Building Your Consultancy Roadmap: Be Intentional About Where You Will Improve
If you simply keep doing what you've alway been growing you're not going to grow. Worse yet, others are going to catch up. You have to constantly push yourself to acquire new skills and improve.
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Do You Cringe At Your Past Self?
Fifteen years ago, I remember a freelance journalist telling me:
If you don’t look back at what you created a few years ago and cringe, you probably haven’t grown.
I think about this every time I review our work and promotional activities from a few years ago.
If I’m not just a little bit embarrassed by it, I haven’t grown enough.
If You’re Not Constantly Raising Your Standards, You’re Falling Behind
Once You Become A Consultant You Enter A Ferocious Race
It feels like almost everybody wants to become a consultant these days.
When a round of layoffs happens, a flood of new consultants enters the space. Alas, this happens at precisely the most challenging time to become a consultant. Work is more scarce and there’s more people chasing it.
Fortunately, as an incumbent in the industry, you have an advantage over the plucky newcomers. But your head start is only an advantage if you keep racing as hard as you can. If you slack off, keep doing what you’re doing or don’t commit yourself to continuous improvement, others will catch up. It will soon become difficult for prospective clients to differentiate what makes you a better option than a newcomer.
For example, if I spent 3 minutes looking at your website vs. those of newcomers, would it be instantly clear to me why you’re the better option?
You’re In A Race That Never Ends
Remember the golden rule as an independent consultant. You’re a company now. Like all companies, you have competitors. This means you’re in a race that never ends. If you don’t constantly improve what you’re doing, you’re going to find it increasingly difficult to attract the clients you want.
Everybody wants to trade their expertise for money - but only a few will be able to build a living from it. Those few are the ones who commit to improvement.
Build Your Improvement Roadmap
Do you have a roadmap for your own improvement?
Ironically, consultants who constantly help clients build their roadmap often don’t have a roadmap of their own. They keep doing what they did yesterday and hope for tiny, incremental, improvements in the future.
That’s leaving personal growth to chance. That’s what I did for far too long. I kept doing the same thing over and over again and hoping we would grow.
Alas, it didn’t work out like that. I was making a good living, but I was opening the door for others to easily catch up - despite having 10+ years of experience.
These days I try to raise the bar for myself (and the team). We try to go better in the services we offer, the deliverables we create, and the processes we use to support our clients.
This means we have a roadmap of how we’re going to improve each year.
I’ve based it on OKRs but adapted it to suit my preferences. This is how it looked a year ago.
Now looking back it’s clear we didn’t accomplish all of that (and we did many things in the wrong order), but I’d say we’ve accomplished 80% of it.
In the past year we have
Relaunched our website from scratch.
Recruited and onboarded a new consultant.
Published our most detailed strategy guide yet.
Published around a dozen new video testimonials from happy clients.
Began (and nearly completed) our ISO20071 certification process and finalised our data privacy policies.
Scripted and filmed four new training courses.
Launched our YouTube series on our new YouTube channel.
Created a training guide for new consultants.
Launched our CRM system on Pipedrive.
Developed a bunch of new internal processes for improving our client work.
Will all of these pay dividends immediately? No. Some of it might just be wasteful spending.
Yet they all build on top of each other. They each improve our work by a few percentage points here and there. And when that’s compounded over several years, we get a lot better.
You can’t control what happens in the market. But you can control what you do and what you’re executing.
What Projects Should You Consider?
There’s no shortage of projects you can think about here.
If you like just look at the maturity model below.
Find what your current tier is and then focus on the activities in the next tier.
From experience, here are some things I would consider:
Creating the definitive guide to major problems in the topic which you keep updated indefinitely.
Revamping/relaunching your website to a top-tier standard.
Creating and managing an exclusive community of industry peers.
Creating an industry index which lets you create rankings and comparisons between relevant organisations.
Hosting your own event series.
Launching a professionally developed training course.
Developing a new service you can promote to past clients.
Completing training courses to equip yourself with new skills.
Creating a collection of case studies and video testimonials showing your work.
Creating a remarkable content series (video, audio, detailed guides).
Hiring an SEO expert and optimising your site to do well in search.
Developing a new sales system to score potential leads and keep track of deals is an infrastructure project.
This is only a flavour of what you might create. What’s important is you are clear about what your roadmap for the coming quarter looks like and you work diligently to implement it.
You should be working on big projects which at least have the potential to have a big long-term impact.
Work On Projects Which Could Have A Big Impact
You should devote at least 50% of your time to work on what we can call business infrastructure projects.
These are projects you undertake once which lead to positive benefits to the business indefinitely.
For marketing, even if they only have a 20% chance of succeeding, if you launch five of them over the year at least one is going to be successful.
But even internally there are plenty of things you can work on which will improve your business over the long term. What you need is to develop your personal roadmap which can grow your consultancy over the long-term.
Use Quiet Periods To Build The Foundations for Busy Periods
Have ‘Shovel-Ready’ Projects For When Work Dries Up
Of course, if you suddenly become busy you might choose to prioritise client work over some of the bigger roadmap projects you had sketched out.
That’s fine (although you might consider hiring at that stage instead).
But what you should have are projects which are fully scoped out and ready for you to begin work on them when there is an economic downturn or things go quiet.
Quiet periods are excellent times to take a shovel-ready project off the shelf and get to work.
One reason why I think we’ve been so productive this past year is the first half of the year was quieter due to the economic downturn. But it meant we could put things in place to prepare
Takeaways:
You’re in a ferocious race against everyone else who also wants to sell their expertise.
You can’t simply keep doing what you’re doing and expect to win that race - you must constantly race the bar.
You need to create a quarterly improvement roadmap for yourself and ensure you’re committed to spending up to 50% of your time working on it.
Use the maturity model to select projects which you can build on - these are especially useful in an economic downturn.
Thanks for reading
Really great information. Thanks so much for sharing.