Four Habits Of Successful Consultants

If you develop good habits, you will get great results (eventually).

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The Power Of A Single Habit Compounding Over Time

Many years ago, I met a highly successful freelance writer. When I asked him he kept getting articles in major publications his answer was simple.

“I pitch one article to one publication per day.”

Come rain or shine, he would pitch one article per day.

It wasn’t the same pitch to multiple publications. It was one highly targeted pitch to a specific person at a specific newspaper (or magazine) each day. That’s approximately 250ish pitches over a year. He estimated he had a 20% acceptance rate which gave him as much work as he could handle.

I think about this often when giving consultancy advice. Success is less about what you plan to do today and more about what you plan to do every day. If you can put the right habits in place and sustain them, there’s no stopping you.

Three Pillars For Consultants

If I had to zero in on a few things which make a consultant successful, I’d include:

1. Building a valuable skillset.

2. Developing relationships with past, present, and prospective clients.

3. Successful marketing.

If you can build habits which match the above, I suspect you will be incredibly successful.

Four Habits Which Serve Me Well

Here are four habits which have served me well over the years (I still do each of these every working day). Your mileage with them might vary, so feel free to adapt them however you need.

1. Reading. I once listened to a podcast with Patrick Stewart where he mentioned he spends the first 30 minutes each day reading. The idea stuck with me so I tried it out. It was a game-changer. I read primarily non-fiction books - typically on topics which can help my work. I’m currently reading a book on information architecture, before that I was reading a book on UX, and before that I read a book on Systems Thinking. I get through 35 to 50 books per year this way. I’ve lost track of the times when I’ve directly applied something I’ve learned to our work.

2. Building and maintaining relationships. Another habit that’s helped is to begin the day by emailing a past or present acquaintance in the industry (often former clients) or reaching out to people who I’ve seen doing interesting work. These aren’t sales emails - they are emails to build relationships. I send one of these emails each morning.

3. Marketing and Promotion. I typically spend the first 60 minutes of my working day marketing my business. This varies from writing blog posts, editing footage, improving my website, or something else. This has helped me write 3 books and over 3000 blog posts - in addition to plenty of other guides and ebooks.

4. One Great Example. At some point during the day, I try to find one great example in my industry and make a note of it. There is no immediate goal of this other than to learn from what people are doing and have material I can use in the future. I don’t always succeed, but the practice is useful.

Your goal is just to get 1% to 2% better at each of these things per month. That’s it. Over the year, or over the course of several years, the impact of this will be huge.

This isn’t a definitive list of habits and you can adapt to serve whatever goal suits you. If you want to speak at major events, pitch one major event per day for example. Just figure out what makes sense to you.

Same Time Every Day

Perhaps the best secret to any successful habit is to do it at the same time every day.

Put it on your calendar.

This blog, for example, is a new habit I squeeze in after my morning reading. I spend 30 minutes working on this before breakfast. After I’m done, I eat, do some marketing work (habit 2), and then go to the gym for an hour.

A quick side note to this, I didn’t embrace all of these habits at once. They were gradually refined over the years. I began with marketing for 60 minutes each morning, then later added my daily relationship email, and added reading each morning a few years ago. Finding one great example began last year and has broadly stuck.

If You’re Stuck, Focus On Habits

On the occasions when a consultant asks me for advice to grow their practice, one of the first things I ask them about is their habits. Do they have the right habits for their situation? Are they sustaining those habits most of the time?

If you’re not getting where you want to be, try to figure out the key pillars of success for a consultant in your industry and then work backwards to determine what habits might get you there.