The 5 Keys to Success

When considering a career as a consultant, you need to determine your own strengths by assessing your personality type and its corresponding personality attributes.  This will help you define your area of expertise, the type of coach you want to be, the type of support you want to provide, and the type of clients you want to attract.

Key 1—What is your personality type?

The first step in determining the type of consulting that aligns with your personality type is to understand who you are. According to David Keirsey, an Educational Psychologist and the creator of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, there are four ”temperament types.” These temperament types form a system of grouping personality types that have similar attributes. These are:

1. The Artisans
Artisans are concrete feelers that get their information from their senses and prefer solid information. They are also free spirits and prefer a flexible and adaptable lifestyle.

2. The Guardians
Guardians are concrete thinkers which means they get their information from their senses and prefer working with information that can be confirmed with what you can see, hear, touch or smell. They like a structured and planned lifestyle and their preference is for security and safety.

3. The Rationals
Rationals are the intuitive thinkers. This means they get their information from their intuition and they prefer looking at the big picture. They love the abstract. They see patterns and connections and they analyze and make decisions logically and objectively.

4. The Idealists
Idealists are intuitive feelers. They get their information from their intuition. They prefer looking at the big picture and love the abstract. They make decisions subjectively, based on their personal values and they care about people feelings.

Under each temperament, there are 4 personality types that create a total of 16 types. These 16 personality types correspond with those based on the works of Carl G. Young and the well-known Meyers-Briggs 16 Personality Types.

• Artisans: Entrepreneurs and Promotors (ESTP); Entertainers and Performers (ESFP); Master Craftsman (ISTP); Directors and Composers (ISFP)
• Guardians: Chief Executive Officers (ESTJ); Peacemakers (ESFJ); Results-Oriented Experts (ISTJ); Master-Servants (ISFJ)
• Rationals: Commanders in Chief (ENTJ); Master Innovators (ENTP); Chief Strategists (INTJ); Visionary Thinkers (INTP)
• Idealists: Inspiring Teachers (ENFJ); Champions and Causes (ENFP); Healing Counselors (INFJ); Mystic Heroes (INFP)

You can listen to an audio file that explains each of the personality types on my Products Page.

Key 2—What needs are you fulfilling that aligns with your personality?

The second key is to understand the need that you are fulfilling. Whether it is finding a job, loosing weight or buying the right equipment, clients will come to you to solve their problem. Your ability to clearly define their goals will enable you to decide if you can provide the consulting service they need.  If you think you can solve everyone’s problems there is a good chance you will solve no one’s problems. You have to be prepared to say “NO” to potential clients that are not in alignment with your expertise. Here are some examples of the types of consultants and coaches that fit each personality type.

Artisans:
1. Coach entrepreneurs
2. Acting coach
3. Fitness coach
4. Song writing coach

Guardians:
1. Business recruiting coach
2. Workplace teamwork coach creating peace and harmony
3. Technology expert coaching businesses on their computer needs
4. Accountability coach to keep people on track

Rationals:
1. Business coaching with Chief Executive Officers
2. Product development coach
3. Business strategy coach
4. Medical research coach

Idealists
1. Motivational speaker and coach
2. Work with underprivileged students
3. Counselor working with people emotional issues, weight loss coach
4. Spiritual coach

Key 3—What are the expectations of the client?

In my experience there are at least four types of expectations. Clients looking for education will come to you for your training and knowledge. If you have information they want based on your experience then they are looking for pure content. Accountability is about helping clients craft a plan to reach a goal and keeping them motivated and moving in the right direction. I have worked with this type of coach and they will draw the answers out of a client and say things like, “you have all the answers.”  They are not teachers—they encourage clients to look within.

Transformation is about results. These types of consultants are paid to deliver. A client that wants to make more money or get a better body is paying for results. The last type, the connector, is like a matchmaker. They have an inventory of people and resources to draw on. They find out what a client needs and meets that need by making the connection to the appropriate resource. Below are examples of the types of expectations and areas where the clients have these expectations:

1. Education: Fitness, business, nutrition, acting, sales

2. Accountability: Life coach, diet consultant, fitness trainer, business coach

3. Transformation/Results: Fear of public speaking, prepare your body for a contest, make a million dollars, manage your money to get out of debt, issues dealing with body-mind-soul, emotional healing

4. Connector: Headhunter, marketing, agent, social media consultant, matchmaker

Key 4—What is your method of delivery of your services?

The delivery of your services needs to fit with you personality attributes.  You will want to consider your comfort level with different coaching methods, such as speaking in front of large groups, one-on-one coaching, speaking over the phone, corresponding by email or some other platform. You must find the delivery platform that works best for you. Examples include:

1. Phone
2. Public Speaking
3. Mastermind calls
4. Explain what’s in a book you have written
5. Teleseminar
6. Teaching
7. Interview

Key 5—What is the price or value of your services?

