« english
How to start a consulting business (II)
I wrote How to start a consulting business on September 23rd. And I’m writing this post on November 2nd.
Time flies.
I’ve been reflecting on my life and my career during the last year. I suddenly realized that for the last years I posponed a lot of personal goals and focused on work or professional goals instead.
I started in the IT business a long time ago, and during the last 4 or 5 years I’ve been focusing on freelancing, providing UX, web design and front-end development services to a variety of clients.
I don’t know exactly when but I came to realize that I wasn’t enjoying my job as much as before.
And the reason, I believe, was a kind of burnout. As I said before, work was everything to me, and in the road of pursuing excellence I sometimes feel I forgot how to live.
Always optimizing everything. Every minute. Squeezing productivity from every second.
The road to consulting
I felt a bit ashamed of publishing How to start a consulting business.
I thought: what are my prospects going to think if I pretend to position myself as a consultant and, at the same time, I’m publishing an article saying I have no idea about how to do that.
And the reason why I published that article is because, from now on, I want to learn in the open.
Which is something I always wanted to do and never took the time to do so.
But let’s go back to consulting.
Definition
consulting
adjective. engaged in the business of giving expert advice to people working in a professional or technical field.
noun. the business of giving expert advice to other professionals.
With this definition, we can say “consulting” is to give “expert advice” to people.
We can infere then, that the requisites for being a consultant is to be “an expert” who knows how to advice people.
This is a soft skill definition as soft as it can be.
What I mean is; consulting is loose by definition. Or better said, the “consultant” title is loose.
Everybody could eventually define itself as a consultant.
In a simplified way, it’s just a self owned title.
What’s next
While I was telling people (in real life) that I wanted to become a consultant, I realized I needed to define some kind of scope for my consultancy.
Personally, this is the trickiest part to me, because I have a broad knowledge base and experience in too many different fields (I’m a generalist).
I’m leaning towards writing more about my services, and defining a specific scope or, alternatively, outreaching people or businesses and offering myself as a generalist. I’ll see how things will continue.
I’m not a native language speaker so if you have any feedback please reach out to me. I’m also networking and looking for new opportunities, my Twitter: @marcelomazza.
<< How to start a consulting business es el anterior