Million Dollar Consulting

Million Dollar Consulting teaches you how to build a thriving consultancy business, by focusing on relationships, delivering strategic value and thinking long-term all the way through.

What does a consultant even do? Sure, the guys at McKinsey always walk around in suits, have a lot of PowerPoint slides, and talk really fast, but what’s their job?

In the most basic form, a consultant adds value to a business that the business can’t create itself. For example, let’s say you own a brick and mortar store selling pet supplies and want to start selling online. You ask for help. The person explaining to you how Wordpress works, how you can create a website, and what it needs to be able to sell items online is a consultant.

In this case, this would be content expertise, knowledge that’s specific to one topic that the consultant knows well. However, there’s another type of expertise, which is process expertise.

Process expertise is about principles and methods which work regardless of your specific niche. These ideas transcend topics and industries. For example, a consultant who tells you that email is the best medium to make sales from with an e-commerce store and shows you how to build an email list, as well as how to structure your website so more people end up buying would be giving you his process expertise.

These are things that help any online store and go beyond technical knowledge, which makes them of course much more valuable than just content expertise. Especially solo consultants do well by focusing more on process expertise.

I’ll never forget or unlearn this lesson: Never charge hourly. Most businesses are used to an hourly or daily fee model for consultants, but that’s nonsense. Do you know why? Because it doesn’t encourage you to be efficient. To the contrary. It gives you an unethical incentive to take more time than you need. The client isn’t interested in how long your work takes. She only wants the result, the improvement you can give her. But if she pays you by the time you spend on the project, it’d be in your best interest to maximize that time, putting the two of you on opposite sides – ugh! The tasks you check off don’t matter either, the outcomes you create do. Those get more valuable as they pile up, tasks just get repetitive. In order to charge flat fees for projects, you have to communicate the value you provide clearly. You demonstrate the end result beforehand, then charge for that. Tell them how it will affect their business (revenue growth, increased productivity, better reputation) and why you don’t charge hourly. When you focus on value, charging a proper…