Elite Organisation: The Operating Systems for Successful Consultants
Elite Organisation: The Operating Systems for Successful Consultants
Doing the boring things well is a powerful weapon to reflect your professionalism and impress your clients.
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Impress With Your Organisational Skills
It’s genuinely impressive to do the boring things well.
For years, organisational was my biggest weakness. I would get excited about doing the work but my processes and organisational skills were poor. This manifested itself in me not doing the following:
Keeping project timelines up to date.
Taking good notes from client meetings.
Sending and gathering feedback from clients on notes.
Having an agenda for meetings.
Ensuring we gained official sign-off on deliverables.
Using change order requests to amend the scope of work.
Utilising a proper filing/organisational structure.
Sending invoices at the right time.
I told myself a story that I was relaxed, flexible, and easy to work with. It was part of my brand.
In truth, it was laziness and I found the process side of consulting tedious and tried to avoid it until I couldn’t.
Poor organisation doesn’t just look bad, it leads to bad outcomes.
For example, if you don’t keep the project timeline up to date, you and your client might have a different understanding of when a project will be complete.
If you don’t invoice on time for your work, it can cause problems for the client if they’ve allocated payment for you in one financial year and you don’t invoice them until the next.
If you don’t take good meeting notes, people might have different expectations of the outcomes of meetings etc…
These things have real consequences.
The good news is this is this is something that doesn’t cost a lot of money to improve - it just takes a commitment to setting up and maintaining systems.
Five Organisational Systems You Should Deploy
Having great organisational skills impresses clients. It reflects the quality and professionalism you bring to the work.
Here are five systems you should have in place.
A single source of truth about the project status.
A full set of templates for repetitive activities.
An efficient meeting system.
A clean file structure.
A document taxonomy system.
Strong project management skills are critical if you want to succeed as a consultant. Let’s go through some best practices in doing this well.
1) Keeping Track Of Client Projects (Have A Single Source Of Truth)
You should always have up-to-date project timelines for every consultancy project.
In my early years, I did this with an Excel sheet which I would periodically update. Looking back, sending multiple versions of Excel sheets to clients is so obviously a terrible idea. You can use Google Sheet if you like, but it’s very limited.
My suggest is to pick a project management tool and commit to it.
We use Asana (and really like it) - but other options include:
Monday.com
SmartSheet
Jira
Airtable
Trello
With each of these, there is an option to share a link to an up-to-date project plan with a client.
The golden rule here is a client should be able to precisely where you are in the project at any time without having to ask you directly. Ideally, they can also see a list of upcoming activities and when they need to do their tasks.
Sometimes you will need to use a client’s system. In that case, make sure you make an effort each day to keep their system up to date with any tasks you’ve undertaken (and check any new tasks assigned to you).
Whenever you do a task on behalf of a client, update the project plan.
Aside: It’s easy to spend a huge amount of time using these tools. Don’t get sucked into that. Decide before you open or select a tool precisely what you need it for and stick with that. If you just want a list of tasks and a timeline, then only use that.
2) A Full Set Of Templates
You should have a set of templates for tasks that you undertake regularly. You will naturally adapt each template to each client, but it’s a lot easier to edit something than recreate something entirely new. I’d suggest templates for at least:
A kickoff call template. This is where you introduce everyone to everyone and go through the basics. This includes the project plan, where you will share information, how you will share information, who the key project contacts are, what access you need, and any invoicing details. Be clear about what you need the client to do to ensure the project stays within timelines. By far, the most important thing here is to push for the access you need early. This means access to stakeholders, data, and internal systems. This always takes longer than you imagine.
Meeting agenda templates. Have a standard meeting agenda template that you duplicate for each meeting (click here to download a meeting notes template).
Stakeholder call templates. Create a stakeholder call template that outlines the initial script, background for you undertaking the all, and a common set of questions that you will adapt and adjust to each individual.
Client contracts. We’ve covered contracts before. You should have NDAs, SOWs, and MSAs drafted by a solicitor for use in your specific organisation. This can save you a lot of time.
Invoices. Make sure you send the invoice at the earliest possible opportunity. This is less about getting the money in your account (although that never hurts) and more about ensuring they can begin the process on their side).
Proposal templates. You should have a professionally designed proposal template that includes everything we covered here.
Client presentation templates. You almost certainly have this already, but hire a designer to create a custom presentation template for presenting to clients. This should cover a dozen or so common slide designs you use. This will save you a HUGE amount of time in the future. Folks like Firm Learning are also good here.
Brand guidelines. You should have brand guidelines in place that are clear about your fonts, colour schemes, imagery, tone of voice etc. that you will use - and keep it consistent.
Setting all this up takes less time than you might imagine. The bottom three you can hire a graphic designer to develop for you for a few thousand dollars (or less). The top three you can come up with yourself. And then you just need a legal professional for for the client contracts.
These are one-off costs. You pay once but you benefit indefinitely.
