Society often glorifies the idea of heroes—individuals who swoop in to save the day and solve seemingly insurmountable problems. We see this dynamic across history, pop culture, and even leadership in our daily lives. But what happens when this fixation on heroism blinds us to the everyday, often invisible, work that prevents those crises from arising in the first place?
During my 40+ years of consulting, I’ve received countless phone calls and emails that begin with a rushed introduction, followed by the ominous phrase: “I have a quick question.”
They know I charge for my time but want free advice.
The first—quick-question-as-sales-tool—is easy to deflect:
Q. “Can I set up a quick call to tell you about a product or service that will undoubtedly change your life?”
A. “No.”
The second approach is trickier. Perhaps my impressive expertise in answering the “quick question” will magically convince them to pay for my services!
The question may be quick, but the answer…
The real issue is that while the question may be “quick”, there’s no guarantee the answer will be short.
Occasionally, I don’t know the answer and can quickly tell the questioner, “Sorry, I don’t know about that,” perhaps referring them to someone who can help. But that’s rare. People don’t want to waste time asking someone unlikely to be helpful, so they usually have good reasons for reaching out to me.
Consulting as a dance
I’ve participated in hundreds of client-consultant conversations. I think of them as dances: mysterious, exciting, full of potential for creating something great, and, sometimes, unfortunately, disappointing.
In my experience, these contracting “minuets” can take as little as ten minutes or, let’s just say, far too long.
The Thirty-Minute Rule
So, if the questioner seems sincere, I invoke my Thirty-Minute Rule to avoid a never-ending dance.
The Thirty-Minute Rule is my reasonable compromise between the competing needs of a consultant and a client. It balances generosity with professionalism, while reinforcing the value of my expertise.
In consulting, “quick questions” often tread a fine line between goodwill and professional boundaries. While helping others builds relationships, my time and expertise are valuable. The Thirty-Minute Rule allows me to offer a fair compromise, demonstrating both generosity and respect for my professional worth. By setting clear limits, I ensure interactions remain productive and mutually beneficial.
After all, consulting is a dance that works best when both partners respect the steps.
I got my first paid consulting job in 1983, solving IT problems for a lumber yard. I’ve been a consultant ever since. I’m so grateful to the hundreds of clients I’ve served over the last 40+ years.
Here are five reasons why I’m grateful for my clients.
1—It’s always a people problem
I was a technology nerd when I got that first gig. I was your guy if you had a problem with personal computers, flaky local area networks, or database systems. It took me about five years of having CEOs confiding to me their non-technical woes despite being hired to solve “tech” problems to learn the truth of Weinberg’s Second Law of Consulting:
“No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.”
I became fascinated by the culture of organizations. As an outsider, I marveled at the variety of dysfunctions I observed. Over time, I got better at solving the people problems I uncovered. Eventually, I realized I was more interested in working with people than technology.
Without the copious experiences of people problems that my clients provided, I’d never be doing what I love today: facilitating connection between people.
2—My clients allow me to try new things
My clients come to me with problems they can’t (at the time) solve. As I work with them they give me opportunities to try new things. Yes, occasionally, I discover I already know how to solve their problems, but that’s rarely the case. My clients’ wants and needs challenge me to be creative. I invariably end up recommending and doing things I’ve never tried before. Consequently, I learn about what works and what doesn’t. My knowledge base and skill set expand.
Because my clients allow me to try new things, I become a better consultant.
3—My clients are my teachers
I’m grateful for my clients because I learn from them. Here are a couple of examples.
Improving Conferences That Work
I designed and facilitated my first peer conference in 1992. I ran them in my spare time for thirteen years before writing my first book. Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love took four years to write. Having spent seventeen years developing the why and how of peer conferences, you might reasonably expect that the book provided a somewhat definitive guide for peer conference rationale and design.
Not so.
I’m still proud of how well Conferences That Work lays out the fundamental reasons for the importance and value of peer conferences. However, it turned out that the implementation sections, adequate for their day, had some important gaps and limitations. When it was published in 2009, my peer conference work exploded.
And, my goodness, I got feedback! It was great feedback. Clients critiqued the approaches I’d developed. Participants said, “Why don’t you do that this way?” It was scary but exciting because much of the feedback included great ideas.
The result was that I wrote two supplements to the book that I published in 2013 and 2015. They included everything I’d learned from my clients that improved peer conferences. I made them free to download. It seemed the least I could do.
Getting thoughtful specific feedback
This doesn’t happen very often. But last week I received a long email from a client whom I’d consulted a couple of times on the design of her organization’s online conferences. After sharing that “our second peer conference was even better than our first” she gave details of “three tweaks…that worked really well for us”.
