The Life of a Consultant
What is Consulting?
Consulting entails the business process of solving complex problems. It includes strategy reconsideration, increased financial performance, improved operations, or some other aspect of a business.
The routine work of a consultant requires data and insight gathering through research, surveys, and interviews. There's also the aspect of making PowerPoint presentations, pitching solutions to clients, running analyses, and traveling. Anyone interested in this career path must be willing to work long hours.
What is the Life of a Consultant Like?
Consultants often work with clients for a fixed period and at the client's office. At the end of an engagement, they move on to the next client. One beauty about their job is that they work for clients in different industries or cities.
Consultancy is a highly competitive and fast-paced industry. However, it comes with a lot of packs, such as
High paying salary
Connections and social networking
Academic sponsorship for MBA programs
Travel
Seamless opportunities
Ease of becoming an Expert quickly
Challenges Faced as a Consultant
Lousy Projects: Some projects can be a drag or even difficult to handle. For many reasons, a project can be draining; it could lack the necessary resources to get the job done. It could also be seemingly unsolvable, lengthy, or just plain boring.
Difficult Clients: Some clients appear difficult and even stubborn. They come with irrational demands and make a Consultant's job challenging. As a consultant, you need high skills to appease them and figure out how to satisfy everyone. In consultancy, attitude is everything because impressed clients translate into long-term customers.
Minimal Personal Time: The life of a consultant becomes lacking socially. It results from long hours, constant commuting, and the unpredictability of a project. It makes planning personal time and scheduling brunches, dates, or time with loved ones more difficult.
Types of Consulting
The consultancy industry is a diverse market within the professional services industry. For this reason, it has a wide spectrum of types. Here's a sneak peek at the type of consultancy in the service industry
Strategy Consultant
These are consultants operating at the highest level of the consultancy market. The focus is often on strategic topics like corporate and organizational strategy, functional strategy, economic policy, and government policy.
The job description for strategy consultants entails the responsibilities of top managers, senior managers, and directors. For this reason, they generally have a different profile than their peers. Their focus lies more on quantitative and analytics skills, while their job description revolves around advising and overseeing implementation.
Operations Consultant
These consultants help clients to improve the performance of their operations. The activities they perform include advisory services and hands-on implementation support.
They also perform primary functions such as production, marketing, and sales. Their secondary functions cover Supply chain, HE, Finance, Legal, ICT, and more.
Operations Consultancy is often associated with a company's technology and strategy side.
Management Consultant
Management consultants are also known as business consultants or organizational advisors. They focus on organizational concerns, such as strategy or various elements within management. Therefore, more than half of all advisors' personnel come under the management consultant branch.
Others include:
Human Resource Consultant
IT Consultant
Financial Advisory Consultant
Is Consulting a Good Career?
Many people seeking to consult only look at the packs - traveling worldwide, staying in awesome hotels, and all-expense paid meals on a company credit card. Of course, the salary is great; even right out of college, consultants get paid to make presentations. However, it involves a lot more than that. Working with clients is a challenging task. Work-life balance is difficult, and the interview process is a little intense.
The good news is that no matter the interest, there's consulting that works for everyone. Consulting is all about helping others.
Consulting offers a unique career path with challenges and opportunities absent in a normal 9 to 5 corporate firm. There are six roles from entry to partner level. These include
Business Analyst - their job description is to support consulting teams. They also gather and analyze the information as well as development projects.
A Junior Consultant owns a functional area. They also develop projects and gather and analyze data.
A senior Consultant leads a team and performs all the responsibilities of a junior consultant in specific environments.
The Managers - A manager leads multiple teams, manages projects, and coordinates with client leaders.
The Principle - They own project deliveries, sell new jobs, and carry out client relationship management services.
The Partner - A partner owns multiple projects, drives organizational strategy, and sells new work.
Becoming a Consultant from Home
Freelance Consulting is a great way to put some extra money in the bank for retirement, kids' college, debt repayment, or some extra spending money.
However, there are several things to consider
Identify an area of expertise.
Set realistic goals.
Get certification
Get a website.
Choose a target market.
Create job offerings
Decide the work location
Set your rates
Network with people.
Build a repeatable system for attracting and closing clients
An Ideal Daily Routine of a Consultant
Working as a freelance consultant means managing your schedule. It comes with various experiences in your days, which eliminates monotony. Here's an overview.
A regular morning routine like exercise, yoga, meditation, breakfast, and more.
Urgent daily tasks include updating the website, writing reports, client proposals, etc.
Phone calls, read and reply to Emails, and read up on current news.
Lunchtime, lunch meetings, and more
Check-In with your team if any
Attend business meetings, workshops, or seminars
Review your day
One thing to note is that consulting is only a job for some. For those who envision stability and structure, a career path elsewhere is a better option. In addition, consulting can be exhausting- in terms of when and where you work and what you do.
Those who choose to consult as a career path do so because they value their freedom and flexibility. However, consulting also requires a person to create work structures and be accountable for impact.
Finally, be ready to get comfortable with failure. Learn to react positively during rejection and when it's difficult to get through a project report.