Freeing Time & Money to Grow Your Consultancy

Key Takeaways

1. Survival and Growth: Initially, consultants must secure enough projects to cover expenses while laying the groundwork for future growth.
2. Working with Associates: Utilizing associates can help generate income and handle larger projects, despite lower profit margins and external expertise accumulation.
3. Repeat Business: Focus on standardized, repeatable services to become known in specific areas, freeing up time for marketing and improving efficiency.
4. Follow-on Work: Prioritize new business with existing clients over finding new ones to save time and effort in business development.
5. Outsourcing: Delegate tasks that don’t require your direct involvement, such as research or operational marketing tasks, to free up your time for more critical activities.
6. Raise Prices: Consider the value delivered to clients and the additional overheads when setting prices, not just previous salary metrics.
7. Use Platforms: Employ virtual assistants and platforms like Fiverr and Upwork to handle time-consuming, low-skill tasks efficiently and cost-effectively.

There are many bumps on the way to success as you grow as a consultant. The first is often simply ‘survival’ – getting enough projects through the door to pay the bills whilst you find your feet.

The second you typically encounter is how to free up enough time and money so that you can build your consultancy. Establishing the spare time and money to start growing the firm: recruiting consultants, building marketing systems, and improving your operational processes.

Many solo consultants never escape this trap and work hand-to-mouth for years, which leaves them no space or spare cash to begin growing their consultancy.

Strategies to Free Up Time and Money for Growth

So, what is a very small consulting firm to do to free up time and money to start growing the consultancy? Here, I detail four ways of doing exactly that, so let’s begin…

1. Work With Associates

Working with associates shouldn’t be a business model for an entire company unless there’s a very good reason for it for two reasons.

First, because you tend to get lower profit margins from using associates instead of employees and second because the expertise is accumulated outside, instead of inside the firm. However, initially working with associates can be a route to making some money without selling your time.

It also allows you to bid for larger projects and begin to assess the potential for key associates to potentially join you as employees. I’ve given advice on how to recruit and use associates here.

2. Do More Repeat Business in Aligned Areas

When small consultancies start, they often do lots of different things just to get the money through the door to pay the mortgage. The sooner you can move to standardized, productized, or at least repeatable services (doing the same thing again and again) the more time you’re going to free up.

As you become known as THE go-to person (or more realistically, one of the people) for that specific service, the less time you will have to spend marketing.

Repeating work means that you spend less time reinventing the wheel, that you become better at doing it (and can thus charge higher prices), and you can create a system/method for the service much faster – which later means you can get someone else to deliver it.

If you need to do other work, ensure that is strategically aligned to your main service: either the same service in different sectors or a service which is upstream or downstream from your service (e.g. a discovery project or impact analysis).

3. Follow-on Work

Aligned to the point above is seeking new business with existing clients rather than new ones. Because small growing consultancies don’t necessarily have the reputation of their competitors, they often spend a lot of time building their pipeline with new clients. This is really hard work and leaves you no time to work on the business.

And it’s all time that you could be charging out at so I would always say, really work on your existing clients, and you get their testimonials where you can, but ideally, also look for follow on work, but for repeatable business.

And develop services that once you’ve done your signature service, if you want to call it that, there’s various follow-on services, and that will save you time in developing new clients.

4. Outsource Work

When you outsource work, I don’t mean that front end work in terms of working with associates, although very often that can be outsourced. In this case I was talking about with partner was doing a lot of research work.

And a lot of that could have been outsourced to someone else, even to bright PhD students because it doesn’t need their involvement. If you can outsource that, obviously, there’s going to be a differential in what you’re paid.

So you can accumulate a bit more money, it also frees you up to be doing other things.

Raising Your Prices: a Bonus Tip

I’ll also add one other one in that I tend not to give because everyone else gives it: put up your prices. When people starting consulting very often they calculate their daily rate by thinking about their old salary and pension, and transpose that into a daily rate. The odds

That’s not how you should be thinking about your price, you should be thinking about the value that you’re delivering to the client. And also you’ve got a whole load of other overheads.

You’ve got to market, you’ve got to sell, you’ve got to employ people and all the rest of it so put your prices up.

Those are a few tips for very small growing consultancies that are just thinking about, “I’m just doing stuff all the time, how can I free up time? What do I need to do as a business to grow, but also how can I free up money on the outsourcing side?”.

We can talk about the back office. There’s a whole load of platforms that you can use Fiverr is one of them. Upwork is another, set yourself a virtual assistant to get them to do the menial tasks for you.

All the tasks that take a lot of time and don’t need a lot of skill but some of the operational side of marketing, you know, writing eBooks, tidying up your blog, uploading stuff to the website, all of that can be done by someone else very cheaply elsewhere. I hope that was useful.