Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Lewis Carroll, spoken by The Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass,

first published in 1872, Chancellor Press, London, 1982, Ch. 2.

Before you begin to invest too much time and effort, never mind money, in preparing to start your own IT consulting business you need to make a realistic assessment of whether you are likely to be successful in this field and if you are likely to enjoy this new way of making a living.

2.1 Must haves for the IT consultant

Having your own IT consulting business is challenging and once you have set it up it is very demanding to keep it going. You will need a whole range of different types of skills, not to mention the fact that you will have to be an entrepreneur. The attributes of entrepreneurship are spelt out in Chapter 5 and it is really quite important that you can honestly say that you have a substantial entrepreneurial streak in your personality. But in addition to all of this there are four other crucial characteristics that you need to possess and if you don't have them you may as well not begin.

• Optimism

• Flexibility

• Sense of adventure and bags of energy

•Ability to persevere

•Realistic view of your business potential

These are sine qua nons to being a consultant and if you don't have them don't do it. Do something else for a living. You have to be an incurable optimist. It is absolutely essential that you always see the bright side of any situation. You have to be very flexible. You need to be flexible in a number of different ways, which I will explain later.

OPTIMISM

2.1.1 Optimism

One of the best ways of illustrating the notion of being an incurable optimist is to recall the old story about the twins and the horse manure. The parents of twins decided to give them a surprise Christmas present of real live ponies. Clearly they could not place the ponies in the children's Christmas stockings or at the end of their beds. Thus the parents decided (for some totally unaccountable reason or reasons) to wrap up a small amount of the ponies’ droppings in Christmas paper and put it in the children's Christmas stockings. The first child, on finding a parcel of pony droppings in her Christmas stocking, shouted out: ‘Goodness gracious me! Who the devil put horse manure in my stocking? When I find out I will murder them!’ The second child, on finding the parcel of pony droppings, screamed with delight, ‘Horse manure – I must be getting a pony for Christmas!’ In the IT consulting context being an incurable optimist means always seeing a pony even when there is nothing more than horse manure lying around. Another way of looking at this is that to be a consultant it is always very useful to be able to see a bottle as being half full rather than half empty.

2.1.2 Flexibility

The question of flexibility is a bit more complex. A successful IT consultant will be flexible in several different ways. In the first place there is the type of IT service you plan to offer. It may well be that you are looking for IT strategy assignments and that you are not doing well at finding these. However, as you are looking for this type of work you could encounter organizations needing project management consultancy. Now if you are a reasonably able consultant with a varied background you may well be able to take project management assignments and perform these types of assignments perfectly adequately. This is really a question of your flexibility. I have known IT consultants who have refused to take on work that they were perfectly competent to do because it was not in the field they ideally wanted to be in. Of course the people I have known who have taken this attitude have not succeeded as IT consultants and within 12 or 18 months they were back on the labour market looking for a job.

The next way in which it is important to be flexible is in terms of the way you price your work. It is sometimes quite difficult to get the daily fee rate you are looking for. In such cases you need to be a flexible wheeler-dealer. This means that you have business nous. In practical terms it means that you need to be creative about how you present proposals to clients and how you obtain your rewards. As well as the fee being too low, sometimes you may have to do more than you would like for a particular fee and you need to be able to construct a value proposition for your client and yourself so that you both are on the right side of the equation. There are no simple guidelines here. If you are to succeed as an IT consultant you will develop a nose for what you can charge. When you are confident enough you might even be able to say when asked what your fee is that ‘Like all consultants you are looking for as big a fee as you can get and that like all successful consultants you will take the fee which the client is comfortable in paying.’

REXIBILITY

2.1.3 Sense of adventure and bags of energy

The third issue that needs to be faced right upfront is that IT consulting is a relatively insecure way of making a living. There are many IT consultants, all of whom are bidding competitively for assignments. There is of course quite a lot of work around but nonetheless there are plenty of disappointed IT consultants. Many firms employ IT consultants because they do not want to commit to the long-term employment of staff. Therefore IT consulting contracts tend to be relatively short and thus you have to keep your eye out perpetually for new work. The effect of this is that IT consultants often do not know where their next month's revenue will actually come from. This suits some people who are entrepreneurs or risk takers and who like the adventure of continually meeting new people and finding and signing up clients. And of course the more you do this the better at it you will become. But others can find this insecurity devastating and cannot function properly in such an environment. IT consulting is just not suitable for people like this and if you feel that you fall into this category, you should stop now and find another way of making a living.

2.1.4 Ability to persevere

An ability to persevere is really all important. Very few start-up IT consultants fall on their feet from day one. It can take months before the business opportunities begin to arrive. This start-up period can be quite frustrating and you need to be able to retain your sense of confidence and also your sense of humour. It is very important not to give up too soon.

