We created a new Women in Consulting member benefit late in 2009, the WIC Mentoring Program. Our successful six-week pilot run ended in mid-October.

The pilot included seven mentees who agreed to help us test the new program. These were WIC members who were interested in the program, but also ready to invest some time (and do some homework!) in order to apply the information we shared with them to help improve various aspects of their businesses.

Desiree Lehrbaum (Lumen Consulting) and I (J. G. Richards Consulting) worked together as a team to mentor the pilot group. We’ll also lead the spring session, which runs from March 24-April 28.

Desiree’s mentoring focus is on marketing and business development of mentees’ businesses. I lead the vision-setting, action planning and “optimizing your business operations” parts of the program.

Once again, the spring session will use a webinar format once a week for an hour, supplemented by a 30 minute 1:1 mentoring call between each mentee and each mentor in the final weeks of the program. We hope to hold our kickoff session as a group, in person.

So how did the pilot go?

I’ll let the Fall, 2009 mentees speak for themselves. Here’s some of their feedback, provided on the anonymous feedback survey we sent them soon after the pilot was over:

“The content was awesome! I can’t imagine it being better.” (This came from a participant during our follow-up call a month after the session ended).

“Not only did I learn specific skills, but I felt more focused on my business and more motivated to actually get past hurdles and get things done.

“A very practical way of approaching the steps of marketing for my business, and identifying and confronting issues holding me back.”

“The program was extremely well thought out, structured into a business development focus with actionable tips and tools to take my thinking to the next level.”

There are more participant quotes I could share, but I think that gives you enough information to know if this is a program that sounds right for you, too.

If you’re interested in the Spring, 2010 WIC Mentoring Program, send me an e-mail at jan@jgichardsresults.com to let me know. We’re finalizing the Spring 2010 Mentoring group soon.

I had the pleasure of attending WIC’s general meeting last Thursday, where Kate Purmal shared insights into how we can make 2010 our best year yet…without breaking our necks! I particularly like that last part!

As part of the networking exercise, everyone was asked to answer the following question:

If you could choose between the following, which would you choose:

• You double your revenue in 2010 but work the same amount of time
• You keep your revenue at the current level but work half the time
• Your revenue and the amount of time you work remain the same but your projects are 2x more satisfying

That was a tough one for me. I want to keep my revenue at the current level and work half the time (I have a young daughter)—but I also want the projects to be 2x more satisfying. An overwhelming amount of Thursday’s attendees voted to double their revenue but work the same amount of time.

What would you choose?

Digging a Little Deeper

If you attended the meeting and would like a copy of Kate’s PowerPoint slides from Thursday’s meeting, email her at kpurmal@gmail.com, and she’ll send them to you. She’s also offering meeting attendees special deals on two of her upcoming workshops, geared to building sales and your thought leadership.  

Sales Boot Camp

If the presentation whet your appetite and you’d like to take your sales to the next level, Kate has an upcoming Sales Boot Camp on February 18, 2010. The one-day workshop is $495 for WIC meeting attendees.

In the workshop, Kate digs deeper on several topics from the WIC meeting:

-       Role-play to perfect the art of creating a “trial balloon” proposal in a single meeting
-       Create a phase 1 or Trojan Horse proposal for your business
-       Develop a phased model for your services
-       Build an action plan to fill your sales pipeline
-       And much more

For more information and to register visit http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=196613

Thought Leadership Workshop

Kate and her personal guru Mark Levy, author of Accidental Genius, are hosting a one-day intensive workshop where you’ll use private writing and exercises to develop a compelling thought leadership platform. You’ll tap into your creative genius to brainstorm high-level ideas and review them with the group to pick the most compelling and captivating concepts. By developing a platform for thought leadership you gain access to a wider range of potential clients and can charge more for your services.

The workshop is $495 for WIC meeting attendees.

For more information and to register visit http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=196828

As consultants, we often capture short interviews with clients or leave ourselves digital messages on our smart phone. If your smart phone is an iPhone, there’s a nifty application that allows you to capture those short audio messages (up to five minutes) and share them: AudioBoo out of the UK. Now, thanks to integration with the Spinvox API, a voice-to-text company, users will be able to automatically convert these audio files to text.

I just love handy little tools like this and can’t wait to test drive it out. So, I thought I’d share this with other like-minded consultants.

Read, “AudioBoo Adds Spinvox to Auto-Transcribe Speech to Text” by Mike Butcher on TechCrunch (July 8, 2009)

Welcome back to work, everyone…hoping that everyone took some good family time off over the holidays since it sure seemed like our clients did!