Her process changes were extraordinarily well-described, creative, and innovative! So good, that I expect to write about them on this blog soon.
Feedback like this is a gift that helps me improve my craft.
Today, because consulting on meeting design and facilitation is a niche practice, marketing via sharing my website posts with subscribers and on social media has also become a significant source of new clients. When potential clients visit this site, they can view my sample client list, assuring them I have credible authority as a consultant.
5—My clients pay me for work I love to do
Yes, I do pro-bono work (e.g. industry education). And I’m happy to discuss innovative ways of getting paid. (No, not by “exposure”.) But, otherwise, my clients pay me for work I love to do.
How cool is that!
Thank you
Finally, I also want to thank everyone who isn’t a client (yet) who has given me feedback over the years.
That includes the ~2,000 folks who have commented on this blog, my professional friends and colleagues, in person and on social media, and tens of thousands of participants who have supported my work and continue to help me learn and grow.
Recently, I had a thought-provoking conversation with association maven and friend KiKi L’Italien. She said she had worked hard to avoid replicating in her marriage some unhealthy dynamics she experienced in her family while growing up. And she felt she’d been successful. But recently, she realized that she had incorporated these unhealthy dynamics into her relationship with her career.
Like me, KiKi’s had a rich and complex professional life. She has switched several times between working as an employee and as an independent consultant in the association field. KiKi told me that some aspects of her behavior working as an independent mirrored the dysfunction of her growing up. Though this was one of several factors leading to the decision, KiKi decided to embrace working as an employee once more for big red M, a company that is a good match for her passions and expertise.
This is the latest step along KiKi‘s journey. I admire the honesty, energy, commitment, and smarts that she brings to her life and work. I want to thank KiKi for her frank sharing that inspired the core of this post. Namely: we need to look not only at our family relationships but also our relationships with our career.
My relationship with my career
Each person’s past experiences and situations are unique. I, like KiKi, work to disentangle myself from what I was taught to believe when I was young. I also notice and review how I work and my relationships with my clients. Doing this reduces the effects of learned dysfunction on my day-to-day life.
For example, when I first started consulting I was scared of disappointing my clients. I (falsely) believed that if I didn’t do a perfect job I would fail in some way. Since I’m not perfect, this led me not to feel good about myself. So, in those early days, I put up with what I now know were unreasonable requests from clients. It took some years before I felt confident in saying no to some of these requests. Eventually, that progressed to breaking up with clients who ignored or did not want to accept my boundaries for a working relationship.
At times, KiKi and I have both chosen to work independently rather than being employed by an organization. This is a big, complicated decision.
Then I remember that, as an independent, I have the freedom to choose:
whom I work with;
the kind of work I do and the way I do that work;
the power to determine my schedule; and
my ability to take breaks and time off when it’s best for me, not my employer.
Your relationship with your career
An unhealthy relationship with your career is different from an unhealthy relationship with your work. The former means your dysfunctional behaviors may affect:
the kinds of work you choose;
the quality of your work relationships at every job; and
your career path.
You have almost certainly experienced unpleasant situations at work. Some of them are caused by circumstances completely out of your control. But in some of them, you have played a part. Having an unhealthy relationship with your career means that you repeat dysfunctional patterns as you move or make decisions about moving from one work opportunity to another.
An analogy would be someone who is a “bad picker” of relationship partners. Over and over again this person chooses to have relationships with people. with whom they are not compatible for one or more reasons that ultimately sabotage each relationship. The same dysfunctional patterns repeat again and again inside each relationship because bad pickers are drawn to relationships that fulfill what their dysfunctional aspects need rather than what their authentic self requires and deserves.
Similarly, you may be drawn to work situations that feed your dysfunctional aspects, leading to repeated eventual dissatisfaction with each new work situation.
There’s no single “right” relationship
Exploring your relationship with your career can have a profound long-term effect on your life.
For example, noticing and responding to our relationship with our work and our careers influence how Kiki and I choose to work as an independent or employee. There is no single right choice for everyone. Although I haven’t received a paycheck for over 30 years, from 1983 to 1993 I was a part-time college professor drawing a salary while simultaneously pursuing independent consulting work. My friend, veteran event producer and educator Brandt Krueger, has a similar story to tell. Employed for twenty years, he eventually struck out as an independent for eight years, only recently returning to employment as a senior event producer at a large company.
What is best for KiKi, Brandt, and me is different. And that’s OK, and as it should be.