You need to determine your price structure and the value of the service you are providing.  The type of coaching you provide, as well as the method of delivery may drive the pricing structure based expected standards.

1. Fixed price
2. Percent of change in income, investments (financial coach), salary (headhunter)
3. Monthly fee
4. Hourly rate
5. Group packages price various with number of sessions (1-3 sessions/4-7 sessions)

Conclusion

In pursuing a career in consulting or coaching, it is imperative for you to evaluate your own personality and the corresponding personality traits. The understanding of yourself and your strengths, as well as identifying your area of expertise, will help you to be an effective, successful, and sought-after consultant. Remember to:

Evaluate the 5 Keys: 1) Personality, 2) Problem, 3) Solution, 4) Process, and 5) Price.
People will pay for: Education, Accountability, Transformation and Connections.

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In particular, a consulting business is faced with many tasks that can be overwhelming. From the financial management pieces to the administrative work, the details never seem to end. Have you considered outsourcing some of your work functions?

Outsourcing Is Not A Dirty Word

Outsourcing is simply contracting out various tasks to others, usually freelancers and small businesses. Although it’s possible to outsource to large firms, the independent and small business owner cannot usually afford these services.

Outsourcing does not mean you have to send your work to another country if you don’t feel comfortable doing so. Using the resources at the end of this article, you can find people in your region that are familiar with the subtleties of your language and your country’s way of doing business, if this is important to you.

You can also advertise locally for help if you prefer to have in-person meetings and you can search specifically for freelance web-based sites in your area of the world. Outsourcing is a concept that can be implemented in a variety of ways. So get creative about it.

Knowing What to Outsource

One of the main purposes of outsourcing is so you can focus on providing services and on business growth, leaving the messier details to someone else. There are probably certain aspects of your business that may be easier to outsource than to manage, including some of the following:

• Advertising and Marketing: Do you need help with creating an ad campaign, writing compelling copy, shopping around and finding placements for ads or optimizing your web sites for search engines? These can all be outsourced to experienced professionals.
• Business Plan: If your business is seeking additional funding from an investor or a bank, a professional business plan is a requirement. The details involved with the content and overall presentation of the plan might be better managed by an outsourced business plan specialist.
• Bookkeeping and Accounting: Whether it involves taxes, accounting balance sheets or overall calculation of where your finances stand, the financial aspects of a consulting business can be time consuming and out of your reach.
• Graphics: From the creation of a logo to the design of your business card and website, a professional graphic designer can give your business a unique and polished look. Freelance artists can be obtained from several online services.
• Help Desk and Customer Support: If your consulting business provides a technical product, consider outsourcing the help desk or customer support end of things. Then you can turn off your pager and relax once in awhile.
• IT Support: You’re not expected to know how to set up a wireless router, add a new DVD drive, network your home or office computers and which type of hardware is best for backing up your work every day. That’s when an IT professional can help with these tasks.
• Legal Services: Do-it-yourself types like to have their hand in everything. But if you spend hours reading through contracts or are trying to figure out the best way to incorporate, don’t forget that you can outsource all of your legal tasks.
• Public Relations: If you’re looking for publicity through the press or want to find speaking engagements or put a video on You Tube, consider outsourcing these tasks to a public relations expert.
• Special Projects: Some consultants with seasonal services or temporary work load issues, such as the editing of new web content, may want to consider some sort of open contract with a freelancer. This will allow you to quickly receive administrative assistance from contractors with a proven work record.
• Virtual Assistant: Small business owners that would rather not deal with the administrative details may benefit from a virtual assistant. These assistants conduct administrative activities including managing email, paying business related bills, sending out communications to your contact list and handling appointment schedules, to name a few.
• Website Services: If you don’t yet have your own website or if you don’t have time to deal with technical issues, consider outsourcing the website aspect of your business. Someone who provides website services can: register a domain name, help you find a host, design and create a website, maintain your website and troubleshoot technical issues.

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

A great advantage  of outsourcing is freeing up your time to concentrate on growing your business and improving your services. Another major benefit is that it keeps your operation nimble and light, because you don’t have to do everything nor hire new employees before you’re certain you can afford them.

The down side is that is difficult for some to release control of certain business tasks to others. There’s also the security issue. Exposing proprietary and financial information can be risky. Finally, the costs of outsourcing must be weighed against its benefits.

