The simplest answer to the question is, ‘By getting someone to pay you for your advice. And to keep doing that with the frequency that you need to keep your body and soul together from the earnings.’ Easier said than done, as in almost everything in life. And so here are some pointers.

Many young and old (post retirement) friends and acquaintances ask me for pointers to enter the world of Organizational Consulting & Training which I have been in since 1985 (this is 2024). I thought it would be good to share generally what I have been advising people for several years. I hope it will benefit many more.

It is easy if you are a motorcycle mechanic. What you do is clear. The customer has a pressing need. It doesn’t cost much to repair his motorcycle. So, the client comes. But with Organizational Consulting you are dealing in concepts, thoughts, emotions, and some techniques which to be effective, depend on the sincerity of the learner in applying them as well as his expertise in doing so. That is a very challenging environment. The customer’s need is not as immediate or pressing like the man with the broken motorcycle. And he must pay a jolly sight more to fulfill his need. Moreover measuring benefit is not as easy or clear as in the motorcycle example. Having been in this business now since 1985, I can tell you that it is perhaps the most challenging and exciting business that exists – provided you know what to do.

So here are 8 pieces of advice about what works and what doesn’t.

1. Define & Differentiate:

What do you have to offer and how is it unique?

Why Differentiate?

Differentiation creates brand. Brand inspires loyalty. Loyalty enables influence. The more clearly you can define your product, the better. It is not what you think you do, but what your customer thinks you do, that matters. Remember that brevity is not only the soul of wit but of definition. Clear, concise definition. Not a long-winded treatise that puts the audience to sleep.

What you offer must be crystal clear to your potential client, so that when he has a need in your area of expertise, you are his natural choice.  Give a lot of thought to what it is that you do and how you can describe it to people. Like we say in sales, ‘Don’t talk features. Talk benefits’. So also, in consulting. Describe it from the perspective of the customer.

For example, if you are a computer hardware expert on your way to work in the train and your neighbor in the next seat asks you what you do. How will you answer him? Most IT Engineers will say, ‘I am a hardware expert.’ Makes no sense to anyone who doesn’t know anything about IT.

Instead ask him, ‘Do you know what a blue screen is?’ He will look at you in horror and say, ‘Death!’ You say, ‘Exactly. If it happens to you and you think your time on earth is over, it isn’t. Call me. That is what I do. Bring dead computers back to life.’ What do you think he will say? ‘Please give me your card.’

You are still the same hardware expert but he now sees you through his eyes, not yours. The truth is that we can only see through our own eyes. So, if you want someone to see (understand) something, help them to see it with their eyes. Not yours. The station that everyone listens to is called WiiFM – What’s in it for Me?

Remember that the world of selling is the world of words. Not deception, but palatable truth. Unpalatable truth is equally truthful but not equally edible. Craft words thoughtfully and take brutal feedback from others about what you crafted. Being married to your words is suicide. The key is not your experience, but how you can use it to help others. Don’t leave that to the customer to figure it out. Spell it out for him. Not because he is stupid, but because his understanding is your need, not his. Don’t tell him what you used to do but how you can help him and how that will benefit him. That will mean knowing his business better than he does himself. Certainly, in terms of an overview from the outside. That is your key differentiator because perspective is a function of distance. Leverage it and show him how it works. Constantly enhance your expertise. Read, learn, attend courses, document everything you do, get independent assessments of your work, and every 5 years get a 360° Appraisal. Become the known expert, the Go-To guy for what you do. As I said earlier, become the natural choice of anyone who needs what you do. Don’t compete. Leverage yourself out of competition.

 2.    Define your customer

Not everyone is your customer. This is the biggest mistake you can make, trying to be all things to everyone. That way you are seen as a generalist, nothing to nobody. People like to feel that they are dealing with an expert, even if it is for a haircut. That means that you must learn to say a very definite, ‘No!’ to some businesses. I stayed out of recruitment (also called ‘head hunting’) from the beginning (1994) when recruitment was a booming business in India with the opening of the market and the influx of multinationals. That made me a confidant of business managers and owners who are my real clients for leadership development consulting. They didn’t see me as someone who would probably poach on them to grow his business. I never regretted that decision. That’s not to say that all placement consultants poach people, but enough do to spoil the reputation of everyone.

Err on the side of caution in accepting assignments. Only the hero who survives, can tell the tale. In consulting, if the client fails, you carry the can. So never accept assignments where the outcome is doubtful because you doubt the client’s sincerity or capability to carry out your recommendations. Remember that both success and failures are news; but often the latter is remembered more vividly and more talked about. So, look for quick wins. Both parties will be happier.