The great thing about taking a little break is that it gives perspective–and I come back optimistic and eager about the new year…I saw trends over the holiday that are quite promising…I was asked to submit 3 different proposals, which doesn’t normally happen…I have 3 projects booked for this month, which doesn’t normally happen.  With those kinds of things happening, it’s easy to forget about all that doom and gloom ‘R’ word talk…

But I’m not going to get TOO comfy even with such good signs–this is a year to go back to basics and to really get clear on my target customers and how I can help them…especially in times like these.

Some thoughts that I’m having and have already begun to implement:

- Update my website (it’s been awhile…and it’s looking dated, especially re: resources I have links to as well as my products/services sheet which doesn’t represent my most favorite new service I’m providing!).  Check out the topic of the S. Bay WIC Luncheon on March 9: 10 Tricks for Updating Your Website.

- Keep my eye out for news/trends that would be helpful for my customers to know about–and tell them (I did this over the weekend and got a big thank you from my customer for keeping them in mind–talk about immediate gratification!).  Check out www.marketresearch.com for inexpensive research reports or www.findarticles.com to find current news items for an industry, your client’s competitors, etc.

- Do some prospecting–I have been reliant upon the steady stream of referrals that I’ve gotten over the past 10 years to feed my business, but in times like these, doing some intentional, deliberate prospecting makes a lot of sense–it will expand my pool of prospects beyond my personal network which increases the odds of finding someone who needs my services incrementally.

- Partner up with others–I’m a broken record on this one (see my first blog entry!), but working closely with some of my trusted colleagues to brainstorm, share successes, keep one another focused on what we all need to be doing, looking for opportunities to refer one another, and looking for ways to help one another overcome barriers are all the benefits of partnering with other consultants.  There is never a BAD time for collaboration, but a tough economy is a GREAT time for collaboration.

Let’s hear from you about what you are planning to do differently this year–either to overcome the impact of the shaky economy or to get you to your next goals for your business…we have so much to learn from one another!

Jen

Big Companies and Post-Mortems
At a Fortune 500 company where I used to work, the project team would convene after a project ended to conduct a post mortem. I used to think “How morbid” — to view a project like a dead body. But often we’d find out that we should’ve done something differently. We’d also congratulate each other on what went well.

And then years later at the same company we’d ask our consulting teams to conduct a retrospective at the end of an engagement (preferably with the customer). We didn’t want to call them post-mortems — even though the customer had undergone a near-death experience! 

Seriously, we wanted to find out what had gone well, what hadn’t gone well, what should have been changed on the next engagement, and most of all, what were the key things that we learned. These insights were shared with other consultants around the world.

Retrospectives as a Ritual
Norman Kerth describes retrospectives in detail on his website. There he classifies the retrospective as a ritual held over the ages, to pass on learning-from-experience from one generation to the next, from one project team to the next. He says the retrospective can fashioned into the structure of a story. 

Consultants and Retrospectives
As a consultant, it’s hard to reflect on your consulting engagements. At the end of a project, we’re likely focusing on the next gig, moving on to wild selling, or scheduling a vacation. Instead, it would be better to:

• Ask your client a few questions: what went well, what could have gone better
• Hold your own retrospective, asking yourself: 
  • What was the story of that selling and consulting gig? 
  • What would I like to repeat on the next gig? 
  • What did I learn that I could use to enhance the value that I bring to my clients?

Developing a Competitive Edge as a Consultant… 
…for me, it’s constant. I’m always building skills, content, and knowledge in my field. And then there are other areas of expertise, such as marketing (honing my website for the 50^th time, for example) or running my business (tipping my balance sheet, etc.), or expanding my business (making very passive income, for instance). I frequently develop these through gotchas, tips, and best practices.

Finding Consultant Learning and Development Resources
Everybody learns differently (which is why Women in Consulting offers so many options for getting up to speed on the latest best practices). They key is finding the method(s) that works best for you, be it:

• On the job: Each client engagement offers an opportunity to improve your selling and your consulting skills.
• Formal training: Conferences and class, while very traditional, can yield knowledge, contacts, and state-of-the-art trends.
• The Internet: If you find formal training passé, you can tap newer learning methods, such teleseminars, webcasts, blogs, podcasts, and Wikis. Even Internet searches can yield a wealth of valuable information.
• Expanding your network and learning from the consultant community: Perhaps the best resources for immediate insight into current best practices are your fellow consultants and small business owners. Find a community that you resonate with and tap it for tips, insights, mentoring, and feedback.

Evaluating the Learning Experience
You can evaluate the effectiveness of a learning experience by asking yourself the following questions:

• Will the information help me strengthen the foundation and infrastructure of my business?
• Can I use what I learned to build my profits?
• Can I now create more value for my clients?