Start and Run a successful consulting business

What is the aim of this course?

No matter what you do at some point you will be fed up with your boss, your work and the corporate life. Most likely you will start thinking about having your own business - something that you can put your effort into and make it great as well as profitable. Maybe, a small restaurant? Maybe, a startup?  If you are working in professional services one of the options you should seriously consider is to start and run consulting firm. It can be very profitable business and help you build other businesses on top of that, especially technological startups.

In this course I will show you how to start and run consulting company fast and efficiently. The course is based on my 12 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting companies and owner of small consulting company (the last 7 years). I have been also CEO, Board Member responsible for strategy, improvement and turn-arounds in biggest companies from FMCG, SMG, and B2B in Poland so I know the subject from all sides including the customer of consulting firms.

I do not like to overcomplicate things so in every lecture I will be quite straightforward. Most lectures will have also a lot of additional resources: templates, examples, procedures, list of tools. The idea is that you have everything that you need to start and run consulting business in one place. If you don’t find something that you need let me know - I will try to prepare something and I will added to the course

Why I decided to create this course?

For our teams we have created courses that help us improve the consultant on-boarding and the teaching process. We have started to use them extensively also with customers that we work with and their teams. Since we made them available to a wider public we got many request, especially on Quora, on how to run consulting business. We try to minimize repetitive work so we decided to make this course in order to cut down on the questions we are getting.

This course is based on our extensive experience in working and running consulting companies. In many cases we use also a lot of clever solutions from other service companies that we helped set up and improve.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step by step guide loaded with tones of, tricks, hints, examples that will significantly speed up your process of starting the company and afterwards scaling to sensible size. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will know:

1. Where to find ideas for consulting business, consulting firm?
2. How to analyze in Excel whether the business makes sense or not?
3. How to get first customers?
4. What to concentrate on if you are 1-man show, a freelancer?
5. What kind of tools you should have?
6. How and in what way you can set-up pricing for your services?
7. How to prepare for scaling, expanding?
8. What kind of business you can build on the basis of consulting firm?   

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.

I will produce the necessary content and

How the course is organized?

The course is divided currently in 5 sections and will be adding new section to address other important issues. Currently you will find the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with little intro into the course  and consulting
• Where you can get idea for your consulting businesses. In the second section we show where you can find ideas on which you can build consulting business.
• Business model of a service company. In the third section I will show you how to calculate whether your consulting business will make money. We start with a general service company and show how to put in in Excel, how to draw conclusions out of this.
• 1-man show. Next section will show you what you should concentrate on if you are running  1-man show, you are forced to be a jack of all trades. This is also very good for freelancer and coaches.
• Getting first customers. In fifth section you will learn how to sell your services, where you can get first customers for your consulting services. For the time being we show 8 ways but we will constantly update with new ideas
• Tools you need in a consulting company. To be successful in consulting you need a lot of tools create in a proper manner. We will show you what you should use and in what way to be successful in your business
• Pricing. One of the most important things in consulting business is pricing. I will show you how you can set your price, what should be your pricing positioning and how you calculate the price and margins of a specific project. We will talk also about dynamic pricing and how to get sell cheap projects to your customers with high margin for you
• Managing consulting company. We have a separate section on the organization of the consulting company. We talk here about the structure of the company and the role of specific positions.
• Preparation for scaling of consulting company. In this section we talk about things that have to be properly set-up before scaling it to significant sizes. If you have already functioning consulting business this section is for you.
• How you can expand. In the last section we talk about ways in which you can expand and build on the bases of consulting new business.

We will be adding new sections in the coming months and expanding existing ones

You will be able also to download many additional resources

1. Examples in Excel, Word, Power Point
2. Presentation of slides show in the course
3. Links to additional presentations and movies
4. Links to books worth reading

So enjoy the course and if you have any questions let me know