7 Step Consulting

How to Resign Gracefully

Cash Money Life recently resigned from his job to take a new opportunity. He’s telling us all how to resign gracefully.

A solid resignation letter is the last key to ending your career with a company. You never want to burn a bridge. You never know what the future holds — you may end up working with someone from your current job in the future. Burning a bridge can have a serious negative effect when you try to find that next position.

This all ties into your professional reputation, which I’ll cover in the coming weeks. Your name is everything when it comes to business. You can have all of the skills, but a poor reputation can ruin your career.

Avoid Legal Trouble in California

As we’ve discussed before consulting is great because you get to travel a lot.

Of course when you are traveling from here to there, you may get into some trouble along the way. It obviously isn’t your goal, but it happens. Flew into Los Angeles, rented a car, and had one too many at the airport bar? End up with a DUI in Southern California… could be disastrous to your consulting career.

But there’s help available: Criminal Attorneys in Los Angeles | DUI Defense Lawyers in Southern California

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Consulting Perk: Avoid HR

I have nothing against human resources people or human resources departments. But let’s be completely honest here.

HR Sucks

In some companies, the human resources department seems to have a different mission from the rest of the organization. Instead of furthering the mission of earning a profit, they want to make the hiring process as long and impossible to navigate as possible. Success is judged by how many rolls of red tape we used to keep Mr. New Hire from getting any work done in his first two weeks of being on the job.

Consultants Avoid HR

As a consultant, at least in some cases, you get to avoid human resources. Your contracting company, if you have one, is most likely dealing directly with the manager. Your manager deals with HR. This should make your life a lot easier. If you have a problem, you talk with your manager or your recruiter. No forms to fill out, no calls to return.

It’s not half bad.

Remember to Write When You’re on the Road

Just because you’re on the road in Shangai and your wife and family are back in Kentucky doesn’t mean you can get away with not sending a card on their birthdays.

One of my biggest beefs with birthday cards, or cards in general, is how expensive they are. At $4 a pop, that starts to add up. Think of all the holidays to send cards for: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, anniverseries, and birthdays. At the minimum you’re looking at four cards per year multiplied by how many people you would normally send cards to. That’s $16 or so per person, per year, at the minimum.

That’s a lot of money. Have twenty family members and friends you keep up with? That’s $320 in cards. Ouch.

A new company, CardsDirect aims to relieve some of that money problem from you. With the company, you can order cards in bulk and save up to 50-70% on what you would pay retail for a card. That’s anywhere from $1.75-2.50 per card in savings! Practically a whole new card! If you used the above amounts of 20 friends, you would only spend around $160 for the same number of cards.

Not only that, but you can add your company logo to it if you are going to send it to a former executive you used to work for. Hey, birthday’s are good for branding, right?

Vista More Secure Than XP, World Shocked

Come on, PC World. Is this cutting edge computer journalism?

The site is reporting that Vista is 37% more secure than XP. Microsoft claims it is 60% more secure, but they are using different data.

This is shocking… how? It’s a new operating system. Of course it’s going to be more secure. It hasn’t been out long enough for those Ukranian youth to develop viruses for it.

The article also mentions that Windows 2000 is more secure than either of them, but they dismissed it because not as many people are using Windows 2000 anymore. Hey — I still use it! Why upgrade if it works?

Next time we’ll talk about what hardware to take on the road as a consultant.

On the road? Don’t pay full price

Just because you are traveling or out on the road all of the time as a consultant doesn’t mean you should pay full price for everything. Even if your client is willing to reimburse you for all of your expenses, why not take the higher ground and try to save everyone a few bucks?

There are a bunch of different ways you could go about this. Fly coach, get an extended stay hotel with a kitchen in it so you don’t eat out as much, or use public transportation instead of a rental car.

Another way to help save money on everything from travel to office supplies to the flowers you send home to your wife while you are away is to use coupons.

“But I’m a consultant. I’m supposed to be big ballin’ it right now.”

I know, I know. The consultant’s life can be full of awesome perks. But again, if you could get promotional codes and discount sales on digital cameras, laptop computers, DVD movies, LCD televisions and video games, why wouldn’t you? Save yourself and your clients money.

Just because you’re on the road doesn’t mean you won’t have Christmas shopping to do this year. And with the price of gas increasing… every dollar counts.

