A-Z Thoughts and Facts

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|L|M|N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|V|W

A
	Article Writing: Writing a minimum of six articles per year that get published in magazines that have an opportunity to be read by your ‘public’ is a vitally important personal branding process. Personal branding must be continuous to be effective. Getting articles published online is another internet marketing concept to build your reputation. Articles can be more current in nature, and more topic focused because you only need to write between 300-800 words. Crafting and drafting an article to suit a particular magazine or publication forces you to work with your own writing. If a topic hasn’t got enough subject matter to become a book at a later stage, it can become a booklet, or an e-book of between 5,000 and 20,000 words.
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B
	Body Language: Researchers estimate that human beings have a body language ‘vocabulary’ of over 20,000 different gestures, each with its own distinct meaning. As with spoken and written language, the more fluent your body language, the better the job it will do to reinforce your verbal message. Clients may have observed your body language long before you open your mouth. For example, clients will observe the way you greet people as you enter the room. By the time you speak, this group will have made some preliminary conclusions about you. Do you seem open? Are you friendly? How responsive are you? Branding: Creating a personal brand is about defining ‘who you are’ (the authentic you), being clear about how that fits with ‘what you do’, and using the mix of these two factors to create competitive advantage for your consulting business. Having your own definable and distinctive personal brand means you will be more focused, more aligned with what you do and far more productive in your commercial affairs. Good personal branding goes beyond personal development but one does need the other. Personal development is more about building inner confidence whereas personal branding is more about how you communicate your expertise and project your image to critical clients. The three Ps of building a personal brand: 1. Promise 2. Positioning 3. Personality Branding Strategy: ‘To know is to have gained knowledge, to do is to have gained wisdom’ is an important metaphor in your brand building campaign. All consultants know the importance of marketing and branding. But it’s taking the action and doing the necessary activities that separates the amateur from the professional. Consider four areas: 1. Expert 2. Talent 3. USP 4. Niche Branding By Writing a Book: Writing one or more books is one of the signature steps to becoming a fully-fledged Odyssey consultant. Writing a book, of course, is only the first step in a two part process. Getting your book published is the second part of this process. Despite the avalanche of electronic information and the accelerating pace of change, the written word in the form of a book holds an influential place in the minds and hearts of men and women everywhere. About 100,000 books are published every year (about 50,000 in the USA alone). That’s about 2,000 new books every week. This means somebody is reading them and somebody is publishing them. Business of Consulting: Seeing consulting as a business rather than as some kind of different or protected profession is the behind the concept of ‘the business’ of consulting. Seeing it as a process not an event. It takes time and dedication. You can make the break through by following the complete systems thinking approach, whatever your profession – lawyer, accountant, dentist, doctor, architect, engineer, management consultant.
