LinkedIn for Consultants: Mind Your Manners

Michael Zipursky 

 

Not a day goes by that I don’t get an invitation from someone around the world to connect with them on LinkedIn.

Right now I have 39 invitations…!

Of the all the connection requests I receive, I only accept maybe 10% of them.
Why, you ask? It’s not because I’m unfriendly nor is it because I don’t like to make new connections. On the contrary.

It’s because 90% of the invitations I get are non-personal. Here’s a typical one I just received…

"I’d like to add you to my professional network. - Ross”

I don’t know Ross from Rocky. Who is he? Why does he want to connect? Why should I connect with him?

If Ross can’t take 30 seconds to personalize his message to me there’s no way I’m going to take even 5 seconds to look at his invitation. I’m simply going to delete or ignore it and move on with my day.

Just because YOU ARE ABLE to connect with someone through this technology doesn’t mean you should take it for granted.

You wouldn’t just walk up to someone without introducing yourself and say “Hey, let’s connect!” would you? Of course not.

You’d walk up and say something like:

“Hi I’m Ross, a consultant from Brisbane that works with doctors. I really like the work you’re doing Michael and would like to learn more, blah blah….”

Come on people! It’s time to get professional!

LinkedIn is a great tool for business, use it properly.

I’ve said this many times before, one of the easiest ways to stand out in the marketplace is to be a real professional. Because so many other “pros” handle themselves and their communications like young school kids.

BTW, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, if you take the time to make it personal I’ll be more than happy to connect with you.

Why You Can't Succeed Alone

Michael Zipursky

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Myth or truth: Professionals don’t need help because they are professionals?
This is common myth.
It’s understandable why people fool themselves into thinking this. If you’re such an expert in your area why would you need the help of someone else…you know it all already!

That’s just not how it works.

Here’s Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO on coaches:

Almost every expert in the world has a mentor or coach of some kind.

I know business consultants making millions of dollars every year that can’t talk highly enough about their own coaches!

These are coaches that have coaches!

Everyone can benefit from a support network. There is always something you can learn from others that have experience.

That’s because we all have different experiences.

Two highly skilled strategists will have slightly different skill sets, will have worked with different clients, and will have different experiences that they’ve gone through.
Sometimes you’ll sit down with your mentor or coach and talk to them about an issue you’re having. It could be about a challenging client situation, the trouble you’re having landing new clients, or dealing with a proposal you’re working on.
You’ve been having a lot of trouble with the issue. You see some solutions but you’re not sure which would be the best one to go with.
You talk with your coach and something magical happens. He explains the issues in a different way. He talks about the options with a slightly different angle to them. He suggests different approaches.
Now it all makes sense.

That’s what a support network is for. That’s how a coach can help you.

You don’t have to do everything yourself.

Achieving success in this business isn’t easy.

It becomes a lot easier when you have people there to help you.
Regardless of your current level of success and experience, getting help can make all the difference.
Getting help doesn’t show your lack of smarts, it demonstrates how smart you are!

ALAN Weiss Interview

Alan Weiss Consulting Interview
by Michael Zipursky
I recently had a chance to interview Alan Weiss and we’ll be sharing the full interview with you on the blog. enjoy....

Mike: We are here with Alan Weiss, author of over 40 books on consulting, many of them bestsellers, including “Million Dollar Consulting”. Alan, welcome to the Business Consulting Buzz Consulting Interviews.

Alan: Thanks Michael, good to be here.

Mike: Alan, you’re probably the world’s most recognized name in the consulting field. I want to go back to the early years. What were you doing before you got into consulting?

Alan: I started my career out of undergraduate school at Prudential Insurance. I was there for four years and I was recruited away to a training firm in Princeton New Jersey. That’s how I got into the general profession.

When the owner fired me, I said that no moron will ever have control over my destiny again.

Mike: Was it a tough decision to go out on your own and become a consultant?

Alan: No. It was inevitable because I was recruited to become president of a consulting firm in Providence Rhode Island. I served as president for two years and the owner fired me. When the owner fired me, I said that no moron will ever have control over my destiny again. I told my wife I want to go out on my own. She said, “Okay but you better get serious”, and I did. That was 1985.

Mike: Why did she say that you better get serious?

Alan: She knew that I tended to be lazy. I’m lazy today. The ideology I’ve developed is because I don’t like to work very much. She said to me, “You’re not going to sit by the phone and expect to get business”.

I told my wife I want to go out on my own. She said, “Okay but you better get serious”, and I did.

I said to her, “You know I better go get an office?” She said, “Why?” I said, “Well, I need an office. I want my own.” And she said, “Why?” Her point was that people aren’t going to come to me. They do today, but they wouldn’t then. I go to them, so why do I need an office? She said, “If you need one you can get one then.” That decision over the course of 20, 25 years saved about $400,000 which was exactly the amount it cost for me to send two kids to private school up through college.

Mike: How did you get your first client?

Alan: My first project was a brief day with a consulting client in Connecticut. They had contracted with Victor Vroom, an authority on leadership who I met in a prior life at the training firm when he sold some of his intellectual property to us. I became very adept at his leadership program. A situational kind of leadership approach. A guy that Vroom worked with, named Phil Yetton couldn’t make a seminar that Vroom was involved in. When he couldn’t make the GTE appearance because he was somewhere else in the globe he said, “The only other person who could deliver this almost as well as I can is Alan Weiss.” And so GTE asked me to do that and then became my first client.

Mike: You’ve been known to say that “you can’t help others until you help yourself.” What do you mean by that?

I’d say that hourly based fees are unethical because the consultant is best paid and is in a better position when the project takes a long time.

Alan: I mean that wealth is discretionary time. And unless you create discretionary time you can’t help other people. I do a substantial amount of pro-bono work. I do a substantial amount of work in the community. And unless you’re able to do that, unless you have the income that supports discretionary time, you’re not able to. Moreover, successful people want to be around successful people. That’s absolute. So you’d better be well dressed. You’d better drive a nice car. You’d better use expensive accessories. You don’t pull out a 39-cent pen to take notes in an executive’s office. You should be well groomed and so forth.
Consequently, if you need to be able to support all these things, you need to help yourself first. It’s the same thing as what they tell you in airplanes. Put your own oxygen mask on first and then you can help others.

Mike: Right. One of the biggest issues consultants deal with is the subject of pricing and fees. You literally wrote the book on that with value based fees, and I want to dig into that. What would you say to consultants that are charging an hourly fee for their work right now?

Alan: I’d say they’re amateurs. I’d say that hourly based fees are unethical because the consultant is best paid and is in a better position when the project takes a long time. The client is best served, however, when the project is resolved quickly. And so that’s an ethical conflict right out of the box. Large firms – the large consulting firms that charge by the hour – are really production capability driven. They’re paying somebody $300 an hour in terms of overhead and salary and so they’ve got a bill amounting to $500 an hour to make a profit. It’s like a paper company or a steel company. The point is that value based fees are far, far better for the client and far, far better for the consultant. It’s the way you make real money in this business. You’ll never make much money charging by the hour.
How much can you charge? And who wants to work 40 hours a week? Not me.