Intentional Consultant: How to grow a sustainable consulting practice

Do you want to be an independent management consultant? Or are you already consulting part time and want to figure out how to grow your business into a full time practice? Then this is the book for you. The Intentional Consultant details the personal story of the author who created a sustainable independent management consulting practice of over 20 years. The author reveals her secrets to success and useful steps to consider for those who intentionally plan to have a career as a business consultant and entrepreneur. Why do you want to be a consultant? What is it that you will be consulting about? Who will be your clients? Why will they come to you? Why will they pay you? How can you quit your day job to be able to work as a consultant full-time? What do you need to do to be able to build the consulting practice to sustain it over time? These are some of the core questions that this book will address. Many people dream about owning a business and what some people don't realize is that all businesses start small. And unlike many other businesses that sell products, consultants sell themselves. If you have the dream that you can be a business consultant, that you have skills that can be turned into services of some sort that customers will be willing to buy, then you can become a business consultant. You can become an intentional consultant. An intentional consultant is a person who plans their consulting practice and builds it for sustainability. It is not happenstance. It is not accidental. It is not something that you do until you find another job. It is what you choose to do to develop a sustainable livelihood for yourself. And it can happen, but you must follow a process and be committed to it and probably work harder than most people, especially early on. So to change your dream into reality you must follow the process. Some of the process steps include preparing yourself to be consultant-things like gathering experiences, developing your initial business plan and building your credentials. The rest of the steps to building a sustainable consulting business are shared in detail in this book.