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C
	Client Profitability: client profitability has a direct relationship between the fees you charge and the time you spend on the assignment. Some clients may be very profitable; others may be costing you money. While 20 percent of your clients may contribute 80 percent of your profits, the question then arises, ‘what do you do with your least profitable clients who absorb your most valuable resource – your time? Competent Warrior: The Competent Warrior stage – the second step – emerges, where you develop a formula that works more often than not, and you start to get seriously focused on expansion plans and visions for the future of your career or business. Competencies of a Consultant: The Odyssey Competency Model is based on the integration of three different but important competency concepts: 1. Personal, Interpersonal and Team Competencies 2. Professional Competencies 3. Business Competencies Consultative Selling: In a nutshell, the client buys you and your expertise first, your solutions second, and your company third. The flip-side of the same coin is that as an Odyssey consultant, you must put the client first, your company second, and yourself third. The order only rarely changes. When your reputation and portfolio of solutions have gained credibility in the marketplace, IT’S YOU who seals the deal. People buy people. The consultative selling process has five phases: Entry, Examination, Diagnosis, Prescription and Implementation. It can stand independent of the consulting process as you will have to enter and re-enter a client organisation for different kinds of assignments. Some will not require the full consulting process formalities. Some will be extended projects. Creditability Builder: In the 1970s Professor Albert Mehrabian’s study Silent Messages looked at the three ways in which you make an impact when you communicate with others — through your words, tone of voice and non-verbal behaviour. He proved, convincingly, the over-riding importance of non-verbal communication or body language in being a credible communicator. The three areas are: 1. Words: Your Verbal Impact 2. Tone of Voice: Your Vocal Impact 3. Non-Verbal Communication: Your Visual Impact
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D
	Definition of Consulting: The first definition is a broad, functional approach to consulting. Fritz Steele in Consulting for Organisational Change (1975), defines it this way: “Consulting is any form of providing help on the content, process, or structure of a task or series of tasks where the consultant is not actually responsible for doing the task itself, but is helping those who are”. In Peter Block’s book, Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (2000), he suggests that “You are consulting any time you are trying to change, or improve a situation, but have no direct control over the implementation. By this definition, many executives in organisations are really consultants, even if they don’t officially call themselves consultants. So, if you are a helper or an enabler, or a provider, or even a manager, you can assume the consulting role”. Consulting, therefore, is a generalist approach, open to everyone rather than the preserve of the elite. This positioning helps explain the hi-jacking of the title ‘consultant’ by everyone from the ‘hairdressing consultant’ to the ‘sales consultant’ to the ‘IT consultant’. It’s an approach or a way of doing something.
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E
	Executive Briefings: Executive briefings are the best kept secrets in marketing a consulting practice. You invite a targeted group of executives to a lunch or evening occasion where you get the opportunity to present on a subject that will add immediate value to their operational or strategic challenges. This provides you with a platform to ‘display’ your expertise. Executive briefings provide an ideal location for working jointly with media, academics or a business sponsor, such as a chamber of commerce, newspaper or other commercial player. Executive briefings, above all, provide an opportunity to publicly show your professionalism and puts you within eyeball distance of prospective clients.
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F
	Financial Intelligence: Financial intelligence is the ability to generate sufficient profitable revenues to meet your goals, to invest that profit wisely, and to ensure that every cost adds direct value to your business.
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G
	Generalists & Specialists: “To be a generalist or to be a specialist, that is the question”. To be a real management consultant, you need to be a generalist, some would argue. A specialist is an industrial engineer, a financial analyst, an expert in compensation techniques, but not a management consultant. This argument says that generalists lack the in-depth knowledge required to fully understand and resolve problems and provide added-value in today’s business environment. Clients today want consultants to have the generalist skills of a general manager and the in-depth knowledge of an expert. It’s a balancing act that could kill your business. By firmly deciding who you are, and how your talent is different, you can find the right balance. Although you may be a generalist in your field, your clients need to perceive and believe that you are a specialist in their area of need. Good Soldier: The Good Soldier stage which is exemplified by the enthusiastic professional who has just joined the profession from college or management. Provided you survive the soldier year(s), you are ready to progress to the next level.
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H
	Human Performance Management: Human performance management has attempted to link business strategy and business transformation with limited success. Linking human performance improvement with the very purpose and future strategy of a business is a consulting task that is not often appreciated by executives and leaders. The impact of a total integrated organisation wide strategic process can be significant and long lasting on a company.