Don’t Expose Your Business to Risk

Probably one of the most important things to remember about outsourcing is to protect your business throughout the process. If you’re outsourcing to strangers, go slowly. Provide them with tasks that are relatively risk-free, such as creating a logo or writing a few articles for your blog. Also, be sure to use safeguards. Don’t give away account numbers and passwords. The bottom line: think things through before passing on work and make sure you’re not taking any risks.

Popular Outsourcing Sites

• 99 Designs
• Crowdspring
• GetACoder
• GetFriday
• Guru.com
• eLance.com
• Freelancer
• oDesk.com
• Rent a Coder

With outsourcing, it pays to consider all of your options. Which aspects of your business must you manage personally? Which can be managed remotely to free up your time? Try to maximize the time you invest in your business by outsourcing the details someone else can carry out. Essentially, you’re giving up something to gain something else. Outsourcing has to help your bottom line and you have to feel comfortable with the situation.

Here are ten of the techniques I share in our Time Management seminars, each one of which will help you to get at least one more hour out of your day of additional productive time.

1. Maintain Balance

Your life consists of Seven Vital Areas: Health, Family, Financial, Intellectual, Social, Professional, and Spiritual. You will not spend equal amounts of time in each area or time every day in each area. But, if in the long run, you are spending a sufficient quantity and quality of time in each area, then your life will be balanced. But ignore any one of your areas, (never mind two or three!) and you will get out of balance and potentially sabotage your success. Fail to take time now for your health and you will have to take time for illness later on. Ignore your family and they may leave you and cost you a lot of time to re-establish relationships. It is especially challenging for self-employed people to maintain balance, isn’t it?

2. Get the Power of the Pen

A faint pen has more power than the keenest mind. Get into the habit of writing things to do down using one tool (a Day-Timer, pad of paper, Palm Pilot, etc.) Your mind is best used for the big picture rather than all the details. The details are important, but manage them with the pen. If you want to manage it you have to measure it first. Writing all things down, not just incoming orders, helps you to more easily remember all that you need to accomplish.

3. Do Daily Planning

It is said that people do not plan to fail but a lot of people fail to plan. Take the time each night to take control of the most precious resource at your command, the next twenty-four hours. Plan your work and then work your plan each day. Write up a To Do list with all you “have to’s” and all of your “want to’s” for your next day. Without a plan for the day, you can easily get distracted, spending your time serving the loudest voice, the noisiest customer, rather than attending to the most important things for your day that will enhance your productivity.

4. Prioritize It

Your To Do list will have crucial and not crucial items on it. Despite the fact most people want to be productive, when given the choice between crucial and not crucial items, we will most often end up doing the not crucial items. They are generally easier and quicker than crucial items. Prioritize your To Do list each night. Put the #1 next to the most important item on your list. Place the #2 next to the second most important item on your list, etc. Then tackle the items on your list in order of their importance. You may not get everything done on your list, but you will get the most important things done. This is working smarter, not harder, and getting more done in less time.

5. Control Procrastination

The most effective planning in the world does not substitute for doing what needs to be done. We procrastinate and put off important things because we don’t sense enough pain for not doing it or enough pleasure to do it. To get going on something you have been putting off, create in your mind enough pain for not doing it or enough pleasure to do it. I prefer the pleasure approach. Take a procrastinated item and turn it into to a game. Work with one thing in front of you at a time so other things won’t distract you. (“Out of sight, out of mind.”) Break it down to little bite-sized, manageable pieces. Get it started, take the first step and you will likely continue it to completion.

6. Run an Interruptions Log

The average person gets 50 interruptions a day. The average interruption takes five minutes. Some four hours each day, on average, are spent dealing with interruptions. Many are crucial and important, like new orders, and are what we get paid to do but many have little or no value. Run an Interruptions Log to identify and eliminate the wasteful interruptions. Just use a pad of paper and label it “Interruptions Log”. Create six columns: Date, Time, Who, What, Length, Rating. After each interruption is dealt with, log in the date and time it occurred, who brought it to you, a word or two about what it related to, the length of time it took, and finally the rating of its importance: A=crucial, B=important, C=little value, and D=no value. Run it for a week or more to get a good measure of what is happening in your life. Then evaluate the results and take action to eliminate some of the C and D interruptions that have little or no value.

7. Delegate It

We all have 168 hours each week and when you subtract 56 hours for sleep and another 10 hours for personal care, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to get done what needs to be done. Delegation permits you to leverage your time through others and thereby increase your own results. The hardest part of delegation though, is simply letting go. We take great pride in doing things ourselves. “If you want a job done well, you better do it yourself”. Every night in Daily Planning, look at all that you have to do and want to do the next day and with each item ask yourself, “Is this the best use of my time?” If it is, do it. If it isn’t, try to arrange a way to delegate it to someone else. There is a lot of difference between “I do it” and “It gets done”.