I learned this the hard way very early in my consulting career when I was asked to write a Personnel Policy Manual for a manufacturing company. I suggested to the CEO that the right way would be to do an Employee Needs/Satisfaction Survey to assess needs and then write a document that would address those needs. The CEO looked a bit doubtful but agreed. When I completed the survey and compiled the feedback, it showed that the CEO’s management style was a huge issue with the majority of the workforce. That is when I made the second mistake. I gave this feedback to the CEO with total sincerity and frankness. After all, the CEO had told me to be totally frank and objective. As a result I was gently and politely shown the door. I was very disturbed with this because I had done the right thing, been truthful and sincere to the client but had lost the job. I asked my dear friend and mentor, Mr. Aroon Joshi. He said something that has guided me all my life since then. “Start where the client wants you to start,” he said. “Then you can guide him to what you think he should do. If not, your approach may be correct but may appear too radical or threatening to the client and he will reject it and you.” I have never forgotten this advice and found it extremely useful all through my career.

Aim to become your client’s friend and confidant. If you do this well, you may sometimes gain a friend and lose a client, but those friends will recommend you to their friends who will become your clients. Some friends don’t pay. And you may feel hesitant to ask. Other friends pay and some even pay more than you ask for. I had two cases when my clients/friend paid me more than I had billed. When I asked them why they had done that, they said, ‘What you gave us was worth more than what you billed us for and so I want to pay you what it was worth to us.’ In the end it all balances out and the goodwill you earn is beyond price.

 3.    Define your fee

 I have a basic rule. Stand in front of the mirror and say the number aloud. If you feel comfortable with it, it is the right amount. Do some hard-nosed analysis about your finances and see what you need – not want – need. Then base your fee on that. Develop a mindset of contentment, so that when that figure is reached you have no stress. Then whatever else comes thereafter is icing on the cake. Remember that once you quote a figure to a client, that is what he will pay you as long as you live. He will take an increment himself every six months but will moan like a cow in labor if you ask for a raise once in six years. So, be careful what you quote. “We are going to give you a lot of business, so give us a discount”, is the oldest, most threadbare line that exists. Even more than, “What are you doing tonight?” Don’t fall for it. Giving a discount to someone who doesn’t want to pay your fee means that you are a bad businessman. Tying myself down to a low productivity client in favor of others who would have been more productive, never made any sense to me. Quote fairly and confidently. Value perception is in the mind of the listener but before that in your own heart. If you are confident of your product or service, then be sure that people will come to you again and again. I have not made a cold call since 1995. It is as simple as that. Give your best and then some more. You will never regret it. What you will regret and pay for is if you take shortcuts. That is very stupid. Never do it.

 4.    Deliver premium and demand premium

‘Buy me because I am cheap’ – is not a slogan that ever appealed to me. Remember no matter what you charge there will always be someone in the market who will pay that to you, once. It is repeat business that is your bread and butter – so ensure that your customer is so tremendously satisfied that he will not only call you again, but you become his natural choice. And what’s more, he will recommend you to others like himself – i.e., real customers for your product. After all a Rolls Royce buyer will not recommend a Rolls to someone who can’t afford it. The repeat customer is the only one who can compare you to others, because he has experienced you once. Make sure that his experience with you is so superior that everything else pales in comparison. He then becomes your ambassador and there’s no better or more effective ambassador than a customer who has experienced you and is delighted.

Selling cheap has several problems: You position yourself as a low-quality provider (default implication of cheap); the client will never agree to a fee raise later so you lock yourself into a low remunerative bind and you can almost never pitch for high-end work. Nobody will consult the trainer of security guards when the Board wants advice. So, positioning is critical. I have found that positioning in terms of quality is best. If you deliver top quality, you get a very good name and people don’t care what you charge. Those who still count pennies are not your clients. Smile and leave them. The fact is that if you are not confident about your product or service then don’t expect the client to feel confident about you.