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I
	Ideal Client: Client profitability has a direct relationship between the fees you charge and the time you spend on the assignment. Your biggest clients may not be your most profitable clients. Be careful not to fall into the trap of confusing size or amount of revenue fees from a client with bottom line profit. Niche marketing for the Odyssey Consultant allows you to identify and work with your ideal client more easily and more often. Some markets just do not fit, or will not pay the kind of fees you need to reach the top echelons of consulting. One of the major reasons average consultants stay average is because they are working in the wrong markets where it is difficult for a small consultant firm to maximise their positioning, and to charge the value based fees they deserve. Your best clients will be moving forward as action orientated leaders. Change will be endemic. They will be seeking a piece of their better self in you, therefore, you will need to be at least 10-20 percent ahead of your client in terms of your psychological and social intelligence. In any market, there is always a profile of potential clients who are high probability clients, these are clients who very much value what you do, and are prepared to pay the consulting fees that you deserve for the ‘worth’ that you create. To justify higher fees to your client, you must increase the perceived value of your portfolio of solutions. Value is truly in the eye of the beholder. Your sales and marketing strategies AND your personal and professional branding are critical to positively differentiating your offering in the minds of your clients. You talk more about profits, return on investments, the vision of the client organisation rather than the features and benefits of your products or solutions. You stop selling, in the old fashioned sense. You realise that your personal capital knowledge bank, expertise and talent can add value at an organisational level and be of real benefit to your client. Intelligent Consultant: As an Odyssey consultant, you must change all limitation thinking with regard to your intelligence. You must put into perspective all forms of the ‘IQ’ way of thinking. You probably have too many comparisons from your management career and examination results that tell you how smart you are, or how intelligent you must be. Exam aptitude can determine your future, if you let it. Your previous management level can put a ceiling on your consulting business, if you let it. Unfortunately, these measures and this kind of ‘limitation thinking’ permeate the consulting industry. IQ tests originated during World War II when more than two million Americans were sorted out for military enrolment through the first mass paper-and-pencil test. This way of measuring intelligence has permeated the education, economic and social world for decades. Be careful that it does not limit your consulting career. In the last few decades, however, there are major developments in the area of multiple intelligences. Interpersonal Communication: Interpersonal communication is a learned art, science and practice of the professional advisor. Interpersonal communication is the process that you use to exchange information with your client on a one-to-one basis. It’s the super-highway to building solid and lifetime relationships.You use the communication process to listen to the needs and wants of your client. You use it to explain models and ideas, but also to share your intentions, feelings and attitudes. The Latin word communicare literally means to share. Interpersonal communication, at its simplest level, is a two way process. Intervention: What is the scope and parameters of the consulting profession? How do you, in fact, help, assist or advise? What’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate? What does an intervention mean? There is a myriad of answers to these questions, but here are 10 general ways a consultant can intervene in a client organisation as follows: 1. Information Gathering 2. Specialist Services Provider 3. Networking Management ‘ 4. Sounding-Board’ Mentor 5. Research and Diagnosis 6. Implementation of Proposals: 7. Developing Systems and Methodologies: 8. The Change Agent: 9. Human Performance Improvement: 10. Executive Coaching: Internet Marketing: The options provided by website marketing have literally exploded over the last decade as the electronic medium has taken hold of every aspect of the marketing mix of every business. Having a website today is an essential prerequisite for every business consultant. Unfortunately, many consultants have followed the traditional product, market route as the prices of getting a website has collapsed. Two of the biggest challenges that consultants face on an ongoing basis are: ‘How do I keep in touch with my current clients, particularly those I haven’t engaged in an active assignment with for a number of years?’ and, ‘How do I reduce the lead-in time and cost of acquisition with developing new client relationships?’
