7 Step Consulting

Another client event: paintballing

I’ve never been paintballing. Or played paint ball. I’m not sure what the official way to say it even is.

But a bunch of guys in my office play paintball occasionally, and say it is a bunch of fun.

One way to spice up your paintballing would go the ultra realistic route and get some official police clothing like 5.11 Shorts or a SWAT t-shirt or something like that.

The upside of paintballing is you are outdoors, and is a team based event. The down side? Well, someone can always get hurt, or have their feelings hurt. You might want to make sure that the client wins!

Client Outing: The NBA Finals

One of the best rivalaries in the history of the NBA is finally back. The Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers are finally back in the finals facing off against each other. It harkens back to the Larry Bird and Magic Johnson facing each other.

I know the series goes back a lot further than that, but I wasn’t around then.

Hopefully it will be a good series. And oh yea, it might make a great client event — if you can get tickets!

Lose that consultant weight!

So you’ve been consulting for a few years. You’ve gotten a bit older. Your metabolism has slowed down.

But you haven’t slowed down in terms of your career. You are flying all over the place, doing consulting gigs from town to town. Since you are on the road all of the time, most likely you are eating out a lot. A lot meaning three meals a day.

Even when you try to be healthy eating out, it is really tough to avoid weight gain. Combine that with the slowing metabolism, your inability to effectively exercise (because you are on the road), and you may have developed that tire around your waistline.

But you want to get rid of it and change your life. You need some sort of diet and need to find diets that really work. Some do, some don’t.

I’ve heard good things about the South Beach Diet as well as Nutrisystem.

Weight-loss-diet-help.com can help you find a diet that works. On top of that, there is a nice collection of articles talking about exercising and weight loss in general. One recent article talks about the 5 benefits of gym workouts. If you’re a consultant and plan to use a gym, you probably want to pick a national brand so that no matter where you are, you’ve got a location that you can use.

Expand Your Job Search: Monster

Monster is the gorilla in the corner of the resume and job search industry. Truly, they are a Monster. Huge company, and a standard place to put up your resume as you search for a job. Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to has, at one point or another, put their resume on Monster.

The pros of Monster: a large majority of companies use it; industry leader; a lot of views for your resume.

The cons of Monster: I hate that they put advertisements that you have to click past every time you login or make a change to your profile. Also, a lot of views for your resume isn’t necessarily a good thing. If you have a highly sought skill set you will get more than a hand full of calls related to your resume, probably all associated with the same job. Another major con is your current employer could find your resume online, which is never good.

Coupons equal saved money

I’ve talked about cutting out coupons or asking for discounts in the past. Simply asking for a 5% discount can be worth a lot of money over time. Using coupons to get a better deal, over time, will save you a ton of money.

We’ve also talked a bit about taking clients out for meals or weekend trips as part of your business plan.

A lot of people like to go fishing. I am not one of them. However, if I had a million dollar account that I was trying to win over and they loved to go fishing, you’d better believe I would find a way to be interested in it. I would buy the equipment if I had to — but I would use coupons or discounts as a way to cut my costs. I would shop the online catalog store for fishing rods, reels, line, tackle and otherfishing gear to my heart’s content.

I might pick up some thumbdrives to give away to clients at Best Buy. They seem to be quite popular at conferences. I might run a contest and give away a gift card from a solid retailer (Target is a great retailer… love them!). If I needed a new laptop, I might try Tiger Direct as a way to save some money.

There are a million ways to woo clients and save money at the same time. Coupon-ing is just one of those ways.

Discrimination in general happens

My post about age discrimination pissed a few people off. I’m not going to apologize, I’m here to tell it like it is. Discrimination is inevitable and can never be 100% removed from any situation. When you see someone for the first time, you form an opinion on them regardless of never having spoken to them for any length of time. It happens.

I am not saying I agree with it. Not at all. I want to make myself clear on that. I’m just saying it is out there in the work force. I have not worked on opening for any client like that, but I have seen clients ask for specific things that they shouldn’t ask for. It doesn’t mean I or my company provide it.

It can be something as simple as a guy comes in to meet with you wearing a three piece suit. You think, wow, this guy is sharp. If another guy comes in wearing cut jean and a Bugs Bunny t-shirt, you may not think the same thing. Presentation can be a lot when it comes to a job search.

But discrimination is NOT okay. Just want to make myself clear. I’m open to discussions on it and how we can fix it, but I’m not going to accept personal attacks.

Finding affordable prescriptions

One major problem in the United States is the cost of health care is sky rocketing on what seems to be a daily basis. Prescriptions, doctors visits, surgery… across the board costs are going up, up, up.

As a consultant, you may even be working on a project with a company to help them reduce their health care costs. Perhaps you are helping implement a high deductible plan linked with a health savings account (HSA). These plans charge a hefty deductible — $2,200 per family — but significantly reduce costs. Employers usually chip in some amount to the HSA to help start the employee off (say $750 or $1,000 out of that $2,200).

One easy way to cut back on your own personal health care expenses is to find an online pharmacy that you can trust. These pharmacies need to be real, legit operations that fulfill online prescriptions. If you pay $100 for levitra at a brick and mortar pharmacy, it might cost you $45 online. That’s a 55% saving and it could be even more than that.

There is no guarantee in place that your prescription would cost less, but let’s do the math. You’re smart. You’re a consultant. Take away all of the costs in operating a retail store — the land, the equipment, the building, all of that overhead… and you would think the online stores could cut their prices down to reasonable levels.

Don’t forget retirement

A lot of consultants out there work on a 1099 or Corp-to-corp basis so that they can control their tax situation (deducting business expenses, etc.). Other times it is on a W2 basis where your client or staffing agency takes the taxes out for you (FICA, Social Security, etc.).

I’ve got to emphasize that you cannot forget retirement. Setup whatever accounts you need to setup whether it be an IRA, 401k, or self employed IRA to save for retirement.

You may like working, but when you’re 65 years old you probably want to kick back and relax. Don’t forget retirement!

Out on the road and need fast cash?

If you’re out in the consulting gig and suddenly find yourself in a money bind — say you lost your wallet and had to cancel all of your credit cards and debit cards — you need to do something fast. Money is going to start getting tight fast. Your hotel is going to want some form of payment. Cash may be your only option while you wait for your new cards to come in the mail — if you can convince the card companies to send it to your hotel rather than your home.

One thing you might resort to would be to get a Payday Loan. You might be able to get an advance from your client, but that might damage your image (even if you have a completely legitamite excuse). If it’s Payday and Loan time, it can be rough. But it may be your only option.

Expand Your Job Search: SimplyHired

Need to find that next job or next gig? We’re going to start looking at the different search engines and job boards to help you decide what is best for you.

First up is a job search engine called SimplyHired. What does a job search engine do? Essentially it tries to aggregate all of the different job openings to one easy to find place. You can search my city/zip code and combine that with keywords to find the perfect job. If you check out the advanced options you can look for just titles and also remove specific keywords.

For example, if you want to find an analyst job that isn’t a business analyst or technical analyst, you can remove business and technical from your title search.

I think you will find SimplyHired very nice to use; it helps you avoid having to visit a handful of major job boards. You can also upload a resume to all of the major boards through your account at SimplyHired. The only downfall is you cannot choose to take out staffing agency postings. If you really want to know who is hiring, you need to screen out those staffing companies (of which there are hundreds).