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ConsultingPulse.com Networking Community!

As we close down 2007 and head towards 2008, we at ConsultingPulse.com are very happy to announce the creation of our Networking Community for Management consultants all over the world.
The Consulting Hub is a networking group with several aspects to it, and it is a tool that we believe consultants all over the world will appreciate and be able to get some value from.

We are new, and we are growing, and we hope that you wil grow with us. For new members to our group we offer the folowing benefits:

• 3 months posts on our Consultants Jobs Board at a 50% discount
• A copy of the Report (Consulting Outlook 208, when it is published in February, and
• A copy of the White Paper – Implementing Business Intelligence, due for publication Feb 2008.

But this is just the beginning. We are already planning for our new research center, Consulting research, and we will be regularly posting tips to help you to get the most out of our new group.

The Consulting Hub will offer you, as a professional consultant, the ability to:

• make connections with others from within your industry
• Make connections with industry leaders
• Look for job opportunities, some of which will be unique to our network
  
• Benefit from the vast range of research reports from our new Research Center
• Benefit from the articles posted by your colleagues from all over the world.

All the best for 2008!

A great start… and more to come!

I wish all of you the compliments of the season. For those of you who celebrate Christmas I hope it was enjoyable, and I hope that the NewYear is a prosperous and eventful one for all of us in the consulting industry. For those of you who visit regularly you will notice that our community is starting to evolve.

During the final part of 2007 we have completely overhauled the site. The goal has been to try to make it more user friendly, more readable, easier for readerws to find exactly what they are looking for.

Over the course of the next few weeks we will be rolling out a number of new initiatives here; including:

• A new networking comunity, one we hope will provide readers with access to the best information, the best jobs, and the best tools that we can get our hands on!
• New elements to the site such as reader submitted articles, new search functionality, and additional levels of interactivity. (We are considering a discussion forum, please give your opinion to the poll on this page.)
• A new knowledge base, which we have been working on with some of the leading companies in the consulting field, and lastly…
• A series of new ways for you to take advantage of our growing prescence in the consulting community.

It is difficult not to be excited about where we are going and the momentum we are starting to build up here, so I hope you will join with us in launching the new year to a bigger and better start than ever before.

What is consulting worth?

An intriguing question? What are consultants worth? For different industries the rates can vary widely, Henri Vanroelen, a VP for Estee Lauder Companies believes the following are general guidelines for pricing IT consultants:

• Help desk / PC support / IS Operators: around 40$/hr
• VB / RPG / Cobol programmers: around 65$/hr
• Oracle SQL / ABAP prgrammers: around 95$/hr
• business analysts / ERP consultants: 120 $/hr
• Program mgrs / projects leads: upward of 120/hr, depends on experience level

Sounds fair doesnt it? In many sectors consultants do indeed charge by the hour, in others they charge by the day or week.

The maths is simple; find out what you are really worth a year. (Salary plus costs) divide it either by the number of expected billable days, or by the number of expected billable hours, then add a percentage. Remember taxes and overheads and make sure to capture all expenses that you normally agree to recharge to the client.

Some common approaches to this type of rate setting include:

- Double or triple your cost per hour/day
- Setting consulting fees based on each particular project
- Setting fees based on actual data
- Or just charging market prices

The last option is the most common. Within a short time in your industry you will become very aware of what your competitors are charging.

Often, when they are confident in their space, they charge by value; meaning that they charge a portion of the value it would represent to their client company regardless of the time they spend executing it.

Alan Weiss has always been one of the more vocal advocates for value based fees, a method he has used and publicized as the best means of earning what your services are worth. As always, he makes a very good case for the practice.

These include:

• capping investment at a specific level
• never having a meter running so clients can feel free to call or email on any issue without additional authorizations
• and no debates over what constitutes billable time and what does not

Ultimately many consultants end up choosing a range of methods for pricing their services, including some that may not be here. Your ability to generate consistent high yield fees will end up being determined by:

• Your relationship with your client
• Your track record
• The uniqueness, or perceived uniqueness, of the services you offer
• Your ability to keep your overheads under control, and
• Your familiarity with your clients industry or business

Rick Schultz, Founder and Software Architect of 100Watt Solutions, ties the concept of fees to overall consultancy effectiveness and paints the picture this way ” The other part of the question, though, is “which clients do you want”? You don’t have to be in any consulting role long before you meet “the client from hell” and need to fire them. If you charge top dollar, you have a smaller pool of clients to choose from, and they’re often pickier (because, hey, they’re paying you so darn much, right?). The lower your price, the greater your pool of potential clients. “