Essentials for Good Consulting Projects (4m 30s) – Association Hustle Podcast Episode 305

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11/06/2021


 
 
Listen to this podcast to discover what the 2 key factors are to any successful consulting project.
 
 
 
Hello and welcome to JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. Founder of The Moery Company, JP’s mission is to arm today’s associations with insight and strategy to thrive and a progressively complex and competitive business landscape. 21st century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core.
Here’s JP.
When The Moery Company started up 10 plus years ago, almost 100% of our work was in business development and sales, but coming out of that, we start to get a lot of consulting projects.
Questions we asked ourselves when The Moery Company started taking on consulting projects: is the value proposition right for our organization? Do we have the right dues structure? Does it need to be modernized? Does our governance fit with the organization needs for the future? Does our org chart have the right people in the right seats? That type of thing started to evolve and come out of the revenue development operation.
I faced several decisions to make in consulting,

  1. I was worried that I wouldn’t get enough projects. That was absolutely not the case. I had this bias that if I just had projects, and I had work, everything was going to be okay.
  2. I made the mistake of not being very thoughtful about my pricing structure that was fundamentally wrong. You can work your ass off and not make any money. I only negotiated downwards. I knew the floor, but I never tested the ceiling. My guess is you’re unaware of the ceiling and you know the floor. Think about how you can move your pricing up and how you can escalate the service and deliver more and charge more because my guess is you have more altitude than you think.

Now once we got the project, what did it look like?
The more consulting I did, the more important I found a good process was imperative to having a successful project.  My colleague, Joe Bates, really helped me with this, he followed a couple of different items that I want to pass on to you now.

  1. We had a set agenda and a launch meeting that addressed all the different scope areas of the project.
  2. After that launch meeting, we established a timeline that we sent to the client, and they agreed to.
  3. We had biweekly meetings. Some projects require weekly meetings, but most of them are biweekly 30 minute recurring meetings, where we review the project, we review the timeline, and we address any gaps that might exist. I also like to drop in a little Friday written update very helpful.

The projects that are least successful are those where there’s a lack of communication between the client and the consulting firm.
I want to address a couple of things regarding the end game and the end of the project.

  1. Be clear in the agreement that there’s one final presentation of the work and have a final date for when that program is finished. A project can leak into more work scope, creep additional appearances, and that really takes a lot of time and time is money. Additional presentations need to be extra.
  2. In the early days, I was very nervous about telling that client about other projects that we could do for them that we discovered during the initial consulting project. Now I’m not concerned about that. Believe me, if you have good project, the client wants to keep working with you. Give them that opportunity.

I hope this content was helpful for you today. I’m certainly pulling for you. And I can’t wait to speak next week on the association hustle.
I want to run up the score on downloads. So if you like this episode, would you share this on social media? Share it to your LinkedIn account!
We hope you enjoyed this edition of JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. We’d love to connect with you. Check out our blog at moerycompany.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You can also connect with JP on LinkedIn and Twitter at @JPMoery, as well as The Moery’s Company’s Instagram and Facebook page
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