Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Emma does someone and I created a course
on Skillshare tightened, a consultant's guide to factor. This mini series, we'll
start with engaging with clients who the prerequisites,
then documentation. That's important
and key questions. We want to building a strategy than
meeting with the team. The importance and tips, then presenting the work. We'll finish it off
with steps towards clients engagements would
visit strategies and updates. By the end of the class, you learned to ensure
effective consulting by addressing the needs of
the clients and business. Articulate the apps and the tops with time here we're
availability and support. You'd be able to
outline the fear of the business gifts
and return with a quicker and more transparent
process. I saw myself. I have seven years experience in insurance and consulting. I've worked for seven years and the oil and gas industry
and currently and finance. I have successfully vaccinated the launch of two businesses and the beauty and cosmetics
industry and food and beverage. I've worked on the
discovery process all the way through operations
and implementation. I hope you find this class
of added value to you. And I hope you enjoy this
mini-series all the best. Thank you.
2. Connecting with a Client: The client recently contact you. Well, that's a good thing. You're likely recognize your
skills and expertise and believe your services would be an asset to the growth
and development. Working with the
business isn't easy. It can be pretty challenging, but you can ensure a
successful experience with the right strategy. Hello, I'm hemorrhage. If someone, then
this mini series, I'll talk you through a fresh
perspective AT consultant. Getting Started might sound complex and even challenging
when you're new consultants. Well, it is always the most challenging
parts of doing anything. Things can get chaotic and overwhelming when you find
it builds the client, and take on new projects. Making sure to have
an explicit formula for how to take
on new clients is critical to ensuring success for your consultancy and clients. The next video, we'll
talk about one of the fundamental aspects of creating your own
consulting business, connecting with the client, and analyzing their business. When taking on a new
client, initially, getting to know
their business on a deeper level, as essential. As a consultant, your
role is to provide clients services they
cannot do themselves, which is probably why they've contacted you during the
client analysis stage, you take the time to connect
with your client personally, we always recommend presenting yourself as an extension
of their business. This way, you can provide
them with tailored support at personalized
experience that meets their needs and
exceeds expectations, your goal is to handle their
pain points so they can focus on what is essential for them running their business. When engaging with clients, you need to be able to put
together a range of services, solutions, and
support systems to ensure that you're targeting and satisfying their every need. With that in mind, the nature of consulting revolves around
the spinning, changing, and ever evolving
set of requirements that you'll likely
need to embrace throughout the
lifespan of a project. Even if your role
as clearly defined, when the work begins
with the client, it will tend to change
and fluctuate over time. This by design, you
want to be responsive to the client's needs during the development
of a project. And certainly don't want to
come across as too rigid. When a client asks
for something, they will count on you
to deliver until we deliver our first one
page, creative brief. A creative brief is a
straightforward document aligned with the project's objectives and the goals the
company aims to achieve. This document outlines
the strategy that the company needs to follow
to get the task done. A brief gives a complete
version of the brand. The project the
company is working on. This brief includes
goals, purpose, target audience, tasks, and
other essential information. Prerequisites. They are the must-haves you must bring to the table when
engaging with clients. They will offer revolve
around simply getting to know what your
client has in mind. Listen to their works
here, their ideas, and try to organize
and streamline this information for
them in a digestible, clearly articulated,
and actionable way. In other words, get the insights that you can act upon to
bring the right solution. So start the project
by ensuring that you and your client
are on the same page. Now, we start the
discovery process, which is fun because it involves a lot of
client interaction. Here, you'll have
the opportunity to brainstorm with clients, bounce off ideas
with one another, and share prior projects that worked for
previous clients. We always recommend that we set the collaborative
process and the right direction
from the outside that transfer ideas to design. Moving along a set
of sequential steps. Here, your client actually understand what you're
bringing to the table. And in the same breath,
you had the opportunity to focus on what the client
is ultimately looking for. No project is successful
after just one try. So don't try to be
perfect and instead, focus on the task and
simply try to land on a good starting point
that you can offer. You can begin a
client analysis with a thoughtful information
collection process that allows you to build
a company profile, should include a list of critical details
about the client. This information will
enable you to get to know their business better
on a fundamental level. While also giving you insights, you need to further tailor their experience
working with you. Once you've determined
your clients processes, operations and pain points, it'll be time to get to
the root. As a consultant. Here, you'll begin to develop the framework for
situating needed services. You'd have to build a team. Or if you choose to do it alone, you don't want to fill
your clients team and on what you plan to do. Begin with the problem
that needs to be solved, and then show them
the plan to solve it. Proved to them what
it is that makes your services unique when
compared to other consultants. This is your chance to shine and showcase what you're capable of. Let's take a look at the
next stage of the process.
