manage clients as a consultant. See, when you land the consulting contract, you’ll be assigned a project authority. That is the person in your client organization that you’ll be dealing with. They’re called project authority because the organization has theoretically delegated them decision making power over your contract. Theoretically. Generally,…
How To Deal With Conflicting Client Feedback
In a normal consulting project, the project authority is the funnel through which all client information pours. When you submit a report, they go and gather feedback. They do the triage and the summarizing and the prioritizing of that feedback, and they let you know what needs changing. No muss, no fuss: you never have…
Coping With Procrastination as a Consultant
You’re not lazy and you’re not a bad manager of time Can a procrastinator become a freelance consultant? God yes. Join the club. But be prepared to battle that procrastination from time to time. If you beat yourself up for avoiding work or putting things off, it’s time to do a bit of reading on…
How to Not Go Broke as a New Consultant
You won’t go broke with a financial cushion. I get it – we are not a society of money savers. We like to spend, and we like to live pay check to pay check, or close to it. We are our grandparents’ worst nightmares. But here’s some of the best advice I can give you…
How to not get sued as a consultant
Don’t make promises you can’t keep That’s it. That’s the advice. If there was one guiding principle I could leave you with through all of this advice, it would be this one. Never write out a grandiose methodology that you can’t deliver. Don’t refer to skills that you don’t really have yet. Think twice before…
Pro Tips for Staying Sane as a Consultant
Work regular hours Part of the joy of being your own boss is that you can set your own schedule. Want to work weekends? Do it. Want to take a Tuesday off? Nothing’s stopping you. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t flex your schedule like that. But in the main, I recommend that you set…