This conversation is one that I have quite frequently with other consultants or entrepreneurs starting out their journey. For me, the most important thing to do is understand the balance of your business's supply and demand. To elaborate, there's nobody that knows your current workload, future pipeline, or what your company's trajectory are better than you. If one side of this is too heavy and your current workload is greatly outweighing what is being demanded in the future, you'll struggle finding time to work on growing the business and never experience growth. By mapping out your S&D, you can begin to craft a schedule that gives ample time for both client work and personal company work, to then allow both to thrive and scale effectively.
Setting boundaries can help consultants manage their workload and prevent overcommitting by limiting the amount of work they take on and setting clear expectations with clients. This can also help consultants work more efficiently and effectively. Boundaries can also help consultants take back control of their business by setting limits on their time and energy, such as only checking emails at certain times or setting aside time for self-care. By setting these limits, consultants can prevent burnout and maintain a healthy work-life balance, leading to better overall performance and satisfaction with their work. Setting and enforcing boundaries takes time and practice, but with consistent effort and communication, consultants can create and maintain healthy boundaries.
In business - especially in our technology-based world - methods, best practices, workflow tools and more are constantly changing and evolving. As consultants it’s important to frequently look at how we’re managing our tasks to ensure that we’re making the best use of our time. The flexibility and experiences we have the potential to earn as consultants is unmatched, but we have to make sure we’re keeping up with the times and trends and that includes how we’re managing ourselves. Don’t be afraid to change things up.
Realizing that your time is most valuable when meeting and interacting with Clients, delegating or offloading all other Client Projects such as research, e-mail communication, scheduling, invoicing and follow up will provide you, as the Consultant, more bandwidth and time to work on your business. You will then be able to add more clients to increase revenues and margins to hire more Client Project Coordinators. This will require training of Client Project Coordinators and additional Consultants on your team, and this model will help you scale your consulting business.
CEO/Fractional Marketing and PR Executive at Ann M Krauss Marketing and PR
Answered 3 years ago
Every week and each day, review and list goals and to-do's for consulting projects and actual business. After you have your comprehensive list, look at everything again and determine what you can reasonably get accomplished within that specific timeframe. Don't forget to consider the balance between your personal and family obligations and aspirations. Then, assign each line item a priority code, starting with something like A1, A2, A3, etc for the most important and B1, B2, B3, etc, for the items that will be great to get done if there is time remaining for that day. It always gives me a great sense of accomplishment to check off all the things I get done and see that I have achieved my goals.
When you first start out as an independent consultant, you tend to say "yes" to every opportunity that comes your way. After 1-2 years though, I think each consultant should strive to excel at one — or maybe two — very specific services. In my case, I've chosen a specific online platform to become an expert in. If a client wants a website built or managed in a different platform, I politely decline. By turning down work that isn't in your precise wheelhouse, you give yourself more time to focus — on your business, on delivering higher quality work, and on getting better and better at that one specific thing. Hopefully, it's something that gets you excited most days. The goal is to become so good and so efficient in this one offering that your clients start providing referrals. Word-of-mouth marketing tends to be the most effective way to organically grow your business as a consultant. -Drew Eastmead
As a consultant, if you do not understand your strengths and weaknesses you are going to experience unnecessary bumps in the road. By taking the time to identify your strengths you are able to schedule your day with tasks that utilize your strong suits. When you identify your weaknesses, you can then hire and delegate to someone who is strong where you are weak. Take the time to deeply understand and execute on identifying this and your business will grow exponentially.
If you can conquer the most difficult tasks first, you’ll be able to power through the rest of your tasks easily. Seeing the progress you make on a difficult task can be very motivating and help you stay on track to complete your goals. Getting the hard stuff out of the way first gives you a sense of accomplishment and helps you control the rest of your tasks.
One tip for consultants to optimize their workflow and take back control of their business is to use project management tools to accurately bid time and resources. Using job and resource data to create better-informed proposals gives consultants the opportunity to create change orders if a client comes back with additional changes not included in the initial scope of work. This can help to prevent scope creep, ensure resources are being used strategically, and make sure progress is in line with projections and commitments.
As a keyword analyst, major projects can land on my desk with very little notice, but I've been fortunate that an honest discussion of workload and realistic timelines is something new clients appreciate, rather than fight against. They might not be too happy if there's a waitlist, but they respect that deadlines of active projects always take precedence over new project deadlines, and retainer client work comes before project work. Those two rules are inflexible and it's a consistency that I've built my reputation on. I make it clear from the outset and put it in my contracts. And to make sure I always have time to work on my business, I keep my calendar clear every Friday from noon on, reserving that time for non-client priorities.