creative work Archives : Conferences That Work

How to attract great consulting clients

Monday, August 1st, 2022 by Adrian Segar

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!

In the beginning…

In 1984, after careers in academia and small business, I began a consulting journey that has continued to this day.

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.

Depending on trust—but getting it in writing

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.

What does that mean?

It means continuing to learn as much about my core self as possible, figuring out my mission, and sharing who I am with anyone who’s interested.

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:

“Like your customers and they’re more likely to like you back.”
—Seth Godin, The likable brand (or person)

How to attract great consulting clients

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.

Tags: charging enough, clients, consulting, creative work, fees, lessons learned, trust, working for free, written contracts| Posted in Consulting | No Comments »

It wasn’t the lobster: How we often do work we don’t notice

Sunday, June 19th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Work we don’t notice

Do you know that we do work we don’t notice?

During the summer of 1993, I was dining with my wife, Celia, at a Maine shoreline restaurant. I still remember our wooden table with the red and white check plastic tablecloth. I had just consumed an excellent lobster and a pint of beer and felt more relaxed than I had felt for many months.

Leaning back, well-fed, I had no inkling what was about to happen. And then, suddenly, out of my mouth came these words:

“I think I’d like to give up working at Marlboro.”

My professional life was hectic. I had a full-time salaried position at Marlboro College, teaching half-time and running the IT department half-time. I was also freelance consulting half-time. Oh, and the first two half-time positions were, in reality, more like three-quarter-time commitments.

You can do the math.

Until that seafood-fueled moment, I had never consciously thought about making any kind of drastic change in my work life. And yet, as soon as the words were out of my mouth I became aware that I was going to resign from the college and move to full-time consulting work.

And it felt right.

How did I get there?

Well, ultimately, it wasn’t the lobster or the beer that caused this epiphany—they were just the welcome catalysts. I’ve written elsewhere about how you can learn from stories that resonate, but there was no resonance here.

Instead, my relaxing meal provided an opportunity for months of underlying percolating work to emerge. We often do work that we don’t notice. While steeped in the stress and the toll that long workdays were taking on my life, I didn’t notice the analysis and unconscious calculation of risks and tradeoffs that were bubbling under the surface; the hard, drawn-out preparation needed to make such a drastic change in my professional life.

Looking back, I remember a moment in Maine when I moved from employee to self-employed, and I call it an intuitive choice. Perhaps this is what intuition is: a sudden realization of a conclusion from steady unconscious processing of our experiences. Whatever the mechanism, I believe that we have significant unconscious resources that can often help us respond effectively to difficult situations. How we bring them into our consciousness is for you to discover. Perhaps lobster and a beer?

Have you ever experienced this kind of sudden insight in your life? Please share your story!

Image attribution: Flickr user subinev

Tags: creative work, intuition, work| Posted in life lessons | 2 Comments »

How you can learn from personal stories

Monday, August 2nd, 2010 by Adrian Segar

How can you learn from personal stories?

After I met Glenn Thayer on a warm Colorado evening a couple of months ago, I kept remembering a story that he told me about a celebrity charity event he was emceeing. This puzzled me because the story had no obvious connection to my life or work.

Recently, I began to understand why his yarn kept popping into my head. I’ll post about Glenn’s story another time, but today I’ll write about how to learn from stories like Glenn’s.

Listening to personal stories

Every day, the people in your life tell you personal stories. They might be a family anecdote, a play-by-play reenactment of last night’s game, a tale of frustration at work, or a child’s outpouring about an incident on the school playground: a unique stream of the tragic, the lighthearted, the passionate, and the mundane. Most of these stories pour through your consciousness, hover there for moments, and are gone. A few resonate in some mysterious way and stay with you for years. All of them influence you. And some of them can teach you valuable lessons—if you pay attention to them.

How can you learn from personal stories?

Some personal stories have straightforward learning implications. For example, a relative’s harrowing tale of a ruined vacation due to last-minute illness may encourage us to take out travel insurance, or a friend’s clear description of diagnosing a car problem may illuminate what a timing belt is and does. And here are some more, often poignant examples of learning from stories.

But what about stories that teach us important lessons in subtler ways? Sometimes we hear stories that touch us, but we don’t know why. What can we learn when this happens?

If you are interested in exploring what you can learn from such stories, here are the three steps you must take. They may seem strange suggestions, but I vouch for their effectiveness if you are prepared to do the work.

Notice the important story

Unfortunately, there’s no universal metric that can tell us whether a particular story can teach us something that matters because every story is contextually unique and each of us has unique lessons to learn. So, if you hear so many stories, how do you know which ones are important?