3. Documenting the process: Documentation, important
and key questions. Now we'll start with
documenting the process. Process flow gives an overview
of the entire workflow. It involves all the tasks, objectives, goals,
and deadlines. All the possible outcomes of
any problems or risks are mentioned in this flow
so that everyone is prepared for any
issue in the future. This flow also
shows relationships between different
components of a process. The first component is the
objective and strategy. What is the entity, department, function, business,
trying to do? The goals of the
entire process should be defined and clear
to the entire team. What strategy is devised
by the company to accomplish as long term
goals and objectives. These strategies can
be used to develop or market company
products or services. The second component is process
understanding workshops. Process owners are
the individuals who are directly responsible
for generating, sustaining, and improving
a specific process. There are accountable for
the outcomes of the process. Two workshops with
them can help improve efficiency and
reflect improvement in the process. They
are carrying out. Some benefits of workshops
are listed below. There are innovative ways of
thinking through workshops, inspiration to work effectively. People can learn different
skills from each other. There are more opportunities for expanding the
professional network. Third component, or my favorite, which are the risks
and internal controls. What are the potential
events that could affect the achievement
of the objectives? What could go wrong? Predict all sorts of risks
and events that can take place and be prepared to counter
them during the process. What are the actions
that department should take to
mitigate the risks? After analyzing the risks that
he might be encountering, your company should find
solutions that can resolve potential risks as
internal controls, which can be
automated or manual, and they're monitored actively, periodically or continuously
independent risk. The force component, alignment and monitoring
and reporting. A process requires a
concrete structure, which means you must maintain an alignment between
the objectives, risks, and controls
in the process. Preparing a process
flow for the projects and operations of the company
can cut a lot of hassle. You have an entire
flow that must be followed for all the processes, which also save, saves time and resources and can help you
concentrate and stay focused. Let's take a deeper look into the importance of process flow, improved quality
of your products and services is
imperative because employees with the best skill set will be assigned
a specific task. They can flourish, which gives enough time to think and
choose the perfect strategy and workforce helps to provide
better customer service. Customers are always right and they are essentially
with the process flow. You can efficiently respond to customers and maintain
your brand image. Risk analysis is
done effectively, which can help the company avoid significant damages or losses. This allows the management
to be prepared from the start and keeps the
process smooth and steady. Process flow, clearly
determined unnecessary steps and hindrances that
can be avoided. And this way, the
entire process can be optimized to improve
the process. Next, we have some key
questions to ask your clients. We start off with what are the most critical
business issues you can anticipate over
the next two years. How can our department or our
partner achieve that plan? What has previously worked well between our departments
that we should continue? What should we do differently
to be more effective? How can we communicate to
ensure optimal collaboration? What politics today
understand as my unit tries to
accomplish these goals. Who else do I think
I should talk with? Can you connect me with them? Once you generate practical, practical and insightful communications regarding
these questions, you can move on to
the next stage. So you've got answers
to those key questions, and now it's time to determine
where you come into play. As a consultant, your client has hired you to help
them complete a project, accomplish a task,
or achieve a goal. With that said, this
is your time to show them just what
you have to offer. See below for your role
in this experience and insight into how
you'll be evaluated. How do you prefer to give and receive feedback and
be kept informed? What are your most important
goals for the year and how do they fit into the company's
strategic objectives? What are the two to three
most critical accomplishments I need to achieve within a year? And how will they be measured? What should I accomplish
in the next six months? And what specific ways
can I help you succeed? One way to understand
the world better is to define your consultancy
identity clearly, you'll want to consider
your passions, skills, knowledge,
and experience. This will help you in developing
your core competencies, which you can then use to define your role clearly to
potential clients. To develop core competencies, accompany must take
these actions. Isolate it's essentially
liabilities, and turn them into
organization-wide strength. Compare yourself with
other companies with the same skills
to ensure that it is developing unique
