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For Consultants

The original focus of CIRWEP was to help and support consultants. Though the mission has expanded beyond that narrow focus, the CIRWEP platform will be most especially helpful to independent consultants. Being an independent consultant is a great way to make a living, but very difficult to achieve. The biggest problem is often that consultants tend to have specific talents, knowledge, and experience that may be valuable to a small set of people.

Overview; How CIRWEP Can Help Consultants

   CIRWEP was initially created to enable consultants to accomplish several things:

  1. Reach a larger audience than ever before possible.
  2. Decrease the amount of time spent in non-paying administrative tasks.
  3. Increase the number of opportunities to speak at conferences and workshops, for more people, with less time invested.
  4. Author books and produce videos demonstrating their expertise more efficiently and effectively by connecting them with people who can do that quickly, easily, and less expensively than doing it themselves.

Enabling independent consultants with expertise to flourish; that is the purpose of CIRWEP.

The Background: A Consulting Conundrum

There is an old joke that a consultant is someone who lives more than 50 miles away and gets paid to tell a company what they already know. If you are a consultant, than you know the joke is based on truth. Often you are hired simply to confirm what some smart people within a company already know (but other less-smart people in the company do not believe). Also, you get much more respect if you fly in from out of town and get paid a lot of money - even when what you report is common sense and obvious to anyone of intelligence.

It is difficult to do consulting without traveling. First, friends who live in your backyard and know you well often fail to recognize your special talents. Only people knowledgeable in your field may recognize your superior expertise. Second, consultants travel because clients who need their specific knowledge and skills are often not found close to where they live. Typically a consultant is a top expert - perhaps the best in the country or the world - in one very narrowly focused field. If they cannot find enough clients who need that one very narrowly focused best-in-the-world skill, by necessity they often have to constantly travel all over the world, or expand their consulting services beyond their base expertise. The problem with the former is so much time wasted in traveling. The problem with the latter is that it means means more competition, less money, and fewer over-the-top success stories.

Wouldn't it be great if a consultant could more easily get the word out about their specific talents and skills, find clients in their "sweet spot" who desperately need their exact type of expertise, and then complete more high-level lucrative consulting projects -all without traveling 200 days a year?

It's already possible, but it is not yet easy.

The Secret to Consulting Success

We already know the best way to get the word out about someone's superior knowledge, talents, and skills is to write a book, create a video, speak at conferences, put on workshops, and gather testimonials. If you are a successful consultant, you may have already done all of these things, and you've noticed how much business you get from these endeavors. If you are an up-and-coming consultant, you may already know that you need to do these things, but haven't had the chance to complete them.

There are many challenges to completing these essential tasks; they are time consuming and (typically) not lucrative in their own right. While a few consultants tip the scale and eventually start to make real money from products (books and videos and speaking), most consultants make money on their consulting services, and use the books, videos, workshops, and speaking engagements to spread the word about their talents and skills so that potential clients needing that specific expertise can find them. The catch is that the time invested in writing, editing, and publishing the book or producing the video takes time away from consulting, which pays the bills. Traveling to conferences and putting on workshops is also time consuming. Every plane trip for which there is no expense reimbursement from a client is money and time out of pocket. It's a catch-22.

Furthermore, those who are talented within a specific domain of knowledge are not necessarily experts at writing or publishing a book, producing a video, or speaking at a conference. Consultants may also need help learning how to sell, an essential skill in order to be successful in the long term.

The bottom line is that independent consultants need to spend less time marketing and more time getting paid for their consulting expertise. They need help and support in learning to sell more effectively. They need the book and video and speaking opportunities, but they often don't have the time to invest to create and market those items. Most importantly of all, they need to reach a larger but more targeted audience. That will enable both them and their clients to be happier. The consultant won't need to stray from their real talents in order to pay the bills, and the clients who really need their expertise will be able to find them. Consultants will be able to focus specifically on just what they do best; consult.

We know that this has been promised before. We also know that CIRWEP cannot yet do what we describe. It is not yet easy enough to use, not yet integrated seamlessly, not yet fully developed. But it is our goal.

The best thing to do for now is to keep a watch on our progress. Get on our mailing list so that you can stay in the loop and know when CIRWEP will be available for you to take advantage of it to increase your own prosperity and leadership.