Talking of positioning, some consultants out of a misplaced sense of politeness say things like, ‘I am always learning. We will learn together.’ Think about what you would say if the pilot of the plane you were about to board said that to you? Would you board that plane? Likewise in consulting. Yes, we should be open to learning all the time. Yes, we learn together. But don’t tell the client that. The client is looking for someone who knows how to solve his problem. He is looking for an expert. Not someone who is planning to treat him and his organization as an experiment for his own learning. The fact is that you, Mr/s Consultant, will walk away, no matter what the result may be. But the client will have to live with what you leave behind. There is no need to say, ‘I am the greatest, biggest expert you ever set eyes upon, and I guarantee you a solution.’ That doesn’t sell either. Just do your best to deliver quality.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. There is a difference between ambition and fantasy. Constantly update your knowledge and experience. Admit a mistake if you make it but don’t volunteer that information if nobody noticed. Make sure you learn from the mistake and never repeat it. Don’t make excuses or try to shift the blame to someone else. Honesty always pays. Honesty is critical to building credibility which is the lifeblood of consulting. Credibility is your capital. Without credibility you are nothing and will never succeed.

‘Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten’ (Gucci slogan)

5.    Only accept work that you are passionate about – leave the rest

That is because you can’t deliver quality unless you are passionate about what you do. Never do something for the money. Do it for love. Money will follow. Money is the natural consequence of all quality work. But if you do something that you don’t believe in, you will never succeed. That is why I have always refused work for cigarette and liquor companies and companies who are known for corruption – no matter what the fee. I have also never done sales training because it doesn’t excite me. I teach leadership where I am paid to do it and I teach it free where clients (like schools) can’t pay me but I believe that they will benefit and need that training. That gives me practice with a variety of audiences and builds equity in the market. Remember that even those who can’t pay, can still talk and their unsolicited praise of your work is free advertising for you and is of incalculable value. Work for love and you will be loved for it.

Genuinely want the best for your client. If you are not interested in the welfare of the client and are working only for the money, it will show and it will go against you. Genuine interest means that you may end up doing more work than you may have anticipated, including some that is not billable. But being genuinely interested means that you won’t grudge or regret that. Take only projects that interest you because if you want to succeed in a project and make a mark, then you will need to be mentally engaged with it 24 x 7. You can’t do that unless it genuinely interests you. That too will show. Genuinely wanting the best for your client also means that sometimes you will tell your client to go somewhere else if he needs something that you know someone else can provide better than you can. It is a tough call and that is why you need to think beyond your income. Remember that in the end it all comes back. People remember and are grateful and will promote and recommend you. Consulting is not business. Consulting is friendship. I have worked with this philosophy for the past 40 years and never regretted it.

 6.    Communicate, communicate, communicate

There is no getting away from this. Talk to people, write things and share with everyone. Have an abundance mentality with sharing. It all comes back. Speak at conferences and seminars. Offer to teach management development courses at business schools and training establishments – pick and choose of course – but do it even if it is pro bono. This will teach you the skills of dealing with people. It will energize you, expose you to your potential client base and give you visibility and credibility. I used to teach at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and Mount Carmel Institute of Management from 1994-97, and at Asnuntuck Community College, Enfield, CT from 1997-99, when I lived in the US. I have been teaching at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad since 1991 and have taught at the SSB Sri Nagar and Gwaldam in 2014. All for next to nothing in terms of fees but the friendships, networking, and experience are all priceless.

Answer phone calls immediately, always return calls you missed, always respond to emails, and call people just to say hello. Have a toll-free number where your clients can reach you. Never leave a phone call unreturned or an email unanswered. As my first boss and mentor, James Nicholas Adams taught me, ‘Think of people when you don’t need them and they will remember you when you do. Human relations are like a bank account. When you don’t need it, deposit goodwill so that when you need it, you can call it in. If you don’t put it there, it will not be there when you need it.’ I value my mentors tremendously.

Good people skills are far more important than anything else. People hire you not because of competence alone but because they like you. Competence is a given. It must be there. Being liked is the deal breaker. Communication is the key to being liked. Consultants, aspiring or experienced, who play hard to get are digging their own graves. Nobody loves you enough to chase you. That may happen one day provided you build enough equity. But it will happen only after a lot of hard work. I once had a client wait for two years for me to return from America to do some work, but the exception proves the rule. If you are not reachable, someone else is. Even if you are the best in the market, they don’t know that until they work with you and if they can’t reach you that will never happen. Remember that the client calls you for his need, not yours. Make it easy for the client or you will pay the price.