capabilities. Develop an understanding
of what capabilities its customers truly
value and invest accordingly to develop a
sustained value strengths, create an organizational
roadmap that sets goals for
competence, building, pursue alliances, acquisitions, and
licensing arrangements to further build the
organization's strengths and core areas. Encourage communication
and involvement and core capability development
across the organization. Preserve core strengths even as management expanse and
redefines the business. Outsource or divest non-core
capabilities to free up resources that can be used
to deepen core capabilities. Businesses require a good plan, a solid strategy, and
thorough market research. You should work with
your client to help them identify the right
target audience, their products,
services, or solutions. Additionally, we can adjust all functions at an early stage. Visited concept, product development,
marketing and sales, scaling up, partnerships
and distribution, and structure and
organizational design. Your plan has to
provide a method for measuring progress and
extreme uncertainty. It can give entrepreneurs
clear guidance on how to make the many trade-offs
decisions they face. Whether and when to invest
in the process, formulating, planning, and creating
infrastructure, when to get it done. When the partner, one to respond
to with feedback went to stick with vision and how and when to invest and
scaling their business. The early days of primary concerns deal
with the following. What should we
build it for whom? What market could we
enter and dominate? How could we make
durable value that would not be subject to erosion
by the competition?
4. Developing a Strategy: Moving on to
developing a strategy. When it comes to
developing a strategy, we start with where we are. Discuss where we are
in the partnership. Examine how you got there, what has gone well,
and what hasn't. Where do we want to go? What to drive the most value
of there were no obstacles. What is realistic and
what is aspirational. We need to prioritize
and come back. What changes have to be made? We'll compare the current
state with the desired state. What the to stop
or started doing. What would it take to
get the results we want? How could such changes? We made a tone to
happen overnight. We can do things that will
deliver faster results. What we will need to persuade others to adopt the strategy? How will we get their support intellectually and emotionally? How do you measure progress? Demonstrate progress. That brings the plants. Like. Furthermore, developing a
strategy can still be tricky. And to make it less complicated, you need to measure
the business case against something comparable. After this, identify mistakes,
problems, and risks. This is a critical stage because such issues can sabotage
your strategy quickly. After identifying them,
find solutions and propose intelligence solutions that are doable and protect the company. The last thing you need
to do is educate yourself more of whatever awareness
of our business, businesses ends and outs and how the company works is vital. And this helps you better
understand the market and process all the
operations smoothly. There are specific importance
of developing a strategy. It is hard for all businesses together tried at the start, and especially for
new companies. Every organization
has weaknesses that can be hard to overcome. The perfect strategy can help to overcome all the issues
that the company is. First, let's talk about
the importance of developing the plan and strategy works as a
guide for management. It highlights how
the business is performing internally and
how competitive it is. With a trifles, it
gives an idea about the internal and external
performance of the company. The strategy also
gives the business are more transparent view
and a vision to follow. When a plan is developed, the world becomes
achievable and untethered, and becomes a sense, it becomes a sense of direction for everyone. The company. Strategy works best
to predict and identify patterns and
trends in the future. Systems can examine
changes in the market and give a clearer view
of future opportunities. Future market predictions can help you strategize accordingly. Lastly, developing
a strategy provides a competitive advantage
over competitors. The company, the company outperform its
competitors and has a better understanding of itself and where they
are going in the future. Now that you've got a
wealth of information about working with a new client,
taking on a project, and developing a
strategy for a company, it's time to move
into another chapter. Every consultant can benefit from working within
a team setting. From time to time. It may take on a
new client that has asked more than any
clients previously. This is a good
thing in this case is it allows you to serve
as a liaison between other consultants who maintain their fast expert expertise in their fields and
specialization. When you can effectively
build the team, bring them all together, and reinforce a comprehensive holistic solution
for the client. You present yourself
as a one-stop shop. And that's all that any
client could ever ask. For. The next chapter,
Let's talk more about team-building and how it relates to your process.