What’s important is to keep looking at our experience with everyone who is part of our world. That includes our family, friends, colleagues, working environment, and our career.
We need to keep noticing what’s happening, what’s working, and what isn’t in all these components of our lives. This crucial work allows us to reduce the distance between who we are and how we show up in the world. In the process, you’ll be working to minimize the unhealthy aspects of your relationship with your career.
At edACCESS 2008 I gave a 90-minute presentation entitled “Learning from the biggest consulting mistake I’ve made — and that you probably have too”.
OK, the formal title was “The Systematic Development of Informed Consent“, which sounds much fancier but requires explanation.
17 years have passed, yet I think the blunders I made while working with a client during one of my past careers—IT consulting—are still relevant and instructive. So, I’m going to ‘fess up to the world. And as a bonus, I’ll introduce you to the people who taught me the biggest reason worthy projects don’t get implemented, and what you can do about it.
The story begins
The story begins in November 2007, when I was invited to a two-day training given by Hans and Annemarie Bleiker. There were about forty of us. Here is a photo of our merry group.
While teaching at MIT in the 1960s, Hans and Annemarie noticed the dismaying reality that many public projects never get implemented or even started. They decided to research to find out why, and if there was anything people could do to improve their chances of success. She’s an anthropologist, he’s an engineer. Since then, they have presented their findings and unique methods for improving matters to more than forty thousand professionals around the U.S. Here are some of their clients…
[Click on the image for the current list.]…and their mission.
Mid-morning on the first day of the workshop I had a major aha! moment. I understood a core mistake I’d made eighteen years earlier. That mistake led to my failure to successfully implement an organization-wide IT system for a major client.
During the workshop, I discovered that the mistake is so common that the Bleikers have spent decades teaching people how to avoid it.
So, I want to share what I learned with you because you have probably already made the same mistake.
My Harrowing Story
The following story is mostly true, though I’ve changed all names to confuse the innocent.
In July 1989, I was hired by a client I’ll call Seagull School. The school had two campuses, North and South, that were three miles apart and housed slightly different academic programs. The key personnel I worked with were Mr. Head, Mr. South (head of the main campus), Mr. North, and the Tech Director.
From 1989 – 1998, I wrote custom software or adapted commercial software for Seagull’s administrative needs. It was all hosted at South. South’s computer labs included both PCs and Macs; North decided to only use Macs. At the time, I didn’t think much about it.
In 1999, I was asked to develop an integrated administrative system that would eventually be used at both campuses. It took about a year to develop. During the development, North was asked repeatedly to define what system functionality they would like, but they didn’t want to talk about specific data elements. Over the next couple of years, it slowly became clear that they wanted something that could be changed on a whim. North wouldn’t consider the ramifications for the whole school. For example, North wanted the school registrar, based at South, to create transcripts, but wouldn’t specify what might be on them for North’s programs.
Finally!
In 2001, Mr. Head decreed at a meeting with all the administrators that the system I’d developed should be used at both campuses. Yay!
But…no.
A few days later, Mr. Head called me into his office. He had just met with Mr. North who had presented him with a large packet of documents expressing his view of the current state of affairs. Mr. North claimed that the integrated system solution had been developed without talking to people at North. So, he had just purchased another system from a neighboring school (without talking to anyone at South). He told Mr. Head that he thought Seagull School should use North’s system for both campuses and have the existing integrated system be an archive of past data.
Everyone at South whom I talked to thought this was ridiculous.
However, for some reason that I was never made privy to, Mr. Head left that meeting feeling it would be impossible to make my integrated system a viable solution for Seagull School right now. So, Mr. Head told me to keep the folks at South campus happy and leave North to its own devices for the present.
Well, what about…this?
A year went by and I had a bright idea. Why not develop a web-based system that would be platform-independent? I gave the Tech Director a quote, but the school decided it was too expensive.
North decided to hire its own consultant to develop a custom system. As I expected, the consultant didn’t do much because he was incapable of pinning North down to say what they wanted.
By 2003, Seagull administrative staff at South were complaining that they couldn’t do the work that North wanted them to do because North’s data was still in a separate system.
So, Mr. Head hired two more consultants to advise on what Seagull School should do. Eventually, the second consultant concluded that the “strongly recommended” scenario was to use my system, with North accessing it via remote control software. The next best option was to develop the web-based system I’d recommended. The third option “difficult to justify”: was to keep using two systems.
For another year, Mr. North ignored the report, and Mr. Head did nothing.
Finally, in July 2004, Seagull asked me to create a web-based system.