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L
	Learning by your Talent: Let your talents shine. What do you really enjoy doing as a consultant? What do you find easy to do? What do you find easy to learn? These tasks are probably clues to your natural talents. These areas need nurturing and development just as much as your weak areas. Pick a subject (maths)or task (driving a car) for example, and map yourself on the north/south easy/difficult to learn axis and on the east/west easy/difficult to do axis with regard to the subject/task. What comes easier to learn and do are talent indicators for you. If you cannot name your talents, you probably don’t really know those talents well enough to exploit them for your own good or the good of your clients. Learning from Clients: Advanced learning works on the principle that your clients are your teachers and that you live off their knowledge. You do not know more but you may have seen more Let your talents shine. What do you really enjoy doing as a consultant? What do you find easy to do? What do you find easy to learn? These tasks are probably clues to your natural talents. These areas need nurturing and development just as much as your weak areas. Pick a subject (maths) or task (driving a car) for example, and map yourself on the north/south easy/difficult to learn axis and on the east/west easy/difficult to do axis with regard to the subject/task. Listening Power: Listening is the first and most powerful of all interpersonal communications skills in client relationship building. The habit of paying close attention to people when they are talking is regarded as the highest form of flattery. The vast majority of people, however, are poor listeners. They are usually easily distracted because their minds are full of other thoughts and activities. Consultants are not generally good listeners when they meet a client. So, differentiate yourself early on with this rare skill. Listening is so uncommon that it will take your client several meetings before he can detect what your difference is to him. Listening is a discipline and a habit that you can learn with practice. There are four key behaviours: 1. Listening Attentively 2. Learning to Pause 3. Be Careful of Making Assumptions 4. Verify to Clarify Listening to Write: Writing a superb professional letter by the Odyssey consultant has a cause-and-effect relationship. Endeavouring to get it right first time, however, means having a systems thinking approach and a total grasp of the picture in the client’s head. Inevitably, a poorly produced final document can be traced back to unclear thinking, poor listening and an urge to produce something, even anything, too quickly.Listening is the supreme consulting skill. Listen ‘to write’, listen for context, listen for underlying issues. Check your ability to paraphrase the client in the form of a summary, or on a notepad immediately after the interview.
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M
	Marketing Excellence: Marketing in a consulting business is about getting the right portfolio of solutions, to the right clients, in the right places, at the right time, at the right fees, with the right level of communication, and at a right profit Master Practitioner: The mastery stage is the ultimate goal for the Odyssey Consultant. Mastery of your subject can take 5-7 years of dedicated hard work. That’s up to 10,000 hours, focused on doing the right things. It’s not 10,000 hours ‘cruising along’. That’s a lot of extra time to invest in moving to the top of your profession. But the time is going to pass anyway so why not start immediately with a systematic action plan. Marketing Questions: 1. How do you make the client disposed to using you again and again? 2. How do you increase your capability to serve your client better? 3. How do you find and pursue the next engagement? Market Strategies Positions: One of the biggest single mistakes that average consultants make is to give equal attention to everybody. The cost of acquisition is often the same for creating a low value, low appreciative, client as it is for your high value ideal client. This piece of insight needs operational wheels, however, or it can turn to cynicism and stress. Any business is NOT better than no business. Learn to say NO. Your time is your most valuable asset on operational matters. Your talent deserves better. You can be just as busy generating total fees of €200,000 as generating fees of €1,000,000. (M1) Meeting One: That first all important meeting! Your ability to listen, ask appropriate questions and empathise are critical factors in creating the environment for the client to articulate their superficial or underlying issues. Most clients know the answers to their own problems … it’s just that they have never been afforded the relaxed, safe zone to articulate them in this form, probably, ever before. They will sense your level of unconditional positive regard for them quite early on. Clients will tell you everything you need to know, at that time, if you create this zone between both of you. However, it’s got to be a peer level regard. If they don’t feel safe with you, if you don’t seem totally credible (that’s 100 percent credible) they will, unconsciously, hold back vital information or give it to you in an operational, technical, superficial form. This will cause you confusion in the letter writing stage. The cycle of average has been started. The benchmark will be set, probably for the entirety of your relationship. (MR1) Meeting