 7.     Document and focus on your own training

The written word has high credibility. So, write. Record meetings, thoughts, ideas and questions. Then read them. You will be amazed at how much you will learn. Every year or so, go over what you have recorded, and you are likely to have the makings of a book on hand. I have written 40 books since 2005. Almost all of them this way. You will be amazed how much research and learning happens in the normal course of life, but most people don’t record it. Beat the rest. Record your learnings. Books are an excellent way to build credibility. They are the strongest way to advertise what you have to offer without having to talk about it. A book is a quiet but confident statement of who you are and what you have to offer to the market. People trust the written word much more than the spoken word. In the words of Martin Luther King (Jr.), ‘If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.’ This also keeps you busy in the lull periods where you may otherwise fall prey to anxiety and stress. Write. Start now. Just do it.

Ensure that you invest in yourself by upgrading your own skills. Set aside time and a budget to invest in your own learning. Get trained on a regular basis and you will find that to be the best competitive advantage. I have found this an absolutely unassailable argument on the rare occasion when someone says to me, ‘But so-and-so charges less than you do.’ I say to them, ‘Ask them what they spent on their own training in the last 12 months.’ Nobody ever came back, and I never lost a client for this reason. The harsh reality is that if you haven’t upgraded your knowledge and skills, then you are really not fit to offer anything to the client. His reality changes daily with greater complexity, more demanding challenges, and an ever more ambiguous environment. How can you help them if you are still living in the stone age?

Remember that consulting, especially leadership consulting, is not about technology but about helping your client sell his dream and then helping him to create a concrete roadmap to achieve it. It is about building trust, keeping confidence and being there for them. Some of this or even a lot of this is not billable. But friendship never is. Yet friendship is the foundation of all great consultant client relationships. As they say, ‘You can only sell to friends.’ That is because only friends are trusted. Consulting is about being trusted, first and foremost.

 8.    Never compromise your integrity no matter how hungry you are

Remember that your client is not the one who feeds you and the One who feeds you doesn’t lack resources. So never do anything which is against your beliefs and values. Have the highest values and live by them. That is the biggest incentive in my view of being an independent consultant – that you get to live by your values. And guess what? Not only will you never starve but you will gain a huge amount of respect in the market which you can’t buy even if you wanted to. For example, I have always insisted on clients respecting copyright and never agreed to use photocopied instruments, books and so on. This is a big racket in India. On one occasion, I had to walk away from a very lucrative assignment from a very famous company (you’ll be surprised if I told you the name) because the training manager insisted that I use photocopied Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) questionnaires to ‘reduce cost’. She said to me, ‘But everyone does it.’ I told her, ‘I am not everyone.’ That was in my very first year as an independent consultant (1994) when I was very poor and hungry, and it hurt very much to walk away. But I did. And the rest is history.

Another aspect of integrity is to keep the confidentiality of the client. Especially if you have high profile clients, others will try to put pressure on you to talk about them. By all means share the positive stuff which you know is in the public domain. But anything that is confidential like business information, personal information about anyone, any plans that you may be privy to, must all remain completely confidential. The best, most reassuring thing for whoever asks you for information about your other clients, is to hear you say, ‘I am sorry, I don’t talk about one client to another.’ That is your guarantee that you will treat their data also with the same care. I don’t know anyone who will complain about that.

Remember that it takes years to build a reputation for integrity in consulting and it takes a single instance to destroy it. It doesn’t matter whether you did it deliberately or accidentally. If you did it, it is a bullet in the head. It is instant death. A reputation of high integrity is your best brand, your greatest asset. It is your signature, your key differentiator in the market and it is what you will always be remembered for. I can say with great pride that I have worked with GE from 1994, but have never been asked to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement). So also, with all my other clients. I have never signed an NDA with anyone. Not that I would have refused. If someone has a policy about it, I have no objection to following it. But nobody ever asked me to do it. As I mentioned earlier, your reputation is your greatest asset. By far greater than anything material. Don’t sell it for love or money. It is simply not worth it. Guard it very zealously and jealously. It will benefit you all your life.

Consulting is hard because it means that someone else must feel that the advice that you will give them is worth paying for. It needs hard work, consistent results and extremely good social skills and interpersonal relationships. But like a giant wheel, it is back-breaking to push it to revolve once, but once it starts rolling, it builds momentum on its own. I have not made a cold call since 1995. All my clients are either repeat or client referrals. Good relationships always pay off. No exceptions.

 I hope this is helpful and gives you a start. We must work very hard – very, very hard to begin with. That is why passion is important because it will help to make the long uphill climb when breath is short and burning in the chest, your legs are leaden, your back is a mass of pain and sweat is pouring off your brow like rain. But you keep climbing because you know what awaits you at the top.

To sit on a rock and watch the world at your feet, your face cooled by a gentle breeze and your body slowly relaxing as you gaze down – not up – at the clouds.