I told them, “No, I’m retiring from IT consulting in a couple of years, and I don’t want to start a new project for you now.” <Muttering under my breath: “You should have said ‘yes’ two years ago when I suggested it – I would have done it then.”>
More dramatic twists and turns ensued, which I will spare you because they aren’t germane to the topic of this post. I’ll just add that Seagull School kept using my system for another five years.
So, what went right?
As a fan of Appreciative Inquiry, I think it’s important to spend a moment summarizing what I did well for Seagull School.
I successfully devised, created, updated, and supported easy-to-use custom software that handled the core administrative needs of Seagull School for almost twenty years.
The core Seagull School staff, based at South, appreciated my work and were strongly supportive during this time.
The investigations of several other independent consultants upheld my recommendations.
So, what went wrong?
I was unable to get Seagull School to adopt a single integrated administrative system for both North and South.
You might ask: “Why did I fail?” But “Why” questions are not especially useful in cases like this.
A better question is: “What could I have done differently?”
I’ll answer this question after telling a fairy tale…
The Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, there was a baby princess, born into wealth and privilege. Everyone who’s anyone was invited to her christening.
Unfortunately, the invitation email sent to a wicked fairy with an AOL account bounced back to the palace mail server, and the bounce never made it through the palace spam filter.
You know what happened next. Although guarded carefully, the princess, grown to a young woman was one day accidentally tased by a palace security guard.
Nothing would wake her.
She had to sleep for a hundred years with her crown on until tech support finally showed up and rebooted her.
The Wisdom of The Bleikers
So now we arrive at The Wisdom of The Bleikers. Here’s their answer to the question “What could I have done differently?” It was the following explanation that provided my aha! moment halfway through the first day of the Bleiker workshop.
Setting the stage
You’re trying to implement a Good Thing for a constituency. It could be a new water treatment plant for a town, a program to reduce the number of unhoused, or—dare I say—the adoption of a single organization-wide administrative information system.
When we do this, invariably some folks are against our Good Thing. Our constituency is divided.
[An important caveat: The Wisdom of the Bleikers is not a panacea for developing consent for a poorly thought-out plan or proposal.]
The Bleikers’ research found that just about everyone thinks of a divided constituency they’re working with like this:
The Bleikers reframe this common view in the context of a scale of agreement, like this:
The key Bleiker addition that the above diagram omits.
Almost every major constituency faced with a significant change includes NIMBYs (“Not In My Backyard” aka “Over My Dead Body”) who, even if they are a small minority, have a great deal of power to torpedo implementation of the Good Thing.
Mr. North was my NIMBY. And, as I’ve related, he succeeded in preventing the implementation of a single administrative IT system during my entire consulting gig at Seagull School. The Bleikers have found that the single most effective way to improve the chance of implementing the Good Thing is to focus on the NIMBYs. And the heart of the Bleiker strategy is to move NIMBYs to 0+%.
The Bleikers have found that this strategy works. Though it’s not 100% guaranteed, they have successfully helped hundreds of organizations to implement complex projects despite the existence of considerable NIMBY opposition.
Why don’t people follow the Bleiker strategy?
Why didn’t I talk to Mr. North as soon as I started to realize that not all was well?
Fear.
Remember that everyone at South who worked with me was very happy with my work. It was easy for me to hang out with the folks at South and join them in complaining about how unreasonable the folks at North were. It would have been scary to go and listen to Mr. North. I felt scared to hear what they might have to say. So, I played it safe. For years.
It’s really easy to hang out with the folks that agree with you. It’s hard to go into the lions’ den and talk with people who are highly opposed to what you, and perhaps a majority of a constituency, think should happen.
My mistake was to focus on developing support at South for a single administrative system at both campuses, rather than developing what the Bleikers call Informed Consent at North. I never really thought about who might be affected by my work. If I had, I might have realized that I needed to spend a lot more time listening to Mr. North. If I had successfully implemented what the Bleikers eventually taught me, Seagull School might have had a single administrative system by 1999, instead of nine years of countless meetings, expensive outside consultants, and school-wide frustration.
This was my biggest consulting mistake. (That I’m aware of.)
Informed Consent, and an introduction to what you need to do to move NIMBYs to 0+%
The Bleikers identify three kinds of consent:
Informed
Uninformed; and
Misinformed
And they define Informed Consent as the grudging willingness of opponents to go along with a course of action they are opposed to…”
So, if you can develop Informed Consent, you can get your proposal implemented!
You can become what the Bleikers call an “Implementation Genius”!