As a consultant.
5. Team Meetings: This stage is the importance and types of meeting
with your team. When it comes time to expand your consultancy and
bring in a team of professionals to help ensure that you have the
proper knowledge, skill, and expertise to meet
the demands of the clients. You need to know how to
manage that relationship. We've talked about a
few best practices to help you build a well
functioning team with the necessary level of expertise to provide added value
for your clients, will begin with some
essential team-building tips and strategies that you can use to foster the
right company culture and within your consultants. Let's start with teammates. First off, how often
should you have them? How long should they be? How many people
should we include? And of course, what should we talk about
during these meetings? Let's take a look at the
importance of Timmy. Timmy things are
significant regularly and these can hold great importance
of done effectively. Some reasons why team meetings keep such great importance. Our employee engagement. Employees have a
platform to engage with all the company members and they feel that their
opinion is valuable. These meetings
motivate employees and have them value their job. As employee
engagement increases, the company's overall
productivity increases and benefits the business. Here's a platform for innovation
and creative thinking. These meetings are platform for the business members to think critically and develop
innovative ideas. The feeling of being
heard motivates them to showcase
their creative side. Teamwork. Meetings can turn a good idea into a master plan. When more people brainstorm
solutions for any issue, it is easier to develop
a quick solution. More team members meet up and information to solve
a company's problem. And team members can
better understand the issue and provide more
visibility to the managers. Entire decision-making
processes made quick and effective
through these meetings, personal interaction builds
up stronger relationships. Good thing has strong
communication. And these meetings from
what good communication? These meetings, certain bonds
between their employees, which further increase
productivity and efficiency. When these meetings
become routine, the culture of these meetings
become encouraging and includes employees feel they are being heard for their
ideas and their insight. Essentially, no one is judged or treated differently
because of any reason. Creating an encouraging
environment for everyone to share their ideas and thoughts in
these meetings is necessary. Meetings are a quick way
of feedback because they are face to face or video for. This sort of open communication allows the company's employees
to grow professionally. These meetings
make the employees learn how to improve
themselves professionally. They can together analyze
the ongoing situation and work on the companies
and employees future. Any business owner
or manager can conduct team meetings
and their company. But not all of those
can be effective. Team meetings must
be adequate to gain maximum out of them and further increase the
abundances productivity. Here are some tips to make your teammates team meetings effective and
further determined. The meeting attendees.