2.1.5 Realistic view of your business potential

REALISTIC VIEW OF YOUR BUSINESS POTENTIAL

Although optimism is the first requirement discussed here and it is perhaps the most important it really does have to be tempered with realism. There is no point in simply imagining that you will be able to sell £100,000 or £150,000 worth of consultancy and be able to grow your business at 20% or 50% or 100% unless you have real evidence to back up such plans. Putting some numbers down on a spreadsheet and doing what-ifs on your prospective IT consulting business without grounding them in real contract is likely to lead to disappointment.

Besides these four crucial issues, before you jump you also need to consider the following.

Successful IT consultancy is as much to do with being able to sell and then to get on with your clients as being technically capable. If all your strengths are to do with your knowledge of the technology then maybe you should reconsider IT consultancy as a career.¹ Another issue is that you need to be a self-starter. By this I mean that you need to be self-motivated. You need to be able to drive yourself onwards even when you don't really feel like it. There is also the question of your ability to communicate. To succeed as an IT consultant you need to be a competent communicator, both verbally and of course in writing. And as well as communicating there is the question of being able to keep confidences, which is perhaps just as important. This question of keeping confidences is of course closely aligned to one's values, especially as they relate to one's sense of integrity. Whatever your skill base in starting out as an IT consultant you will find that you will need to continually learn and relearn. Therefore for success as an IT consultant you need to be fully committed to life-long learning. There is no way of getting out of this – as long as you are a consultant, learning has to be one of your most urgent responsibilities to yourself.

One final point, sometimes people say that they want to get into IT consultancy because they are tired of working for a boss. They say that they want the independence of being self-employed. Such people often imagine that as a self-employed IT consultant they will be able to start work at 10 am and finish at 4 pm. When the mood takes them they will indulge in long leisurely lunches. They will be able to take the kids to school and pick them up, take long weekends off whenever the fancy takes them. They will have six or eight weeks’ vacation every year. These types of individuals have somehow acquired the notion that it isn't hard work to be self-employed. It is quite puzzling as to precisely where this type of thinking comes from. It is perhaps some misunderstood interpretation of portrayals from nineteenth century literature.

The reality of being self-employed, especially in the field of IT consultancy, is that it is very, very hard work. Instead of having one boss, each and every one of your clients will in effect be your boss. In addition if you have had to take a loan your bank manager may also hassle you. To make a success of an IT consultancy career you will have to be even more dedicated than you were in your full-time job. You may have to work 50, 60 or even 80 hour weeks. You may have to travel extensively. A client can call you out in the middle of the night – and it's hard to say no. As a consultant once you have said no to a client you can expect not to be asked a second time. IT consulting can be very rewarding indeed, but it is seldom to do with the fact that you are likely to have more leisure time, especially in the short term. You need bags of energy and a will to work. When you are a well-established consultant and have more work than you can cope with then you can think about balancing your work and your leisure.

YOU MAY HAVE TO WORK 50, 60 OR EVEN 80 HOUR WEEKS

The objective of this chapter is not to put you off or to discourage you in any way from starting up your own IT consulting business. There are loads of great opportunities out there right now if you want to take up the challenge of finding the work and managing it successfully. The objective of this chapter is rather to ensure that you understand some of the really important personal attributes necessary to be a great success in such an endeavour.

… PHYSICALLY, INTELLECTUALLY AND EMOTIONALLY DEMANDING

IT consultancy is not an easy profession. It is physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding. However, for those who succeed the rewards can be most satisfying. You will see how your efforts help your clients overcome problems; you will observe your clients’ businesses prosper; you can enjoy learning and keeping up or increasing your skill base, and sometimes you can even make quite a lot of money. For the right sorts of people IT consulting is a career choice that they should give very serious consideration.

2.2 Summary and conclusion

It is important to think carefully about whether IT consultancy will suit you. It really does not suit everyone. Talk to other IT consultants whom you meet about their working lives and how they cope with the challenges they face. Find out what they like most about their work as well as what they like least. Do the self-test below and then discuss the results with your friends and family. Take as much advice as you can about your options. But always remember if you try IT consultancy and you don't like it or it doesn't work for you it is always possible to get another job.

2.3 Self-test on the characteristics necessary for IT consulting

There are a number of personal characteristics or attributes that you should have if you are likely to succeed as an IT consultant. You will find here 12 of the more obvious personal attributes. It is not intended to be a definitive list but just a rough guide to stimulate your thinking about whether IT consulting is really for you.

Thus if you feel inclined rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 on the following personal characteristics, where 1 is low and 5 is high:

Figure 2.1 The IT consulting aptitude self-test

Scores and their implications

In general if you scored less than 4 for any of the issues in the IT consulting aptitude self-test you will need to improve. You need to be just excellent in pretty well all these issues if you are going to make it as a successful IT consultant.

If your scores are low on a couple of these attributes but you still want to try being an IT consultant, don't despair. But you will find it helpful to put time and energy into improving the particular attributes.

¹ Delivering benefits to your client organization is what ultimately counts and this can seldom be achieved by just being an outstanding technologist. You obviously have to be completely in command of the technology you are working with but you need a range of other skills as well, as will be explained later in this book.