Freelance Consulting

After March 3, I plan to leave my current gig to pursue freelance consulting for awhile, along with a number of colleagues. The exact vehicles and logistics are still in the formative phase – fortunately the administrative logistics for consulting businesses are not too arduous.

I find it useful to revisit a post I wrote a couple of years ago on independent consulting because I don't have the sales prospecting scale I use to have within a larger firm. I think that a lot of what I wrote about independent consulting is still true. I might have one additional add, and that is I think that social networking tools are getting better for helping consultants. Just the other day I was just contacted by a CEO of a technology company because of my LinkedIn profile and updates I had made to my status (which stated "Steve is looking for new contract or employment opportunities"). The CEO has been looking to grow his business and is looking for general management, finance, marketing, business development, and account management assistance. Although the lean was toward a full-time hire position for me, the geography is unlikely to work. So now the impetus is on me to work with him to determine whether I can help in either a consultative role or interim management role. Now in all fairness, the CEO knew me from before from venture-related circles and consulting, so this is not a cold networking opportunity. That said, I didn't have to reach out to him for the process to get kicked off. I was able to use social networking tools. And as compared to having to compete against 300-1000 applications for a job (I'm a normal guy and have *never* won in that kind of environment), one has to think about how to measurably change the odds of winning.

Of course, I've probably jinxed my personal opportunity by talking about it in the open. But given that we are in a terrible recession and that freelance consulting is the "new unemployment", I wanted to elevate the discussion.

Twitter Me This

Background: Management strategy consulting professional David Dalka, Florian Hollender, and other management consultants are using Twitter. Ford Harding, world-renowed author and expert on sales (e.g., for consultants and other professional services folks), also has two very recent posts on using LinkedIn and Twitter as part of the business development and sales process.

What else? Twitter raises more than $35 million (just before Valentine's Day) by the big guns in venture capital. Yet – no business model required.

Based on that context, I've started an account to get hands-on experience with Twitter. I think my home page is here. I can't stand to use instant messaging (although I do use it), so I'm not sure a federated "blurting"-thing is going to stick with me. That said, I'm willing to see whether carpal tunnel or Twitter wins out. I am also interested in developing my thoughts on both how Twitter communities form and how businesses might capitalize on Twitter.

Update (2/24/09): Link to approximately 8,414 consultants that Twitter? Side note: compare this to approximately ~1.2 million consultants on LinkedIn.

Some Tips On Dressing As A Consultant

Florian Hollender at the Killer Consultant blog has some good Consulting 101 tips on how to shop for clothes when starting as a new consultant. I've never really commented on dress considerations publicly, but I'll add just one recommendation on dress based on personal experience:

Plan to wear a pair of decent shoes on the plane, and don't just pack dress shoes in your baggage. 

I have had to let my boss wear my shoes to a client site when his got lost during international travel. Since he took the nice-looking ones, good thing I wasn't left to wearing a bunch of sneakers to the client site!

Good Find and Thoughts on Management Consulting and Recruiting in 2009

Gautam Ghosh has both a good find and interesting comments on management consulting recruiting in the current environment. A few themes permeate his post: 1)laser-specific recruiting, 2) hybrid experience, and 3) focus on productivity. I can't really comment on #1, but as for #2, I have known a number of ex-consultants return to their prior consulting firms after having left once for operating companies (in some cases, the returns have been even more numerous than once). For whatever reason, returning to your prior firm (or even to the consulting field again for that matter) used to be much more rare. On #3 regarding productivity experience, this has been confirmed by account executives that I work in conjunction with – the turndown in the global economy has really created a stronger demand for those with operations or cost reduction experience (over other areas such as growth managers).

Update 2/20/09: An older post of mine that may be interesting to reflect on in a down market … "Don't Become An 80s Rock Drummer"

Quick Graph on Triangulation Concept

Awhile back I had a post on triangulation, and although I had received a number of questions on how this might be depicted, I never got around to showing it. The attached picture below is pretty good and is motivated by an engagement involving wireless spectrum valuation. The basic idea is that we used three methods to get the range of potential dollar values for each wireless spectrum property. The chart below is the summary chart that ties the results of separate analyses together. The first method of valuation on the left (historic comparables) involved looking at past government auctions for similar properties and coming up with high, low, and in-between values. The second method of valuation (economic model) used a statistical regression model trained on a priori auction conditions (e.g., number of bidders, amount of money ante) and ex-post results (e.g., property values), and here we basically used the model to predict what might be the outcome of a new, unseen auction. The third model (financial metrics) basically took a look at recent market transactions (e.g., outright asset sales) or values imputed by the stock market value of wireless-heavy companies (e.g., by taking enterprise value and normalizing by spectrum holding amount).
Triangulation  

When one plots these three different valuation methods on the same chart, it becomes possible to "triangulate" and see what a competitive values for the wireless properties might be. We basically added two horizontal lines to depict the expected minimum amount of money to pay to be in the game and also the maximum amount of money that should be spent (e.g., based on balance sheet of company and financial capacity).

