How To Become A Consultant – Important Tips
Planning to open a consultancy and be your own boss? If you are serious about being a consultant you would need to know how to become a consultant and before that you need to be sure that you know what a consultant does. Many people think that being a consultant is an easy task as you would be required to give only advice’s to people and you get paid for that. Well the story is not that simple in reality and if you are being a consultant you just cannot slide away after giving advice’s, you would need to guide your clients end to end to achieve their goals. So let us understand what all you would require to become a consultant, preferably a good one.
Identify the field of work
As a consultant you would be considered as a subject matter expert for your field and it would be expected that you would know everything in and out about the field. So when you want to know how to become a consultant you need to be certain about the field that you will be consulting people on. Ideally, the field that attracts you the most personally should be the field of your work as you would have thorough knowledge about it. You cannot be a consultant of cars if you like working with computers.
Get yourself licensed if required
While some minor consulting as in gardening consulting does not require any formal training or certification, most of the other consulting businesses require a formal certification and licenses from the government. You should not only be focusing on gathering information on how to become a consultant but also should know where to get these licenses from.
Build a network, preferably a strong one
You would be doing the work of consulting only when you have clients and you will have clients only if you have a good network through which your clients would come to know about you. The moment you have decided that you would be making a career as a consultant and you want to know how to become a consultant, you should start building a network through your friends and acquaintances. Once you have started and do a few successful consultations, your reputation would automatically make your network strong, but till that time you have to look after it to make it as large a network as possible.
Decide on your payment amounts and billing methods
Although this does not have a direct relation with how to become a consultant but then deciding on your payments is something that you should be doing at the very beginning of your career. Do not expect very high fees in the initial years, as you would need to earn that reputation first before you charge your clients with heavy bills.
Talking of bills, it is also important that you decide on the billing method that whether you would want an hour based payment or a project based payment. It would be wise to charge your clients based on a project overall in the initial years and then when you have made your name in the field of consultancy, that is the time you may think of charging hourly.