Ed Callahan
Ed Callahan is a Philadelphia-area EOS implementer who helps organizations clarify, simplify, and implement their visions. For more information on Ed or to contact him, click on his LinkedIn profile, read his Stay Focused blog, or go to his website.
What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out? Match your consulting practice to a passion; don’t just create an extension of what you have been doing in your career up to this point. If you are passionate about doing something, it will give you the fortitude to stick to it through the inevitable difficult days while you are building your practice. I am now on the third iteration of my practice in 10 years, and I have finally accomplished this particular piece of advice as an EOS Implementer where I combine my business experience and my passion for being a small business teacher.
What was your most important early decision (e.g., financial, organizational, marketing)? I stopped billing myself out on an hourly basis. It rid me of the hassle of keeping track of my hours and having to justify them to the client. I transitioned to a monthly retainer, paid in advance, with contract-based expectations as to deliverables from both me and the client. Much simpler and a great qualifier of real prospects, as distinguished from tire kickers who want you to work on commission or equity only.
Can you offer one piece of advice to help a new consultant get through the first six months? Focus, Focus, Focus. Focus your value proposition. Focus your target market. Focus your messaging. Build a very narrow brand in which you can become the dominant player. Ideally align yourself with an existing set of intellectual property/business proposition so that you can focus all your energies on getting clients. Generating cash early should be your only objective.
There are times when standing out from the crowd is a bad thing. Marketing your consulting services isn't one of them.
What makes you different?
It’s a question individuals and organizations often struggle to answer effectively. Why should someone hire you over your competition?
C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel wrote an oft-downloaded article for the Harvard Business Review back in 1990 on defining your competitive advantage. Core competency, elevator speech, value proposition, secret sauce — the concept is the same: Whether you’re making the decision to consult or you’re already up and running, success depends on your ability to verbalize your core competency or competencies and to position yourself as offering someone nobody else can (or does).
Building a great elevator speech will be a recurring theme on these pages. From Pralahad and Hamel’s point of view, here’s what you should be thinking as you develop a list of core competencies:
- Is it a significant source of competitive differentiation? Does it provide a unique signature to how you describe yourself? Does it make a significant contribution to the value a customer perceives in your product or service?
- Does it transcend a single business or market niche (i.e., does this core competency give you an advantage with more than one target customer)?
- Is it (or will it be) hard for competitors to imitate? In general, they say, competencies that arise from the complex harmonization of multiple technologies will be difficult to imitate. This combination of resources and embedded skills will be difficult for other firms to acquire or duplicate.
Prahalad and Hamel argue that few firms — much less individual consultants — are likely to be leaders in more than five or six core competencies. If you’ve compiled a list of 20 to 30 capabilities, odds are you haven’t yet identified your true core competency. Once you have, however, you are far more likely to be able to focus on value creation and meaningful new business development rather than a shotgun approach to marketing or opportunisitic expansion.