One Response: The goal is to present all M1R letters right first time. You may outsource this to your PA by dictating the letter in your car immediately after you meet the client. Or you may do it yourself, or outsource it to an agency. Follow your house-style whichever way you do it, some basics of design as are follows: 1. Present it on letterhead and continuation paper at first draft stage (to get the look and feel) 2. Paginate as appropriate, from page one (centre bottom) 3. Spell-checks and basic grammar errors eliminated first time 4. Use standardised bullet points and bold subhead, indented paragraphs, italics and other design features to add appeal, emphasis and variety 5. No full stops at the end of bullet point lines, except the last point. First letter of bullet point in upper-case 6. Final total visual scan for best possible presentation. Models: The Odyssey parallel process steps are conceptually very simple to follow and relatively easy to understand in the context of the four parts/16 modules of Odyssey: The Business of Consulting model. The Odyssey model allows the odyssey process to be frame worked and contextualised in a very simple way. A consulting model is a theoretical construct that represents a mental or conceptual set of variables with a logical integration that shows – visually — what is possible from a consulting intervention on a major client assignment. The primary purpose of a consulting model is to show an idealised outcome within a logical framework. It allows you to move one step up from abstract theory to a more idealised situation and helps your client see the big picture, master blueprint, or above all, how an intervention could be applied practically to their set of circumstances. A well constructed consulting model is the ideal framework to show what is possible and therefore has certain assumptions, procedures or stages built into it which need to be explained and adjusted for each client assignment. When you make a decision to firmly anchor yourself on odyssey level 3 as a trusted advisor, the practice of developing your conceptual ‘mentalisations’ into consulting models becomes an imperative. How do you conceptually represent a process such as an organisational development intervention, or a strategic change management assignment, or a cultural transformation process, or the installation of lean mean manufacturing, or a new IT system? A consulting model helps bridge the gap between conceptual possibility and the reality of where you and the client are right now. Conceptual thinking is fine but can be the rock that average consultants perish on simply because they cannot ‘operationalise’ the concept to a more practical platform. Add in the art and science of pen selling to build the model from ground up and you go a long way to ‘making it live’ for your client.
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N
	Narrowcast Marketing: 1. Proprietary Research is used regularly by the big firms to develop positions on a specific market sector or problem. 2. Seminars and Executive Briefings are a core competency for the Odyssey consultant. 3. Writing Books and Articles gets your profile in magazines and newspapers. 4. Making Speeches at public conferences gets publicity and spin-off benefit. 5. Attendance at Industry Meetings gets you involved in real operational issues. 6. Networking is always important but never urgent. It needs to be ongoing and is best when you are having ‘a feast’ period. 7. Referral Sources are gold mines. Do good work and they will be volunteered to you rather than you asking at the time of your greatest need. 8. Community Activities. Giving something back needs to be an ongoing activity and during the ‘feast’ period. Definitely never during a ‘famine’ period. 9. Getting Quoted in the newspaper is the ultimate reference. It requires networking and keeping in touch with journalists. 10. Newsletters can be regular or periodicals, paper or electronic, but should serve to update and refresh. 11. Brochures are too associated with product selling. Keep them different. 12. Media Tracking for opportunities is good but used a lot in product selling. 13. Cold Calls is the old fashioned hard-selling method that went out with the 20th century. 14. Direct Mail is too predictable, product-oriented and immediately positions you in the wrong way. 15. Advertising rarely works. Free PR, ‘subliminal advertising’ is better. Networking: networking is the active process of developing and managing mutually beneficial relationships within your personal, professional and business contacts. It is vitally important to realize that a personal, professional and/or business network does not automatically translate into a social capital. It is quite possible to have a large number of people in your network, but contributing no real social capital value to your organisation – simply knowing lots of people does not constitute a worthwhile capital.
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O
	Observation Awareness: Observing means much more than seeing. You see everything that passes by your eyes but you do not record it. Observing is like listening with your eyes. The eyes are the windows of the soul. How good are you at reading signals? Remember there are 20,000 non-verbal signals! Points to note: 1. Perception is more important than the reality 2. Your eyes are the most powerful of your five senses 3. Your eyes (and observing skills) are desensitised 4. Your eyes see several thousand messages per day.
