Bootstrapping a Knowledge Consulting Practice

Thinking about doing some consulting? Looking for ways to expand your consultancy? Here’s 13 strategies and tips for turbocharging your practice.

Know Thy Customer

• Who is your customer and what are they buying?
• How will the buying decision be made?
• How important and essential is your solution?
• Can they pay (or will you need to help them find a way to pay)?

Advance Thy Brand

• Position yourself as an impact-focused expert.
• Run a thought leadership blog.
• Pitch yourself as a conference speaker.

Productize

• Define lines of business, brand typical deliverables (training, research, planning).
• Look for repeatable revenue streams to reduce your cost of sales.

Outbound Marketing

• Send a regular email blast; build a community around your value-add.
• Run short thought leadership campaigns (blogs, reports, webinars, podcasts) on emerging topics.

Always Be Selling

• Everyone selling everywhere all the time.
• Hone your pitch.
• Tell customer stories (or better yet, let customers tell your story).

Invest In Tools

• Invest time in building a great contact database.
• Build and manage a sales funnel.

Web Presence

• An attractive functional website is a must
• Pick a couple social media channels—you don’t need to be everywhere but you need to do what you do well (see Getting Smart on Social Media)

Leverage Part-time Consultants

• When bootstrapping you always have too much work or too much capacity
• A group of part-time consultants gives you some extensible capacity

Reuse Everything

• Content: blogs become papers and presentations
• Proposals and reports: build and save templates that you can reuse

Graphic Standards

• Pick a simple logo and color scheme; use it everywhere (web, proposals, collateral) consistently

Nice But Cheap

• Attractive and unusual cards are worth it
• Brochures are usually a waste

Ask For More

• Share a big vision for impact
• Don’t be afraid to ask for more

Nonprofit Partner

• If not a nonprofit or if you haven’t received IRA c3 designation, it can be helpful to have a nonprofit partner. While many foundations use contracts to advance their charitable agenda, it can be useful to have a partner that can solicit and participate in grant -funded activities.

What would you add to this list? Comment below and tweet me, @tvanderark.

For more, check out:

• How to Become a Mission-Driven Organization
• 8 Tips to Stop Micromanaging & Start Leading