6 Facts You Need to Know About Starting Your Own Consulting Business

Thousands of professionals have dreamed about starting their own consulting business. It seems like a great career path. Hang a shingle, bring in clients, be your own boss, do awesome stuff and make bank.

Consulting, as it turns out, isn’t sexy, glamorous, or easy. It’s downright hard -- harder than you might think. I encourage anyone with the moxie to start a consulting business. But I also offer cautions -- a few yield signs that could save you a lot of grief and get you closer to achieving your dreams.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. You’re going to face cranky people.

Some people can’t handle unpleasant relationships, especially people who BS them or kick them around. If you’re not ready to face cranky people, then consulting isn’t for you.

Consulting is a face-to-face business. You meet with people. You shake hands. You step into corporate offices. You sit across tables. You talk to people.

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And some of those people you talk to are just plain mean.

You figure out pretty quickly who is worth working with and who’s not. As you figure it out, you might have to endure some relationships that eat away at you.

2. Your deliverable is knowledge.

A consultant is hired for one reason: Knowledge.

You must assert your knowledge in the niche for which you were hired. A client selects you to work on their behalf because you know something that they don’t.

This means that you tell them like it is, and don’t back down. Deliver the knowledge that they pay for. If they don’t like it, so be it. If they disagree, so be it.

Your deliverable is knowledge, and if you deliver it in a half-baked way, you’re losing the quality of your service.

3. You’re probably not charging enough.

One of the biggest mistakes I see new consultants make is that they don’t charge enough for their service.

Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe it’s inexperience. But maybe they just don’t know how much they should charge. There’s no magic formula for fee-setting, but there is a general rule: Charge more than you think you should.

It’s important to your client that they are getting a return on their investment, so this should be important to you, too. If you can prove your ROI, you’ve got leeway to charge a healthy percentage of the client’s profit.

read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242956