There isn’t a rational way to notice important stories. Instead, you need to cultivate your emotional intelligence, or, if you prefer the term, your intuition.

Important stories affect you at an emotional level. You live in a world that pays lip service to the rational, but, unless you’re a sociopath, you have emotional responses to your life experiences. The trick to noticing that a story is important to you is to detect that you have responded emotionally in a surprising way. An important story evokes an emotional response, and if that response does not make sense to you, there is gold you can mine from it. Glenn’s Colorado story brought up an emotional response that I didn’t understand. Noticing was all I needed to proceed to the next step.

Capture the story

Perhaps it’s my age, but I find that if I don’t capture the essence of the story so I can recall the details, the tale I’ve heard disappears, like smoke, from my memory within a day, never to reappear. So I carry around 3 x 5 cards to jot down stories and ideas I have. (I’ve also started using Simplenote on my iPad for the same purpose.) When I heard Glenn’s story, I wrote “Do you have a handler?” on a card, which was enough for me to remember his story until I got home and added the phrase plus a few notes to a file I keep of potential topics for blog posts. Now the heart of his story was captured in a place where I would see it weekly whenever I was thinking about a blogging topic.

Tease out the meaning

Teasing out the meaning of an important story is a creative exercise. When I came across Glenn’s story in my blog post pile last week, I decided to spend some time musing about it. I’ve found that the two best ways for me to go into a creative place involve either:

Performing mindless physical activity, like stacking wood, going for a walk, washing dishes, or taking a shower.
Listening to loud music that I like.

while daydreaming about the topic in question.

Your methods for stimulating your creative juices are probably different. When you’re ready, find a time and place when you won’t be interrupted and apply them. Here are some tips for making the most of your creative exploration of the story:

Relax, don’t have any preconceptions about what might happen—watch and listen to whatever drifts through your mind.
Don’t censor thoughts and images that come up, just make note of them. I like to have a pen and paper available to record what comes up.
Concentrate on the non-rational; you can unleash your analytical powers once your daydreaming phase is over.
Don’t expect to unlock all the secrets of the important story in one session. You may want to return to it in a few days to see what’s jelled, what seems important, and what now feels superficial.

I’ve learned some important things about myself and my life by examining stories that have power for me. I hope the techniques I’ve described are useful for you too.

How do you make sense of important personal stories you’ve heard? Do you have examples you’d like to share?

Image attribution: Flickr user maxpower

Tags: creative work, creativity, emotions, Learning, meaning, noticing, social learning, stories| Posted in Learning | 2 Comments »

6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences

Monday, May 31st, 2010 by Adrian Segar

I’ve never run a conference without volunteers. I’ve spent over thirty years organizing meetings. Here are 6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences.

1) Is this conference marketable?

One of the most important ways I leverage volunteers is during the earliest conference planning stages to determine whether a proposed event is marketable.

Here’s my simple rule of thumb when deciding whether an idea for a conference might work.

Can I find at least five people enthusiastic enough about the proposed combination of topic/theme, audience, location, and duration to volunteer their time and energy to make the event happen?

If I can’t easily find at least five volunteers enthusiastic about a conference, I’ve (painfully) learned that the event is almost always unviable.

2) Use volunteers for creative work

You’ve got a bunch of willing volunteers—what should you have them do? I try to allocate volunteers to creative jobs at conferences. Research indicates that paying people to do interesting work can make them less motivated! Here are some examples of conference tasks well suited to volunteers:

greeting arriving attendees
introducing attendees to each other
facilitating sessions
organizing and running fun activities

I generally use volunteers for creative work and reserve mechanical tasks for paid staff.

3) Check in with your volunteers

Talk with each volunteer individually well before the event. Ask them how they’d like to help and come to a clear understanding as to what’s expected from them.

4) Plan to have enough volunteers

Volunteers are sometimes less reliable than paid staff. Ensure you have a few people who can cover for last-minute gaps in your volunteer staff during the event.

5) Reward your volunteers

Reward your volunteers throughout the event. Make sure volunteers receive refreshments, meals, and access to conference amenities. If they are attending the conference, offer them reduced or free admission. Reimburse them for any incidental expenses they incur.

6) Never take your volunteers for granted!

Make sure you recognize their contributions, not only publicly, using appropriate perks, awards, and publicity, but also privately. Show them you genuinely appreciate their contributions, and they will become your biggest boosters.

These are the 6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences.

How do you work with volunteers at your events? What lessons have you learned?

Image attribution: flickr user sanjoselibrary – creative commons share alike 2.0 generic

Tags: appreciations, creative work, event-planning, lessons learned, recognition, volunteers| Posted in Associations, Uncategorized | 10 Comments »