Use coupons, and don’t be ashamed.

Another Consultant Perk: Pick Your Weather

As the post title indicates, there is yet another perk to being a consultant. If you were so inclined, you can pick what climate you want to live and work in during specific times of the year.

In the southern parts of the United States it can get incredibly hot and humid during the summer. As a consultant, pack your bags and land a gig in Wisconsin to avoid the heat.

When winter hits and you want to avoid negative 20 degree temperatures and ten feet of snow on the ground, pack up and find a gig in Texas.

The simple fact is you may have a home base where you own a house or live in an apartment, but you may spend a large portion of your time on the road, living out of an extended stay hotel. Money is always an important consideration, but consider what the temperature is going to be when you get there. Why be miserable if you don’t have to be?

That, or you can just work in San Diego year round. 72 degrees with a slight breeze. Jerks.

Then again in California you have to deal with wildfires, earthquakes, and mud slides… so all is not well.

Bottom line: go someplace new, someplace you will enjoy.

Be Careful with Your Taxes as a Consultant

As a consultant you can get paid in a variety of ways: standard W2 contract (client or staffing company taxes income taxes for you), 1099 (no taxes taken out, you have to take them out on your own), and corporation-to-corporation (you run your own company and your client writes a check to your company, who in turn writes a check to you).

Let’s say you go on eight different engagements throughout the year. Three W2 contracts, four 1099 contracts, and only one corp-to-corp engagement. Your taxes can suddenly become very confusing. You can easily underwithhold your taxes and end up paying huge penalties at the end of the year. Not good. You’re in this industry to make money, not hand it over to the government in penalties.

Additionally, your engagement may not have been in the same state. That can get even more confusing, and you might need state income tax help.

Imagine settling in at home for a break sometime in May or June, after you’ve done your taxes. You get a notice in the mail: you’re going to have some IRS tax audits. Uh-oh. Not good at all. You need IRS tax relief ASAP.

Of course from there you do some research online, find someone that can help you the process, and learn how to avoid the same problem next year.

Be careful with your taxes. No one wants to deal with the tax man.

Recruiters are Humans, Too

It seems that many potential or current consultants forget this simple fact.

Yes, I have a family and a life of my own. I have bills to pay, too.

Yes, I have bad days. Those bad days probably have something to do with someone backing out of a job, leaving a contract early, failing a drug test, or simply calling every thirty minutes begging for a job.

Yes, I want to provide you with the best service possible. I want to find the job that fits you like a custom tailored suit from Hong Kong. I want to remember to call or e-mail you back every single time. My service is my brand for a contractor like you. You having a bad experience does me no good. Really, it doesn’t. I want the client to like you. I want you to get the job even if I despise your personality because then I earn my commission.

However, I am not a robot.

I cannot create jobs in the marketplace for you. If I could, I would be extremely rich.

I cannot make the client like you. I can’t help it if you show up in a wrinkled dress shirt (untucked, no tie), jeans, and sandals. I’m sorry the hiring manager laughed under his breath at how you dressed.

I cannot put a round peg into a square hole. I refuse to do it. “Oh, let’s just see what they say about my resume” is the exact reason my client is using a recruiting service. I am the person in between you and the client. They pay me for that so they don’t get a bunch of unqualified candidates. Guess what. You’re unqualified.

I cannot make the marketplace like your skills. I’m sorry that you’ve been installing cable into customer homes for six years. You’re not a Windows server administrator with three to five years of experience.

So remember, your recruiter is human. He goes on vacation. She has kids and a family. He may not answer the phone every single time you call — please don’t call back continuously for the next thirty minutes. Take a deep breath, send one e-mail, and I’ll get back to you when I can.

Get listed in a directory

As a consultant your brand name is most likely going to be your name. It’s simple, and easy. Setting up a company to call yourself something you think is more brand-able may work. The choice is really yours.

Either way you go about it, you might consider setting up a website. I’ll go into the details on how to setup a consulting website in the future. But let’s skip ahead and assume you’ve got a website set up and you’re trying to get more exposure. You might consider putting it in a web directory free of charge. There are a bunch of directories out there, some good, some bad, some are directories of directories. You want to find a directory with a high page rank and a lot of traffic.

As I mentioned, we’ll talk about using a website on the consulting side of things more in the future. But if you’re already there, try the web directory path to get some more exposure.