Implementation Geniuses:
Don’t concentrate on developing support for their proposals
Focus their efforts primarily on the bottom of the Agreement scale
Aim to develop their fiercest opponents Informed Consent
The Bleikers spend most of their workshops teaching how to develop the Informed Consent of NIMBYs. I’m not going to try here to reiterate or summarize what they teach. I recommend you go to their workshops for that! But I want to end with five Bleiker “pearls” that give you a taste of what to expect.
Pearl 1. Why versus What
Telling your constituency:
WHY you exist…
WHY you do what you do…
…is ten times more important than just telling them WHAT you do.
Pearl 2. The mission is not the mission statement
Your mission is a bunch of responsibilities. It resides in people’s guts.
Your mission statement is a bunch of words, a verbal sketch of the mission, but just a sketch.
You need many different mission statements, some long, some short, some technical, some non-technical – but many, many…
Pearl 3. The Bleiker “Life-Preserver”
Repeat often!
“There really is a problem.”
“We are the right entity to be addressing this problem; in fact, given our responsibility, it would be irresponsible for us not to address it.”
“Our approach is reasonable, sensible, and responsible.”
“We do listen, we do care.”
Don’t say “we want to” or “we would like to”.
Say “we need to do this!” or “we owe it to you”.
Pearl 4. The Null-Alternative
The Null-Alternative is the sequence of events that, most likely, will come to pass if you don’t implement a workable solution.
It is the consequence of your failure to implement a workable solution.
I titled this post “Learning from my biggest consulting mistake”. There aren’t really any dumb mistakes. Mistakes are integral to learning. They only become dumb if you don’t learn from them and consequently repeat them over and over again.
Have you ever avoided people who have the potential to torpedo important work because you feel scared of what might happen if you do?
I have, and I believe such behavior is understandable and, unfortunately, common.
I hope that by sharing my story and the Bleiker approach to developing Informed Consent with you, you learn how our natural unwillingness to listen to those who vehemently oppose something we think is a Good Thing can be overcome.
To your and your constituency’s benefit.
Has something like this happened to you? Please share your stories, experiences, and thoughts about anything in this post in the comments below!
Image attribution: – Illustration of The Sleeping Beauty by Ruth Ives from Wonder Books’ “Sleeping Beauty” by Evelyn Andreas, Copyright 1956.
I’ve consulted for more than a thousand organizations. My clients include branches of the U.S. Government, large international agencies, and for-profit and non-profit companies. Over the last four decades, I’ve found the size of a client’s organization affects many aspects of my work. Here are some of the pros and cons of consulting for large organizations.
Pros of consulting for large organizations
The pros of consulting for large organizations are pretty much what you’d expect.
Credibility
When choosing a consultant it’s smart to see whom they’ve worked for (and check references). Potential clients who check out my partial client list can see that I’ve worked for huge organizations like The World Bank, The Nature Conservancy, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Having had clients like these can reassure large organizations that I may be able to help them too. Smaller potential clients may also be impressed. (I also include plenty of smaller organizations on my client list, so people know I routinely work with large and small clients.)
Status
Consulting for large, well-known organizations obviously confers a certain amount of status. If you care about that kind of thing. Which some people do.
Access to resources
Large organization clients usually have more access to useful resources than smaller clients. For example, meeting rooms, specialized support staff, and travel budgets are often plentiful and generous. That can make my work easier and more pleasant. (Note: I’ve found for-profit clients have a harder time freeing up staff support for my work than the associations that make up a majority of my client mix.)
Larger fees? Perhaps…
You’d think that larger organizations would tend to pay more generous fees, and I’m sure sometimes you’d be right. However, I don’t set my fees based on the size of the client but on the scope of the work that’s needed. Though I don’t charge the stratospheric rates that some consultants quote, very small companies can have a hard time finding the money to pay me to do a good job. (And if I can’t do a good job for them, whatever the quantity of work, I won’t sign a contract.)
In general, only a few potential clients reject me because they decide they can’t afford me. My contracts with large clients may involve more time and money than similar work for a smaller client (see below). Otherwise, since I don’t set my fees on a “what the market can afford” basis, I don’t find a significant correlation between client size and fees. Other consultants’ experiences may be different.
Cons of consulting for large organizations
The cons of consulting for large organizations are less obvious than the pros. It took me a while to discover them.
More BS
In general, I don’t enjoy consulting for large clients as much as small ones. That’s because I’ve found working with large organizations involves…well, more bullshit. The BS manifests in many ways. It’s more likely, for example, that there will be conflicts between people and departments that I have to handle as part of my work. Decision-making processes are often convoluted. Administrative and contract issues take up more time.
