I had no idea what being a consultant was before I did it.
I had worked with consultants, some of my friends are consultants, and I always thought it looked like a pretty cool job but really honestly truthfully I didn’t really know what it was.
In fact, if I am being maybe too honest, the reason I became a consultant is because I liked Counterculture, my boss was retiring, and the thing I loved about working at the University of Liverpool was the variety and being a consultant seemed like a cool way of having a job with lots of variety.
Part of the reason working out what a consultant does is hard is because they do lots of different things. My job is much more like a university policy advisor than it is a tax consultant, for example.
It’s also fundamentally odd to describe what it is a consultant does. My dad worked in a firm that built engines for buses and lorries most of his life and my mam worked in a cigarette factory. Explaining their hard jobs is easy. They made engines and cigarettes. At the end of the day I don’t physically produce anything. For all intents and purpose my work doesn’t actually exist until someone else reads it.
The thing that we do for work are often different to the things we care about (my mam doesn’t smoke and my dad doesn’t drive a bus) but I’m lucky, and it is probably beyond luck to be an unusual and immense privilege, that I genuinely care about the work I do.
Politically, I think the reform of public services, institutions, and business, toward more socially just and economically successful ends is the way in which the country gets better. I am particularly expert in universities but I’ve spent some wonderful days with museums, galleries, the NHS, students’ unions, local authorities, businesses, colleges, national charities, and lots of other places.
Why is my experience valuable?
I see the absolutely central bit of my work as using my experience to give clients the best advice possible to address their challenges, meet their ambitions, and otherwise help them move their work forward. However, the basics of consulting are fairly simple; pitching, writing, working with clients, and analysis.
Individual consultants have specialisms because it is hard to be good at everything. They do a handful of things that they are really good at. They do things someone will pay for but not something everybody will pay for. For example, my expertise is within public administration and my niche within that is in the working of civic, charitable and public organisations (universities, students’ unions, museums, charities, local authorities etc.)
Temperamentally I also think I am quite well suited to consultancy. The three biggest differences between consultancy and the “normal” jobs I’ve had are 1) I simply have fewer meetings and less organisational imperatives so I can devote more time to problem solving 2) it is more demanding of a greater range of skills to suit different clients needs, approaches, and organisational cultures and 3) it is endlessly interesting as by virtue of seeking consultancy organisations are usually dealing with the difficult, complicated, and hard to solve, bit of work.
How do I get work?
Through a mixture of competitive tender processes, approaches through networks, collaborations with others, and otherwise trying to get noticed through meeting people, writing things, and speaking at stuff.
Someone once asked me if you need to be really clever to be a consultant. It obviously helps but it’s an interesting question what being “clever” really means and the kinds of clever that people will pay for.
How do you value your time?
If I’m a painter I can count how much my paint costs and add on my labour. If I’m a recruitment consultant I can take a percentage of someone else’s wages. If I am, for example, a self-employed higher education consultant I have neither materials or other people’s wages to benchmark my time against.
When it really comes down to it the only product I actually have to sell is my own time. I don’t build something that people can use, I don’t invent new technologies, and I don’t discover new medicines, compounds, or technologies, that can be sold. The only thing I can sell is time to work on something that a client thinks is worth working on.
The answer is that pay depends on understanding the market, or markets, and the relative value of your skill within that market. The rarer the skill, or skills, you have are and the more in demand they are the more you can charge for your time. See below for a hastily constructed diagram which illustrates this point
The ideal scenario is that you can bring to the market a rare skill which is in high demand. The problem is that once a skill is in high demand more people seek to acquire it and it is then no longer as rare. The second best options are then to have either a relatively rare skill with low demand which suggests that the market will reward you with fewer but more well remunerated projects. Equally, skills which are in high demand but relatively common suggests that you will be able to attract a high volume of projects but they may not always pay very highly, acknowledging everyone’s perceptions of low and high pay are different.
The thing which is unlikely to ever work is to try and monetise something which isn’t your skill and there is no demand for. I really love playing football but I am very bad at it and there are millions of people that want to be footballers. The cruel laws of supply and demand (and genetics I suppose) mean I will never be a footballer.
Understanding market position is really hard but it’s the greatest indicator of pay. Charge too much and a client may wish (or in the case of some procurement exercises be obligated to) work with a cheaper consultant. Charge too little and you will end up underselling your own value within the market and miss out on income you could have otherwise had.
Underpinning the price equation are four other important factors.
The first is the extent to which people know about your niche and will therefore seek you out to pay for it. The second is the signal that your pricing sets out. A high price can either be off putting or a presumed, rightly or wrongly, sign of quality. All things being equal if you had to buy a coat which is £100 or a coat which was £200 but has 50% off most people will buy the £200 coat. Thirdly how much other people are charging will impact the perceptions of your pricing. And fourthly there is a natural ceiling to how much some sectors can pay. If your speciality is in working with tiny community groups it will not pay as much as having a speciality in industrial pharmaceuticals.
In short, there isn’t a right number a consultant will charge or a client will ever pay but it is an ever changing dynamic between how skill is valued and the availability of that skill. This changes over time depending on changing needs, reputations, and budgets.
What does the work entail?
Do Work: I get to look at really hard problems, analyse them through a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, and then give some advice. That advice might be a report, planning a campaign, a new strategy, a review, training, or something else.
Grow work: As we win work and do more work my hope is that Counterculture is continually seen as the high quality consulting firm we are and my own expertise in higher education is increasingly called upon.
The less prosaic version is work out problems, analyse the problems, help clients to solve the problems.
Thanks to our success in getting, doing and growing work Counterculture continues to win a diverse number of projects and continually expand our teams across a broadening range of service areas. If you feel that you could benefit from our expertise, or that consultancy could be the right fit for you, please feel free to contact us – we’d love to hear from you!
And don’t be put if you have never been a consultant. I never had been either and it turns out I really like it.