Friday 26 February 2010

Things are looking up for the self-employed

Life has been tough for many independent consultants and freelancers over the last year or so. Clients are under pressure to reduce costs and retain permanent staff – plus to read the press it would seem there are thousands of newly redundant 40 and 50 something’s looking to set up as self-employed.

After analysing the results from this year's fee survey, though, it seems that most consultants are optimistic about the coming year. A whopping 93% see revenue stabilising or improving this year and over half expect to grow.

There has clearly been pressure on fee rates, which have dropped an average of around 8%, and many of our respondents have been asked to work for free - or as good as - at some point in 2009. The good news though is that while people are happy to be flexible for charities or businesses that are really struggling generally they feel confident enough to walk away from clients who are just pushing their luck - which often results in a change of heart from the client!

The key I think is to be clear about the value you bring to a client and make sure they understand this - arguing about fee rates fades into the background if your client knows you will deliver and trusts you to improve their business.

Monday 22 February 2010

Demonstrating quality

I've always been impressed by the depth and variety of experience that so many Skillfair members have, and that's been reflected in the testimonials, references and other information they've provided for quality checking purposes. We've now added a new feature to the system that allows members to display their key memberships and accreditations alongside the quality rating - so clients can see immediately who is 'Prince Qualified' or a 'Chartered Marketer' for example. We'll be contacting the various professional bodies over the next few weeks for permission to use their logos so members will only be able to display their credentials if they've provided evidence of these to us. Once you're a full member of Skillfair you'll be able to add further detail to your profile, as well as your professional credentials, all of which boosts your own website presence on search engines.

Of course qualifications are only part of the story, they're a good way of demonstrating commitment to your profession and distinguishing yourself from other less well-qualified providers. But once you're in touch with a client the various bits of paper are much less important than what you actually do and unfortunately it is much easier to damage a good reputation than it is to build one in the first place. We've had feedback from a few project owners recently that messages they've received have included some fairly obvious spelling mistakes. In a competitive market it's easy to rush your response to any enquiry but it's more important than ever to check and double-check before sending any message - you may be the first to respond, but if you give the wrong impression you'll also be the first on the reject pile.

PS having made that comment about checking things carefully I went live with the new feature without my usual double check that everything was OK - Doh! Apologies to anyone who tried to use it on Friday and was frustrated - all OK now and  I promise to be more careful next time :-(

Tuesday 9 February 2010

do clients deliberately mislead in tenders?

Apparently The National Federation of Builders (NFB) has conducted a poll, which shows that a fifth of small businesses think local authorities do not advertise their tenders properly. Details here

Having just done stint of tender loading I think they may have a point - of the 10 I've just loaded onto Skillfair 3 had seriously misleading titles.

For example, "IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support", is actually a tender to provide a data centre to host some servers and "information systems or technology strategic review and planning services" is a housing management information system.

I have some sympathy with the clients as they do get a lot of responses but it makes me very glad that we actually read every tender and change the titles to something more meaningful before sending them to our members!

Friday 5 February 2010

Weird and wonderful tenders

One of the things that makes searching for tenders for Skillfair interesting is the eclectic nature of some of the requirements. In the last few months, some of the more unusual ones have ranged from a Totem Pole artist and designer for Liverpool, an entymology consultant for a museum in Berkshire, research into odour nuisance from sewage sludge, plus my all time favourite – being a hermit for a month in a museum tower.

Keeping it simple - do consultants over complicate things?

I've come across a few blogs and discussions this week where people have been discussing how they should refer to themselves and their  business. Critical issues such as 'do we talk about training or learning' or 'are you a mentor coach or a coach mentor' seemed to have assumed a life of their own. It's true that the language we use makes a difference to how people react to us, the idea behind 'learning and development' rather than 'training' being to help the recipients of the service feel more in control, but I do wonder sometimes if we sometimes agonise too much about how we describe ourselves.


Clients generally come to us with a very clear idea of what they want done and very rarely use complex language to describe it. They are much more likely to ask for 'help' rather than 'coaching' and for a 'training course' rather than a learning experience. Of course, some special language or jargon is essential in getting the precise nature of a requirement across - and we quite often have to resort to looking up some of the more technical requests we get - but in general I think it's worth sticking to plain and simple language whenever you can. If you're not sure if your profile or website has veered too far from simplicity why not ask a friend to review it or take a look at the Plain English website for guidance. I particularly liked their before and after examples of management gobbledegook.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

social media - is it just for girls?

I've just noticed something odd about the people who've signed up for our Intelligent On-Line Marketing workshop in March. Going by the names it looks as though 80% of them are female - which started me wondering if there's something about the topic that attracts women rather than men?

Do the fellas think they already know how to do it? Maybe you don't want to plan that far ahead or perhaps that male cynicism and scepticism is getting in the way? 

If it's the last point - I share the cynicism to some extent, there's a lot of hype about things on-line and it's really important to cut through that and understand exactly which elements of on-line and/or social marketing will deliver useful business contacts rather than the inane chatter that seems to swamp the good stuff on most sites.

What do you think - and what aspects of social marketing are you using?