Surviving a Career Transition as a Consultant
Many executives are surviving their career transition as a consultant. Here are thoughts on surviving and thriving through a downturn as a consultant.
It is very important that you strengthen your offering, positioning and foundation.
Your Offering as a Consultant
Over-deliver core offerings to core customers.
The temptation is to expand into new products or new services and new customers. The issue is the risk/reward trade-off of that investment, particularly given the likelihood of irrational behavior by the people who will lose business or customers to your initiatives.
Plus, there’s the additional risk of diluting your positioning. Instead, deploy extra resources to strengthen your core offerings and delight your core customers.
Positioning Yourself as a Consultant
Strengthen your existing positioning as a consultant.
Career transitions are good times to increase market-share. They’re even better times to increase mind-share.
Use extra time to accelerate your thought leadership in your current area of strength, resisting the temptation to try to broaden your positioning.
Your Foundation
Manage your cash.
This is different than managing profits. Downturns require disciplined management of cash inflows and outflows.
There are longer-term investments that make sense in normal times that may be too risky for the short term. Remember, you have to make it through the short term to get to the long term.
Good Hunting!
Follow Hire Consulting on Linkedin for talent management solutions and executive career transition coaching to help reach your full potential.
Mark James, CPC is the founder and CEO of Hire Consulting Services (HCS). Established in 1999, HCS is a highly customized executive outplacement and career coaching firm for executive-level professionals.
Mark is equipped with over 25 years of experience in Executive Career Management Coaching, as well as Outplacement and Executive Search Consulting. He is the author of the three best-selling books—Keys to the C Suite: Unlock the Doors to Executive Career Path Success, The Interview Mindset: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Your Career, and The Recruiter Mindset: The Ultimate Guide to Working with Executive Search Recruiters.
Mark uses a proven and successful strategy and structured process to fully enable his clients to conduct a professional job search campaign and with the singular goal of securing their next career opportunity in significantly less time it would take without a career coach. Clients gain a new perspective of their marketing value coupled with executing a strategic plan and closing the deal on their new role in their next job.