8. Manage Meeting Time

A meeting is when two or more people get together to exchange common information. What could be simpler? Yet, it can be one of the biggest time wasters we must endure. Before a meeting ask, “Is it necessary?” and “Am I necessary?” If the answers to either are “no”, consider not having the meeting or excusing yourself from attending. Then prepare a written agenda for the meeting with times assigned for each item along with a starting time and ending time. Circulate the written agenda among those who will be attending. There is no sense in holding a meeting by ambush. Let people know in advance what is to be discussed.

9. Handle Paper

It’s easy to get buried today in the blizzard of paperwork around us. The average person receives around 150 communications each day via email, telephone, hard mail, memos, circulars, faxes, etc. A lot of time is wasted going through the same pile of paper day after day and correcting mistakes when things slip through the cracks. Try to handle the paper once and be done with it. If it is something that can be done in a minute or two, do it and be done. If it is not the best use of your time, delegate it. If it is going to take some time to complete, schedule ahead in your day calendar on the day you think you might get to it and then put it away.

10. Run a Time Log

If you want to manage it, you have to measure it. A Time Log is a simple yet powerful tool to create a photo album sort of overview of how your time is actually being spent during the day. Simply make an ongoing record of your time as you spend it. Record the activity, the time spent on it, and then the rating using A, B, C, and D as described in #1 above.

Some examples of how your time might be spent: Made telephone calls, 35 minutes, A; Made baskets, 48 minutes, A; Attended meeting, 55 minutes, C: Telephone call from Janis, 7 minutes, D. Run this for a few days to get a good picture of how your time is being spent. Then analyze the information. Add up all the A, B, C, and D time. Most discover a lot of their time is being spent on C and D items that have little or no value. Finally, take action steps to reduce the C and D items to give you more time for the really important things in your life.

What are your best time-saving tips?

TLAC: Why did you start the Productivity Institute?
Don: I created the Productivity Institute to address the specific Time Management needs of all who want more out of life. In our time management and speed reading seminars, coaching, keynotes, and consulting, we teach participants how to significantly increase their personal productivity, both on and off the job, and accomplish more in less time with less stress with greater work/life balance.

TLAC: What do you mean by ‘productivity’ and how does this relate to Time Management?
Don: Productivity and management do not mean doing the wrong things quicker, because that just gets us nowhere faster. Productivity and time management are doing the right things in all of our Seven Vital Areas of Life: health, family, financial, intellectual, social, professional and spiritual.

TLAC: Of all the productivity killers, Email seems to slow us down immensely. How can we take control of our Inbox?
Don: I have four suggestions to help you to become better at “Easing E-mail.”

1. Get off the lists. The best way to deal with a problem is to never have it. If you are receiving a lot of unwanted e-mails, ask to be removed from the various lists.
2. Get an unlisted address. Just like getting an “unlisted” telephone number that you share only with those whom you want to give direct access, you might want to get a separate e-mail address that you use only for the important communications you wish to receive.
3. Check it once or twice per day. Many people I speak with are chained to their email server, monitoring incoming email on a continuous basis. Maybe this is because e-mail creates its own sense of urgency, but most of the communications are not all that urgent. I let my “incoming” batch up and I respond to them a couple of times per day.
4. Deal with it. Like handling paper, you don’t want to get into the “shuffling blues” where you read e-mail, postpone action, save it, re-read it later, and allow things to slip through the cracks. As you open each e-mail do one of the following: a) If it requires a quick response, (it will only take a minute or two), respond to it and delete it. b) If it requires a response but is not the best use of your time, try to delegate it. c) If it is going to take more than a minute or two to respond, schedule it for action in your Day Planner.

TLAC: Consultants often work 6 or 7 days a week. They often have to juggle multiple tasks. Is there any way out of this cycle?
Don: Parkinson’s Law says, in part, that a project tends to expand with the time allocated for it. Those who are working 6/7 days a week have their thermostat set too high. If you make it a rule that you will only allow X days to get your consulting work done, you will figure out a way to do it.

TLAC: What’s your opinion of all the commercial time management systems that are out there? Do you think one approach is better than another?
Don: There are hundreds and I’ve reviewed many. I suggest three criteria:

1. Get a holistic single system. The average person uses nearly a dozen different ways to manage their time with Outlook, BlackBerry, wall calendars, pick message slips, DayTimers and on and on. I use a single DayTimer system to manage both my business and personal time.
2. Get a simple, user friendly system. We crave simplicity. That’s why they invented automatic transmissions.
3. Get a system that is small enough and compact enough that it can be with you at all times so that you can act when opportunity comes to you.

How do you work smarter? Add your tips below.