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P
	Personal Productivity: Personal productivity is the ultimate personal talent differentiator in the achievement of your personal and professional strategies. Excellence in personal productivity means achieving your primary objectives, on time, every time. It’s having a clear understanding that there are choke points and winning edge factors that either hinder you or help you to be very productive as a consultant. Sometimes, ironically, you may like the limiting factors because they protect you from the truth. Sometimes you may develop a state of ‘learned helplessness’ with regard to the winning edge factors that give you the push-up to the next level of productivity and performance. Personal productivity is about getting important tasks completed in less time, with less stress, so you can focus even more attention on the high-value activities that give you a maximum return on your investment. Process Consulting: The consulting process has a clear beginning, middle and end, and includes all the activities undertaken between the consultant and client to help achieve both their clearly defined outcomes and objectives. Your personal and business strategy, your consulting models, and your willingness to learn and reinvent yourself all fuse together when you engage in systems thinking. The Odyssey process has identified five phases in the consulting process as follows: 1. Entry and Examination 2. Diagnosis and Prescription 3. Consultant Execution 4. Client Implementation 5. Assignment Completion and Exit These phases are not fixed. They are flexible and require your ‘judgment call’ on virtually every assignment. However, they should act as a guideline to keep you on track and serve your client very well. Process Framework Steps: The consulting Odyssey has four steps which parallel the four dimensions of the human being, physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. The four steps are mirrored in several other process frameworks. Making the jump to the next step can only be made when you are ready intrinsically and extrinsically. You must make progress in all dimensions to climb the stairs of success. “Give me a lever, and a place to stand, and I will move the world” said Archimedes, and this is critical to process positioning. Whichever step you stand on in the process determines your power to leverage, just like Archimedes. Where you start in a process framework also determines your position. And positioning is everything in creating personal and consulting advantage. Professional Organisations: Joining professional associations allows you an opportunity to see what is going on in your industry. Networking opportunities are part and parcel of personal branding such as signing up to your local chamber of commerce or professional institute. But you must become a regular attendee and get to know the other regular attendees. As high as 80 percent of those who join never attend. Put yourself forward as a speaker for the year’s agenda in a professional way. Introduce yourself with a professional outline of your topic, and credentials. Someone is always in charge of the schedule for the year – get to know them. Volunteer for committee work and take responsibility for some aspect of the association’s work. This gives you an opportunity to get wider visibility, including local and national press and TV. Proposal Writing: A proposal is a selling document, a statement of your capabilities to address a given client requirement. A proposal says, ‘I can do what you want based on the meeting of minds during our discussion’. A proposal is designed to outline ? to an extent sufficient to sell the idea ? the concept of what you are proposing to your client. Not clearly addressing the client’s problem is the most common reason for proposal failure. If you can prepare superior proposals that shout ‘professionalism’ from every page, and do this in a cost and time effective manner, then a proposal becomes the most effective, most efficient instrument you can have for making a first-class impression on a prospective or existing client. Writing proposals is only difficult if you are not organised, if you don’t have a plan of action and a methodology to guide you every step of the way. Getting the client’s requirement right is the most important part of the proposal development process. Get your definition of the client’s requirement wrong and your solution will miss the point completely. Be sure that you know what the client really needs and wants before you even consider possible solutions. Purpose of Consulting: Establishing a conceptual framework regarding the purpose or purposes of consulting helps shape your approach to client assignments. The underlying motives of helping, assisting, or advising seem to permeate all definitions of consulting. Here is the Odyssey definition of consulting: Management consulting is a professional and business advisory service which assists clients to achieve their strategic objectives by: 1. Helping solve management and business problems 2. Identifying and taking advantage of new opportunities 3. Embracing talent management and ‘the learning 4. organisation’ 5. Assisting and advising on the implementation of 6. change.
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Q
	Questions: Observing means much more than seeing. You see everything that passes by your eyes but you do not record it. Observing is like listening with your eyes. The eyes are the windows of the soul. How good are you at reading signals? Remember there are 20,000 non-verbal signals. Points to note: 1. Perception is more important than the reality 2. Your eyes are the most powerful of your five senses 3. Your eyes (and observing skills) are desensitised 4. Your eyes see several thousand messages per day.