Update 7/30/09: Been made aware of another posting on the net regarding triangulation and the football field method. See here.

Thoughts on Living in a Company Filing for Chapter 11 Creditor Protection

Disclosure: In early March, members of my team and I will most likely be casualties of the economic downturn and inferred strategic changes by our employer, Nortel. This post reflects my perspectives only and not necessarily those of my employer and colleagues.

As background, the past few weeks have been quite tumultuous at Nortel. After many years of work in trying to turnaround and restructure the company, Nortel filed for creditor protection on January 14, 2009 (under the Chapter 11 code for the U.S. region). For those folks that will continue with the company, turnaround work is not yet done. Although I've worked in a number of environments, prior to this experience I have never lived *within* a company that has filed under the Chapter 11 code. I write this post simply to share some thoughts on both social media situations and management styles I've seen in this environment. In no particular order:

  1. Companies need to be aware of blog posts by directly involved parties. Here is a blog posting that chronicles communication of the ex-Nortel employees with the CEO, Board, officers, and the Monitor. The content of the posting is written professionally, and it seems to both chronicle a sequence of events and communications that indicate a number of "disconnects" in the communication process between employees and CEO (primary target it seems). Given the electronic environment that is a regular part of our lives, managers and workers need to know that histories can be traced more than ever before. I, for one, never saw this thing kind of thing ten years ago.
  2. Third party blog sites should also be monitored. For example, blogs such as All About Nortel cover the happenings in the industry with specific focus on Nortel. Whether one loves the AAN site or not, I have found that employees to look to these sites both for information and as an outlet. People discover things that they did not know (of course many things need to be verified). For example, in one of the comments sections of a recent All About Nortel post, I saw a disturbing comment by a potential distributor and customer of Nortel. I forwarded that information to a regional manager I knew - soon the blog post had circulated to a VP level for escalation and verification.
  3. Managers should treat their employees like adults where possible. Sounds like a basic one, but as an example, my manager gave me (and my team) straight talk and opinions during the process (outcomes which are still unfolding). Even when things weren't set in stone and when potential results were ugly, he managed to be up-front. On the other hand, in another situation at Nortel I did have a manager in the chain who (from my vantage point) chose to gather information to make himself look good while "rolling people under the bus" without having an adult conversation with the affected parties first. Little did this manager know that people were willing to be rolled under the bus for the cause but instead felt betrayed when the adult conversation never occurred and they were simply rolled over.

Although I didn't really address anything about the issues related to creditors, suppliers, and partners, from the above, my largest takeaways would be that fairness, transparency, and communications are critical things to balance in a company under duress. 

Update 2/11/09: As sample exhibits, I also wanted to point out some user-generated video on the Internet. Here is a YouTube video (apparently posted post-Chapter 11 filing) covering a pep rally as part of the "I Believe" grassroots campaign within Nortel. To contrast this is a more cynical YouTube parody as related to the blogpost/letter I cited above in point #1.

Update 2/15/09: CEO provides a YouTube update to the "public".

Update (6/21/09): The end of Nortel is near (post).

Update (8/10/09): CEO of Nortel (Mike Zafirovski) to step down. Another era has ended. Note the slideshow provides an historical view of a great Canadian company (more than 100 years old) that has come to an end.

Some Additional Links and Resources on Management Consulting

Dr. Robert Lahm, Jr. (Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship with Western Carolina University) looks like he may have organized some links and resources on consulting here. There are a number of blogs listed along the right hand side of his web page, a number of which I have never covered on this blog before.

Additionally, about midway down the page there are some links on "Consulting 'How To'" and "Starting a Consulting Business". In the "How To" section, Dr. Lahm not only references a popular post of mine on client facilitation skills but also provides a presentation on "Consulting Basics (Class 2 Slides)" (note PPT). That Powerpoint presentation sheds even more light the importance of soft stuff in an engagement. It also provide some concrete advice on the cadence of a (desirable) consulting engagement.

Financial Times ComMetrics Global 500 Blog Index

For what it's worth (FWIW) – I just ran across this Blog Index (Alpha). Not sure when this was introduced (perhaps vintage 2008?). I don't fully understand the scope and rankings yet, but I find the discovery interesting given my time away from actively being involved in the corporate blogging space. Notes to self: one consulting firm (Accenture) on the list at #18 of 48, heavy tech in top 10, and mixed industries in top 30.

Update (2/7/09): Dr. Urs (CTO associated with the technology) contacted me to inform me that the tool is still in Alpha phase. More info on how the tool works can be found here. Registration and accounts can be obtained here. The is also a Twitter stream covering tool improvements, etc.