There are exceptions. Typically they occur when I’m working for an autonomous subunit of the entire organization where the stakeholders have the decision-making authority needed for me to do my work. Under these circumstances, it’s like working for a small client, albeit one embedded in a large organization. Unfortunately, I don’t often come across this structure. Even when I do, the organization’s environment and structure sometimes warp the goals and objectives for our work in strange ways.
Harder to talk to decision-makers
One of the most frustrating issues when consulting for large organizations is that it can be impossible to talk directly with key decision-makers. In large organizations, I often work with middle managers who are enthusiastic about what we create. But then we have to sell our approach to upper management. Senior staff typically expect to hear from their middle managers rather than me. In practice, this is very inefficient. Any questions or objections that middle management can’t answer have to be passed back to me. This does not usually end well.
My rule of thumb is that if I can get ten minutes with a senior manager, we can get a go (usually) / no-go decision. For example, working with a hospital chain CEO recently, it took a few minutes to resolve an issue that no one else in the organization was able to handle. But this is frequently impossible!
I have seen more great consulting collaborations unnecessarily scuttled via the refusal of senior management to get even briefly directly involved than for any other reason.
I’m well aware that as a consultant I have no power, only influence. So I don’t take it personally when clients don’t follow my advice. But it’s still a frustrating and wasteful experience for everyone involved—and it’s a much more common outcome at large organizations.
It’s a wash
Creating long-lasting positive change in the organization
It seems plausible that a good consultant can create more long-lasting positive change in a large organization than in a small one. After all, the former has more people to influence, and any successfully introduced change will therefore affect a larger number of people.
Influence is like raspberry jam. The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets.
Large organizations dilute your influence for creating change because it’s spread over many people. In a small organization, I have more influence over fewer people and can help make a bigger change take place.
Here’s an example. A few years ago, I and a group of meeting designers spent a day looking into how we could improve the annual UN Climate Change Conference meeting process in order to better meet the challenges of the climate crisis. These meetings involve hundreds of countries and thousands of NGOs and people. A few hours spent reviewing the arcane procedures that have been historically used convinced me that the likelihood of a single consultant or organization affecting the outcome of these meetings was infinitesimal.
Conclusions
Personally, I prefer to consult with smaller organizations. Although the perks of working with a giant concern are rather nice, they don’t compensate for dealing with the higher level of BS that I often encounter or the increased likelihood of failing to make a positive change (despite getting paid).
I’m sure that some consultants prefer spending time in big and complex cultures. If you’re one of them and would like to share your viewpoint, please do so in the comments below. And if you agree with my preference, share that too!
These days I am blessed with clients who are a joy to work with. But that wasn’t always true. Here’s how I learned to attract great consulting clients.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. Everything that follows assumes that you have something of value to offer potential clients, you’re competent enough to supply it and have a realistic opinion about your worth. If you’re looking to get consulting work but don’t have all the requisite skills or expect to be paid unrealistic fees, this post won’t help you. But if you are a consultant who somehow keeps ending up with difficult clients, read on!
Running a monthly local community group—the Southeastern Vermont Computer Users Group, long defunct—exposed me to businesses that needed advice and support on using these new-fangled “personal computers”. They hired me. Early on, I remember telling my wife that I had a few months of work booked but didn’t know if there would be more. After about five years of making similar statements, she pointed out that I probably didn’t need to worry too much.
Wondering about how much work I’d get, I accepted everything I was offered that I could do.
And sometimes, that didn’t work so well.
Three lessons learned
Charging enough
A local lumber mill offered me my first IT consulting job. I had no idea how much to charge, so I asked a friend. He asked me the hourly rate I thought I should ask for. When he heard my answer he laughed and said, “Double that!”
He was right. I had been doubting my value. The client didn’t even question my fee, and neither have hundreds of subsequent clients. Over the subsequent years, I discovered the truth of one of my mentor’s Secrets of Consulting:
“The more they pay you, the more they love you. The less they pay you, the less they respect you.”
—Jerry Weinberg, one of his ten laws of pricing
In fact, if a potential client tries to aggressively negotiate with me over my fee, it’s a warning sign that our relationship is going to be less than ideal.
Working for free
I was once asked for a detailed proposal to fix problems with a client’s complicated database management system. The client told me they’d fired their previous consultant. I spent a significant amount of time determining possible solutions and submitted a comprehensive proposal. Imagine my disappointment when the potential client gave the proposal to the supposedly “ex-” consultant and told him to implement my solution.
This taught me an expensive lesson.
Since then, I simply won’t do creative work for clients without payment. I’m happy to have an initial call (typically 30 – 60 minutes) without charge and send a general proposal. But I won’t work after that point without a signed contract.
