Consultant

[philipwhiteold]

Seems like a lot of newer MBA grads over at Business Week forums have been basically doing this. Its a hard market. Any successful consultants here willing to share some free advice?

[dpetersam]

Believe it or not, I don't venture off my own BWeek thread, so I'm not quite sure I know what others are doing.

I did some freelance consulting back in the late 90s when AdmissionsConsultants was a "half time" job for me. I kind of fell into it. A decent sized company offered me work as an independent contractor with an eye towards hiring me if things worked out. I started to enjoy my autonomy and continued the relationship as long as possible without joining their company as an employee.

Two things to point out:

1. The economy in Northern VA/Washington DC was very good and there were plenty of companies looking for help.

2. Most of what I did was through networking/word of mouth.

I think its tougher for a non IT independent consultant to get into the bigger companies and I personally found the small start ups to be the easiest when I did go it alone.

[YaSO]

A good friend of mine got laid off a couple of years ago. He was looking for a job for a while, but he knew a lot of people in the area since he lived there for number of years (10 years or so?). He also had a son in high school, and being a father of a high school kid, he got to know many people in the area. He was working in the IT industry for many years and he started from tech support. It was not what he wanted to do(tech support), but that's where he had to start. In his last job, he was a developer. The way he established his career helped him to cover a wide range of subjects in IT, from networking, PC configuration to web and programming. It turned out that many people needed help in setting up their work environment, updating websites and what have you, and he kind of started working as a consultant. Not that he had any other choice, but that's just how things started. As he gets to know a new customer, he/she often refers him to another new customer(s). Things kept going like that and he hires two people now to run his consulting company. He is also about to start a venture project while he and his partner making the funding(I will be a part of the project most likely). Apparently he's doing pretty well.

Whether new MBA grad can call himself a consultant and start a business is a question that I cannot answer; I think it tough though I don't think it impossible. But the point that I want to make is that sometime a bad situation can turn out to be bliss. One too good example is Michael Bloomberg; he was actually laid off right before he started Bloomberg. It's not like one day he decided to strick on his own, quit a kick ass job and started on his own; he started running a business more or less to pay his bills initially.