I’ve seen it with friends and clients over and over again. After years of frustration fighting red tape and reorganizations in the corporate world, or after receiving the offer of a big severance package, they hear the siren song of being an independent consultant.
And it looks so easy from the outside. “I’ve got years of experience. I’ve got so many friends in the business who will throw me projects,” they believe. And with earnest enthusiasm, they make the leap, from the corporate environment into the consulting world.
The statistics are bleak. About half of all new companies fail in the first five years according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2017. The rate of failure is even higher for new consulting practices, hovering around 80%. Anecdotally, most don’t survive year two. And paradoxically, there is a lot of competition. There are still over 680,000 consultants in the U.S. and additional 53,000+ coaches.
One person who did make the leap is John Constantine, who had a thirty-year career in companies that included GlaxoSmithKline and Merck before he made the leap to the “other side” as Senior Vice President at Orchestrall, Inc., and principal in its training and talent development practice.
After a slow start, John found the answer to becoming a busy successful consultant from a surprising source. And today he spends his time helping life sciences companies to train and develop their people better. I caught up with him recently to hear his story.
Kevin Kruse: Tell me how you made the move into consulting.
John Constantine: I’d thought about it for many years, talked about it for a few. As a natural “disruptor”—forgive the buzz word—I was getting bone-weary of the constant battles with the corporate forces aligned against change. After 30 years of working my way up in Fortune 50 companies, I finally reached the tipping point and ventured out.
Kruse: Lots of people get frustrated in their jobs, though most don’t actually want to risk the comfort zone of a steady paycheck and good benefits. What specifically was your tipping point?
Constantine: Constantly disturbing the status quo is exhilarating and rewarding, as long as you can keep getting promoted to different roles to boil the next ocean. Promotions every couple of years are common early in careers, but there comes a time when you start to approach the practical ceiling of moving up. Once a career gets within two to three levels of the CEO of a huge multinational company, there are just too few roles available at higher altitudes. My tipping point was spending a few too many years in a senior role in a Fortune 50 company. The welcome mat to continuously change things was shrinking. I made the decision to leave industry and start a consulting business where clients actually want to pay to have someone disrupt things.
Kruse: What was it like making the leap? Was it what you expected?
Constantine: The first year was brutal. I had a sense that my extensive network wanted to engage me as a consultant, but the contracts were hard to come by. It began with a few small projects, which I expected to turn into larger ones or referral projects. Though those first few engagements were not miserable failures, they were “one and done,” and I struggled to figure out why they were not more successful. It took a while for me to figure out what I was doing wrong.
Kruse: What was your “magic moment” of realization?
Constantine: All four of our children are grown with their own successful lives and spread around the U.S. We are blessed to see all of them often, and it was one day early in the second year of my consulting business and of my kids asked me a simple question. “What is it you actually do?” It was a rare moment—I was genuinely at a loss for words.
It was beyond an elevator pitch problem. I had several elevator pitches…that was part of the problem. The issue was more central to success or failure. I truly had not defined what my “strike zone” was: what was it that my network was looking for me to help them with?
Kruse: So I assume you had a business plan, and you say you had elevator pitches, but you needed something else.
Constantine: Writing a business plan is required, but if you can’t succinctly state in one or two sentences what it is that companies should hire you to do, chances of success are low. While I was fortunate to get just enough business during that first year to keep afloat, I really should have thought long and hard to define what my consulting business was before embarking on it. It turns out that lack of clarity comes through loud and clear when talking to prospective clients, no matter how confident you think you sound. Once I had my core business proposition succinctly defined, the really rewarding engagements started flowing in.
Kruse: What are some final tips for those who are thinking about consulting?
Constantine: First, define your “strike zone” and literally run it by your family. They love you and will be brutally honest. If they can’t understand it no one will. You can call it a mission/vision or whatever you want, but it should flow from your lips as if you were talking in your sleep. You’ll have the chance to run it by your network as well, but family is a reliable and safe test market.
Second, resist the temptation to take projects/engagements that are even a little bit out of the strike zone. You might think you can do it, but unless it is something you can do better than most everyone else, you’ll rarely have that client for the long term or for repeats/referrals.
Third, be obsessive in defining needs/requirements of engagements, as well as success factors. You cannot demonstrate success without concrete agreed upon dimensions of what looks good.
And most of all be honest with yourself, just as your children would be.
Sourced from Forbes contributed by Kevin Kruse