My advice: avoid any potential client who insists on detailed creative ideas before a contracted relationship exists.
I used handshake agreements for years. They worked almost perfectly for me, but that’s because I eventually discovered I have a good (though not infallible) intuitive sense of whom to trust. But eventually, I began requiring written contracts for one important reason.
A written contract is a great tool to minimize misunderstandings.
Despite my best attempts to clearly communicate and agree on task scope, execution logistics, and the many other components of a professional relationship, I still find that what ends up in my head can be different from my client’s understanding. The creation of a signed written contract, which sometimes goes through a few drafts, is a great process to maximize the likelihood that our expectations match. And it acts as a great de-escalation tool if one of us forgets what we’ve agreed to.
The most effective way to attract great clients
But the best way I’ve discovered to attract great clients is to know who I am and share myself publicly.
For example, this blog includes hundreds of articles posted over the last 16 years. Those who care can learn about my views on a wide range of topics, such as meeting design, facilitation, consulting, life lessons, facilitating change, the meeting industry, personal effectiveness, technology, and much more.
I’ve been happy to participate in many video interviews and podcasts, allowing people to learn more about my ideas, approaches, and personality.
On Twitter, I post on an even wider range of subjects, sharing content and ideas I like as well as, these days, a lot of political commentary.
Though I’m well aware that I, like everyone, still maintain personas, I continue to try to minimize the difference between the me I present to the world and who I truly am.
Allowing potential clients to see who I am helps them decide whether I might be a good fit to work with. Sharing who I am attracts those who like what they see. And, I’ve found, I’m likely to like them too! Which, as Seth Godin points out, can be a win-win:
To summarize, let’s assume you can be of value to potential clients. Then to attract great consulting clients, you need to do three things:
Learn how to identify and say no to potential clients who are not looking for a win-win relationship with you.
Work to understand who you really are and your mission in life, and then be that person (no games). This is probably the hardest step. But it pays rich dividends in so many ways, not just in your professional life.
Market yourself—your core beliefs, skills, and personality—to potential clients. Those who have a need for your services and like what they learn about you will be drawn to get in touch.
That’s my recipe for attracting great consulting clients. It’s been working for me for years. If you’re a consultant who ends up with difficult clients more than you would like, I hope it helps you too!
As always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Picture the renowned senior consultant breezing into the gleaming corporate HQ of Fortune 500 MegaCorp, for a well-paid gig advising C-suite executives. Now, picture the newly-hired janitor who spends their evenings mopping & vacuuming floors, cleaning restrooms, and emptying trash and recycling cans in a small MegaCorp branch office. Who has more power, the consultant or the janitor?
Wrong. Actually, the janitor has more power! Here’s why.
Influence but no authority
Both the consultant and the janitor have responsibilities. MegaCorp contracted the consultant to give the C-suite good advice. MegaCorp pays the janitor to caretake the office.
The janitor has more power because they have the authority to do their assigned caretaking. Even though MegaCorp limits through the job description the scope and status of their work, the janitor has the power to determine how to clean floors and empty trashcans.
The consultant has no power to make any changes at MegaCorp. Consultants have influence — but no authority, no power. My mentor Jerry Weinberg defined consulting as the art of influencing people at their request. Any seasoned consultant, however successful, sometimes fails to influence their clients.
“As a consultant in various fields for 42 years, this is a familiar world: one where I have influence with a client but less authority than a janitor. Clients are free to ignore my advice. Sometimes they do, but clearly I have useful influence that typically leads to significant change. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t continue to be hired and — usually 😀 — appreciated.)” —Adrian Segar, The declining influence of leadership positional power in a network society
The janitor has the power to caretake their building in the way they want and need. MegaCorp gives them that power while not granting any to the consultant.
The Hard Law
Having influence but no power is one of the hard things about being a consultant, as expressed by Jerry Weinberg’s Hard Law:
“If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant.” —Jerry Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting
This is indeed a tough truth to swallow. But Jerry adds an “atom of hope” with a reframe:
“Some people do succeed as consultants, so it must be possible to deal with failure.” —ibid
When’s the right time to solve small problems? The right answer is almost always “as soon as practically possible!”
Why? Because small problems often become large problems if we don’t work on them in a timely fashion.
Unfortunately, people don’t appreciate the value of promptly solving small problems, because (see cartoon below) we love to acknowledge and reward heroes — people who solve big problems, aka emergencies — rather than the folks who proactively solve small problems and prevent emergencies in the first place.