Meeting attendees should be decided according to the purpose of the meeting. The employees who
are not related to the operations
department should not be invited to an operations
department meeting before deciding
on the attendees. Asked herself who will
provide better insights on a particular issue and who can
benefit from this meeting. Have a clear agenda
before deciding any. You must set the meeting's
purpose and agenda. Strip this down the things
you want to discuss, the issues you want to
resolve, and then discussion, ortholog down the predicted
outcomes and of the meeting, which helps you to move the meetings and the
right direction. When it came up
professional that surrounds it and stuff
not to stay on one topic. With so many ideas you
can quickly go off track. As a business owner
or a consultant, it is your job to stick to the agenda and purpose
of the business, keep the members
engaged in the plan and find answers to the
questions and the schedule. Meetings beforehand and
give the conference attendees enough time to prepare and schedule and
other business matters. Of course, schedule your
appointment so that everything on the agenda is discussed and given its
fair share of time, make sure nothing
is missed and drop your meetings up and
they're given time. The session is over before time. Don't drag it out and ended. As a team. It's your
responsibility to give fair and equal chances to everyone to speak and
give their insight. And then meeting your
team members and put can provide more ideas
and options to ponder upon. There is no harm in
getting big ideas. So let them use this platform and make these meetings effect. Last, note down, all the important things
discussed in the meeting. These action items should be
documented by someone and then implemented and acted
upon, which are essential. As these are the members inputs
which need the follow-up. They can be forgotten or misplaced if not
appropriately, document. So where do you begin? Once you've got something
to show your client? How do you get started? How do you show it to them? Well, there are a variety of ways in which you can
present the word. And the next stage will look at presenting the
work to the client
6. Keys to working with a Client: This video will talk about the key to
working with a client. Businesses require a good plan, a solid strategy, and
thorough market research. You should work with your
client to have them identify the right target audience for their products,
services, or solutions. Additionally, you should address all functions at an early stage. Vision, concept,
product development, marketing and sales, scaling up, partnerships and
distribution, structure, organizational design,
and many other things. Your plan has to
provide a method for measuring progress and
extreme uncertainty. It can give entrepreneurs
clear guidance on how to make them mini
trade-off decisions they face, whether and when to invest in the process
formulation, planning, creating infrastructure, and when to actually
get it done, went to partner, and when and
how to respond to feedback. The early days, our primary concerns did with the following, what should we
build and for whom? What market could we
enter and dominate? How could we make
durable value that would not be subject to
erosion by competition? Here, where we start
developing our strategy. At first we look
at where we are, discuss where we are
in the partnerships, examine how we
actually got there, what has gone well,
and what has. Second, where do you want to go? What to derive the most value
if there were no obstacles, what is realistic versus
what is aspirational, we need to prioritize
and then come back. Third, what changes
have to be read? So we'll be comparing
the current state with the desired state and what's stopping you from
achieving that state? And what do you need
to start doing? And what do you to
stop to it to get the results we want forth? How should we set changes be
made a toe tap on overnight. We can do things that will
deliver faster results, but we will need to persuade
others to adopt strategy. So we need to get their support intellectually and emotionally. Fifth is how to
measure progress. Important thing here is not to get too hung up on measurement. We just should demonstrate the progress that brings
the plants to life. Furthermore, developing a
strategy can be tricky, and to make it less complicated, you need to measure
the business case against something comparable. After this, identify the
mistakes, problems, and risks. This is a critical stage because such issues can sabotage
your strategy quickly. After identifying them. To find the solutions
and propose intelligence doable solutions
to protect company. The last thing you need
to do is educate more. Educate yourself more
about everything. Awareness of a
business's ends and outs and how the
company works is vital. And this helps you
better understand the market and process all
the operations smoothly. It is important to
actually start developing a strategy that is hard for all businesses to get
it right at the start. And especially for startups, every organization
has weaknesses that can be hard to overcome. What a perfect strategy can help to overcome
all these issues. Let us talk about the
importance of developing. The strategy works
as a guide for management that highlights
how the business is performing internally and how competitive it
is with its rivals. It gives you an idea about the internal and external
performance of the company. The strategy also
gives the business are more transparent view
and a vision to follow. When a plan is developed, the goals become achievable
and intelligence, and it becomes a sense of direction for everyone
in the company. It works best to predict and identify patterns and
trends in the future. The systems that you will be setting can examine changes in the market and give
a clearer view of future opportunities. Future market predictions can help you strategize accordingly. Lastly, it provides a
competitive advantage over competitors of the company. The company outperform
its competitors and has a better understanding of itself and where they are
going in the future. Now that you've got a
wealth of information about working on the strategy, taking on the project, and developing the strategy
right from the start, it's time to move
into a new chapter
7. Closing thoughts: Now that you've got a wealth of information about working
with a new client, taking on a new project
and developing a strategy. It's time to move into
another new chapter. Every new consultant can benefit from working within
a team setting. From time-to-time, you may
take on a new client that has asked more than any
fantastic previously. This is a good
thing. These cases, it allows you to serve as a liaison between
other consultants who may tailor vast expertise in the fields of specialization. When you can effectively
build the team, bringing them all together, can bring forth a
comprehensive and holistic solution
for the client. You present yourself
as a one-stop shop, and that's all the clients
could ever ask for it. So where do you begin once you've got
something to show your plan, how do you get started? How do you show it to them? Well, there are a variety of ways in which you can
present the work. For instance, you can
do it in-person and schedule a teleconference
if the client isn't local. Alternatively, you
can simply mail them a finished product or prototype
and communicate remotely. But no matter what, always remember that
presenting the work is better than submitting
the final copy. This is where you'll be
updating your client. Updates are critical.