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R
	Referral Marketing: Word of mouth marketing will still account for 60 percent or more of the best work you will receive from your ideal clients. One of the great blessings of working with your ideal client is that they have a tendency to talk about you with similar others. This has a ripple effect of creating a golden chain of recommendations for your consulting business. The primary purpose of your consulting business is to create and keep clients who appreciate what you do and who put you in ‘a category of one’. When the need for a solution enters their thought process they immediately think of you, and only you. It is just too awkward, time consuming and risky to consider the alternatives. This most basic question is, ‘Why should I do business with you?’ Results-Based Consulting: A systems thinking approach to managing the critical first part of the Odyssey process which is creating the right kind of relationship with the right kind of client and at fee levels where both you and the client are very happy. It is about win/win versus win/lose, lose/win or lose/lose in the client/consultant relationship. Revenue Generation Strategies: 1. Expand Your Client Base … Attract New Clients 2. Develop Longer Term Retainer Type Contracts … Contract For Many Assignments Once 3. Create Passive Or Parallel Product Streams … Capitalise On Your Original Cost Of Acquisition 4. Broaden Your Strategic Positioning … Sell Larger Assignments 5. Justify Higher Fees By Creating Higher Perceived Value … Increase Your Fees 6. Improve Assignment Profit Margins … Focus On Ideal Clients And Solutions 7. Reduce The Cost Of Client Acquisition … Examine Your Positioning Process
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S
	Sensing Consultant: Tapping into your preference areas are vital in talent identification and finding the best ways to be an advanced learner. An important consideration in your learning is how you prefer to use your five senses — seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling — which are controlled from the neo-cortex of your brain. How do you prefer to use these senses in your learning? You may be dominant in one learning style and may struggle with the others if you are not aware of your preferred style. Consider experimenting with some of these different ways of learning during the Odyssey process. Seven Ingredients of the Marketing Mix: 1. Product: Always define your ‘product’ in terms of the added-value or benefits it provides to your client. Every product on earth is only as good as the perceived need that it fulfils. 2. Price: Setting fees in a professional services business is fundamentally different than price setting in a product based world. 3. Professional advisors and consultants get paid for services rendered, and largely for what they have done over a lifetime of experience and expertise gathering, rather than for what they do in a particular transaction. They get paid for their talent rather than the product they deliver. 4. People: The primary relationship here is the meeting of minds between you, the consultant, and your client. Remember, your client can be one person – the economic buyer – or an organisation, where general relationships are ‘in play’. 5. Promotion: Traditional business has a myriad of promotional avenues such as advertising through the print media, or on radio or TV. Direct mail, telemarketing and electronic commerce on the internet provide a rich array of promotional opportunities. 6. Packaging: First impressions count in consulting, just as in life. What is your visual appeal? How professional is the visual presentation of your presentables and portfolio of solutions when top clients eventually see them? 7. Positioning: Your clients will decide in their own mind that you are ‘the obvious expert’. Your talents and methodology will be ‘hiding in plain sight’. Remember, it’s not what you do in a transaction that determines your value, it is always the calibre of the service rendered. 8. Place: In traditional marketing parlance ‘how you get the goods out of the woods’ and where you sell your product is of primary importance. In the consulting world, your location or site is less important than, say, a high street retailer. Elite consultants regularly work on site with the client, or from home. Six Profit Drivers: 1. Staff Profitability: What are the ratios you need to achieve between staff costs, revenues and profits? 2. Personal Profitability: Consider the ratios between your personal productivity and profit contribution. 3. Client Profitability: Measuring your costs and revenues per client is one of the easiest measures in consulting. 4. Sales and Marketing Profitability: ‘No-cost marketing’ can produce better results than ‘must do’ marketing campaigns. 5. Portfolio of Solutions Profitability: Is the 80-20 rule alive and well here? 6. Niche Market Profitability: Ideal client profiling is key. Social Networking: A good ‘rule of thumb’ is to balance your speech with 60 percent content or information on your topic and the other 40 percent on the process that makes the content work. There is no better way to engage an audience than by giving examples, telling stories, showing a demonstration or diagram, and moving about appropriately on stage. Having humour, fun, encouraging questions and interactions are all supreme skills that need to be practiced a thousand times over before you become expert with them. Speaker: Establishing yourself as a professional speaker is a powerful trademark as an Odyssey consultant. Always maintain your primary branding position as a strategist, businessman, or as a consultant. Explain that you are privileged and honoured to be invited to speak at their conference as a key note speaker or as part of a panel of speakers. Strategy: Strategy is an essential thinking tool and a powerful planning process to gain the individual, team or organisational competitive edge.