“Prevention is better than Cure. But which one makes a better story?” by @workchronicles
Two societal examples
Here are two examples of the value of solving small problems early, and the consequences when you don’t. The first is one where solving small problems in advance averted major world disruption. During the second, world leaders delayed solving small problems, resulting in millions of avoidable deaths.
The Year 2000 Problem
In 1999, I reviewed the million lines of computer code I had written for clients over the previous two decades. I was checking for what is called the Year 2000 Problem (or Y2K). In the early days of writing computer software, many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits. This made the year 2000 indistinguishable from the year 1900! (There was also a concern that programs might not incorporate the 1-in-400-year calendar exception that makes the year 2000 a leap year.) As the millennium approached, programmers realized that when such programs ran on January 1, 2000, havoc might ensue.
Before January 1, 2000, these issues were small problems. On January 1, 2000, they could instantly become big problems.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of programmers worked diligently to review the millions of software programs currently running. When we found code that displayed the Y2K problem, we fixed it. I think I found four places in my old code that I needed to fix. Only one of these issues would have caused significant problems for a client.
We worked to solve small problems before they became big problems.
Society didn’t call us heroes. I’m pretty sure there are no statues of Y2K mitigation programmers. No one gave us medals or publicly recognized our efforts. And that’s OK by me. We were just doing our jobs.
I, and all the programmers I know who actually did the work and could see the consequences of inaction, are in the other camp.
The COVID-19 pandemic
Experts on pandemics have written about how the millions of worldwide deaths caused by COVID-19 could have been greatly reduced, especially the 500,000+ (1, 2) in the United States. We know that pandemics regularly wreak havoc on world populations. But we failed to work on the critical small problems of developing antiviral drugs or vaccines in advance.
In the United States, the consequences of the Trump administration’s consistent attempts to defund and disarm America’s preparedness against a mass outbreak of a viral respiratory illness, something that previous administrations had sought to prepare for, and Trump’s continual dismissal of the alarmed advice of his experts and intelligence services is well documented (1, 2). It’s estimated that if Trump had dealt promptly with solving the relatively small problems during the early stages of the pandemic, he could have prevented about 60% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths.
In recent weeks, we’ve been able to see the stark difference between Trump’s dereliction of duty and the leadership shown by the Biden administration on a coordinated response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter includes:
Restoring problem-solving capabilities dismantled by Trump, such as the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, and administration-wide infrastructure for monitoring and responding to emerging biological risks.
Securing funding and Congressional support to establish an integrated, National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics to modernize global early warning and trigger systems to prevent, detect, and respond to biological threats.
Reviewing and seeking to strengthen the U.S. pandemic supply chain, public health workforce, medical countermeasure development and distribution, bioeconomic investment and technology-related risks.
These actions create the conditions for solving problems that may occur in the future. You may not see such problems as “small”. But their size and difficulty to solve are small compared to the problems that can result when we ignore early warning signs and lessons from history.
Solve small problems!
Unfortunately, society tends to reward those “heroes” who rush in as saviors to solve big problems. The countless folks like you and me who work every day to solve small problems don’t get much credit.
Nevertheless, do the right thing. Invariably, prevention is better than the cure. We may get little or no glory from preventing big problems, or even catastrophes, but our world is a better place because of it.
Thank you, everyone, who works each day to minimize big problems for individuals, organizations, and societies by solving the small problems that, if unsolved lead to big ones! You are my heroes.
Do we really need heroes?
Do we really need heroes?
During my 40+ years of consulting, I’ve received countless phone calls and emails that begin with a rushed introduction, followed by the ominous phrase: “I have a quick question.”
I got my first paid consulting job in 1983, solving IT problems for a lumber yard. I’ve been a consultant ever since. I’m so grateful to the hundreds of clients I’ve served over the last 40+ years.
Recently, I had a thought-provoking conversation with association maven and friend 
Though I’ve been a professional consultant of one kind or another for over forty years, I sometimes still fall victim to the Consultant’s Curse.
At 
I’ve consulted for more than a thousand organizations. My clients include branches of the U.S. Government, large international agencies, and for-profit and non-profit companies. Over the last four decades, I’ve found the size of a client’s organization affects many aspects of my work. Here are some of the pros and cons of consulting for large organizations.
Picture the renowned senior consultant breezing into the gleaming corporate HQ of Fortune 500 MegaCorp, for a well-paid gig advising C-suite executives. Now, picture the newly-hired janitor who spends their evenings mopping & vacuuming floors, cleaning restrooms, and emptying trash and recycling cans in a small MegaCorp branch office. Who has more power, the consultant or the janitor?