Don't forget when you're working
for a client, you should keep them updated on your progress because they went out of their
way to hire you. They're still likely
interested in having at least somewhat of a saying in
the projects progression. Always be sure that you're keeping them updated
on your progress. They may want to change
things along the way and even have a new idea they'd
like to build off up. With that said, here are
a few tips to remember. Maintaining regular
communication with your clients is
essential to build the client's trust that their
work is your top priority. Apart from building trust, communicating with the
client allows you to avoid minor issues and reservations of clients at any
step of the project. This will lead to clear
misunderstandings and prevent simple problems into sometimes problems may happen
if you are not adequately providing
clients with the priorities and
clients will not take action on delivering
the things you need. On time. You can quickly address these issues
if you regularly contact land plants to realize where the actual
problem occurred, keeping the client accountable
will let you resolve these issues understanding
based on the common goals. Sometimes clients will have reservations about
your performance. Updating the clients with
the key performances and metrics holds them
and you accountable. When you relate the results
with the information provided to effective
consultants have several critical
strategies up their sleeves that they can use when working
with clients. Often these strategies
revolve around critical management and
business metrics that help you provide clients with critical insight on
performance, cause, and effect. Remember, you need to
make yourself stand out from other
consultants in the field. You can do this by leveraging a few bits and
competitive advantages that you can embrace
from the moment you start marketing yourself
as a consultant. Let's take a look at some
quick facts on your abilities, on how we can showcase
your abilities. Starting with the problem. What problem are you
trying to solve? Is it a problem? Look deeply into the
issue that you're facing, as it might be
sometimes something that can be sorted out. Advantages, what
makes your solutions, especially how are you
different from others? We need to analyze how we have an advantage over
others and what Edge solution describe how you're planning to
solve the problem, give a clear view
of your solution. And this will help
everyone understand how to implement the work and the solutions that you're
providing products. How does your product or service
work? Show some example. Give a demonstration of your
product or service so that everyone can understand
what it is like. Traction. Traction means having
a measurable set of customers that serve to
prove the potential. This is important because
if traction is lacking, it will negatively
affect and impact your customer base
and dry up for sale. Market? No. Or at least attempt to predict the size of
your target market. Know your market and its
analysis, It's good. This helps you efficiently market your product,
competition. What are the alternatives, solutions to the problem
you are trying to solve? Look at the capacitors, study them, and analyze
their products. This helps to define your
unique selling point and your marketing technique.
The business model. How are you planning
to make money? Short schedule for when you
expect revenue to ****? Business model highlights a company's plan
for making profits. This can help you
predict cash inflow. Investing. What does the plant, but what kind of money
are you looking for? The resources required
for your product are essential and you shouldn't have all the details about them. Forecast. This helps to have enough
capital to finish your project. You leave your contact details and let people know how
to reach you quickly. Don't make people wait or
struggled to contact you. Thank you for watching and
I wish you all good luck.
Mohamed AlSaman