3) An Effective Meeting System
You will spend a lot of time on calls with clients. This is a good thing. It’s when a client stops showing up for your calls you should be concerned. But there are good and bad meetings. You need an effective system which includes the following.
A meeting scheduling tool. It’s a poor use of everyone’s time to go back and forth trying to set up a meeting. Instead, use a scheduler like Calendly to send over your availability and let the client pick a convenient time. Spend an hour or so becoming familiar with it and ensure you keep your availability up to date.
Set meetings for 25 or 55 minutes in length. Set limits on the length of your meetings. I’d suggest setting meetings for either 25 or 55 minutes. Give yourself a five-minute break between meetings. This is useful just to relax for a few moments between calls, follow up on tasks from the previous meetings, or take a short break.
Take better notes. Having a set of documented notes makes things a whole lot easier to decide what was agreed on and when. This is also especially important if things vary from what was agreed in the contract. You need to document notes to protect both you and the client. If your primary contact ever leaves, it helps to have a good set of notes to work from. Make sure you use a meeting notes template.
Follow up immediately. Once the meeting is complete, you have three critical tasks to do straight away (I’d suggest leaving yourself 5 to 10 minutes between meetings to do this). These are:
Clean and send the notes out to all relevant stakeholders (especially if they couldn’t make the meeting). These days tools like Otter.ai can do this automatically. But I’m not 100% convinced Otter captures notes and action points as well as it should.
Include a note asking recipients to highlight any points of clarification within 24 hours. This essentially says ‘unless you disagree, this is the approved version of events of this meeting. It’s good to rely on this later.
Schedule the action items relevant to you. Take the action items from this document and put them in a dedicated tool with assigned times for when that project will be completed. I prefer to get these scheduled in my Google Calendar so time is specifically blocked out to complete these tasks.
If you have recurring meetings (see below), add the link to the meeting notes in the calendar invite.
4) Create A Clean Folder Structure
In your client kickoff calls, you should ask how you will share documents with each other.
In the past, you would send documents by email. But this is becoming less common as data-security concerns have risen. Increasingly you will share a link to a document hosted somewhere secure.
The common options here are usually:
A clients hosted server
MS Teams
Box
Google Drive
Dropbox (less common these days)
Whatever system you use, it’s important to keep the structure clean and consistent.
Set a ‘TEMPLATE CLIENT FOLDER’. This has the structure you will use consistently for each project. Whenever you get a new client, duplicate this folder. This may also contain template documents you might use (for example, meeting note templates, checklists etc…).
Create clear sub-folders. This will vary, but you usually want folders for at least the following:
Contracts
Background Information
Research
Deliverables
Shared Deliverables
Meeting Notes
Only provide clients with access to the ‘Shared Deliverables’ folder. We all deserve the ability to work on projects in privacy until we’re ready to share. You usually don’t want to share a half-finished project with a client unless you want feedback. Even in that case, you probably want to develop it to a stage where it’s ready for feedback. You do your work in the internal deliverables folder.
If your client wants documents shared on their system, you can skip the shared deliverables folder and simply transfer the documents across when you’re ready.
5) Document Labelling System
You should have a good information classification policy which is used consistently throughout your documents. The purpose of this is to keep track of which documents have and haven’t been shared with clients (and to prevent accidental leaks of information)
All information you should be classified into one of three categories:
Classification
Public [EXT]
Internal [INT]
Confidential [CONF]
Status
Draft [DRAFT]
Reviewed [REV]
Shared [SHARED]
Depreciated [DEP]
Finally, you might add a version control or last revision date (although this is optional).
So a typical naming structure for a document might be:
[CLASSIFICATION] - [CLIENT] - [DOCUMENT TITLE] - [STATUS] - [DATE]
For example
[CONF] - Microsoft - Sales Strategy - [DRAFT] - V2
You can update this to your needs if you like. You might add [FOR-REV] to indicate the draft is complete and is for review by someone else.
The key point is you should be able to look at the documents in your system and instantly know the status of each of them.
Automation Isn’t As Helpful As You Might Think
It’s not a surprise to look at the above and think:
Damn, that’s a lot of finicky work - I wonder if we can automate it.
Yes, you can automate some things. But make sure you have a very clear, battle-tested, manual process in place before you automate it. You should be able to describe every step of it clearly. It’s common to spend hours automating a process only to later discover there are so many exceptions to the process that automation really doesn’t save you much time.
Sometimes automation simply clashes with human behavior. For example, sending out reminder notes to update the document tagging after an update doesn’t work because people simply ignore the automated reminders they receive often.
Even today, we’ve kept our automation rather limited to things like setting up new clients, updating Slack with project updates, and a few things that simply make life a little easier. Every time I’ve tried to do more, I’ve discovered there are just too many exceptions to the rules.
Summary
Developing a world-class organisational system won’t just convey the right level of professionalism to clients, it will encourage you to deliver better work. If you develop the right systems and stick with them, you will soon see the benefits in client relationships, the quality of proposals you’re developing and the projects you deliver.
None of the above takes deep technical knowledge, just a commitment to doing the boring things extremely well.