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	Trusted Advisor: the Trusted Advisor stage is where the majority of competent consultants find their level of excellence. They do good work for a niche market who are loyal to them and vice versa. They have gone beyond the ‘feast or famine’ roller-coaster and earn above average personal income. They enjoy their work and work with their ideal clients only. TV & Radio Branding: Getting invited on to a TV or radio show is a little more difficult than getting published, but can be achieved nonetheless with a systematic, well thought out campaign. Like book publishers and magazine editors, TV and radio directors need expert opinion and interesting topics virtually every day of the week. Turbo Strategies: 1. Talent Value: Only five percent of consultants define their own personal capital and talent value in investment terms … 95 percent let the client or their competitors define it for them. 2. Transformational Interventions: Good consultants advise and consult at individual and team level, or on ad-hoc projects. Odyssey consultants help transform organisations with strategic interventions. 3. The Conceptual Age: Join the conceptual age, where talent, value and creativity – not time – is the current currency. Aligning human capital with business strategy is the elusive concept that ‘demands’ consultative talent. 4. The Consulting Process: Traditional consultants write reports that tend to gather dust on the client’s shelf. Odyssey consultants help the client through the full consulting process to achieve the desired results. 5. Analyse & Assess: Measure at the start, and measure at the end, and remember Einstein’s words: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. 6. Change Transformation: People don’t resist change as much as they resist ‘being changed’. There is a one-to-one relationship between the amount of involvement/participation and the positive changes/transformation achieved. 7. Consulting & Renewal: Professional practice consulting is about change, renewal, and transformation. The scale, context and outcome of change may be different for different clients, but basically, change is change. 8. Worth & Work: You deserve to earn what your talents are worth as well as for the work you contribute. Charge for your work AND your worth. 9. The Fees Paradigm: Fee setting is contingent upon the value expected by the client, the expertise expended by the consultant, and the nature of the engagement. 10. Freedom & Appreciation: ‘Freedom’ in consulting means having the kind of clients who accept your fees because they appreciate your value and your talent.
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	Value Priorities: Perception is reality. The client will have many moments of impression from their interactions with YOU … from the very simplest to the critically important. How your staff answer the telephone … how your presentables (letters, documents, brochures, manuals etc.) are quality focused … how consistent your offering is maintained … and how you live out your brand promise are all critical moments of impression. Verification for Clarity: Verifying or paraphrasing is the process of making sure that both sender and receiver of the communication clearly understand each other. It means knowing what the client has said – but more importantly what he or she has meant. One way of ensuring everyone is on the same wavelength — connecting — is to rephrase what the person has said in your own words, conveying what you think they mean. Do not just repeat their words to them, they are bound to agree with that.
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	Writing- House Style: Developing professional writing habits and learning to write with purpose needs to be part of your values, mission and communication ethos. Writing excellence is simply a formalised expression of your thoughts, captured in a piece of script. Having the right content, however, does not mean the job is done. Your goal is to present all your documentation to the highest possible standard, to maintain consistency across your consulting practice, in the most efficient way, and to set standards below which you will never fall. Call it your own unique HOUSE-STYLE.
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