At the beginning of January, I put an ask out in the Twitterverse to speak with consultants doing great work. Because of that Tweet, I had the opportunity to chat with three consultants who’ve all faced their own struggles, hardships, and wins.
My first chat was with Chrissie. She is a former consultant at Bain & Co. with a passion for helping female entrepreneurs. I came to these chats very casually with zero expectations aside from wanting to ask people, “how do you do what you do?” But Chrissie came prepared! She had researched my websites, my Twitter, she knew a bit about who I was, and what I was doing before we even got on a call.
Chrissie was very helpful. She encouraged me to move beyond the lower-paying (read: lower-paying for consultant work) clients and consider taking on new clients that are in alignment with my new goals. We discussed service tiers and products that could be beneficial.
Biggest Takeaway from Chrissie’s Chat: Allow yourself the space to grow.
I’m so glad I met Charbel. As soon as we started chatting, I was at ease and knew I could trust him. We have some similar personal beliefs that we chatted about for a while, and then we got down to business.
Charbel is one of the folks that has worked with huge names in his past and finally got to a point where he decided to go out on his own. He’s currently in a spot of rebuilding. I’ll let him tell you his story, but it was so encouraging to see someone who had a lot of reasons to advise me to stop and run for the hills, or to go get a “real job”, but instead he was fired about all the potential in his growth.
Biggest Takeaway from Charbel’s Chat: Everything you’re doing now is equipping and preparing you for your next adventure. No knowledge or experience is lost or pointless, and there is no such thing as failure.
I loved chatting with April. Before she could barely get a word in I had to tell her that I’ve purchased her book numerous times: on ebook, paperback, and as a gift to founder clients, and that we had met a couple of years before at the BOS conference. Basically, I fangirled all over her.
April has a pretty incredible journey while building her consultancy. She’s definitely found her stride but is still learning how to grow and scale to the next level. She shared a little bit of her process, and that it took her a few “false starts” to figure out what worked best for her and her process.
She told me how she knew she needed to build a platform in order to be on bigger stages, to get bigger clients.
She mentioned that the book did three things at once for her:
Gave her authority because it showed she knew what she was talking about.
Piqued conference organizer’s interest in her.
Gave her something to give to the clients who needed her help, but couldn’t afford it.
Biggest Takeaway from April’s Chat: Build a platform. Let one conference, podcast, event, etc build into another and another. These events are the lead magnet and funnel for client work. Al you need is a couple of contacts or interested clients after an event to make it worth it.