I started this consulting practice armed with a Ph.D. in Operations Research, a few books on sales and proposal writing—and no clients or industry contacts. Since then, I have grown a successful practice and helped a variety of organizations with market research, data mining, and decision support. I enjoy sharing insights on building a consulting business “from the ground up” with other management professionals, and have outlined some of my own experiences in articles and talks.

My critical success factors included:

Network with similar people.
For me, this was INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, a 12,000 member society for professionals in those fields. You can visit INFORMS at http://www.informs.org/, and their excellent “Operations Research for Businesspeople” at http://www.scienceofbetter.org/.

Network with different people.
Consider joining professional organizations for management consultants, where people of various specialties gather regularly for networking, professional development, and moral support.

Look professional.
To take full advantage of your business development, you need a company identity package: a spiffy logo, business cards, letterhead, and other materials you can use to promote yourself. This is one area where I absolutely could not do it myself—Nancy Webb worked with me to create a professional look.

Get help.
My most valuable asset as a consultant is my time, and I need to spend it delivering current contracts and selling new work, period. My own virtual assistant is Knee Deep Solutions, which over the past year has completed PowerPoint presentations, refined charts and graphics, written or edited documents, and assisted with hiring decisions. Knee Deep also created this website, incorporating the style of my existing stationery.

Write a little.
In 2004, I authored How I Started an OR/MS Consulting Practice with a Laptop, a Phone, and a PhD, which was published by Interfaces. The article outlines my experience starting a practice with no clients or contacts, the steps I took to grow my business (such as networking and cold-calling), and the time required before those steps paid off. It has put me in contact with a wide range of people I would not otherwise have met.

You can view an abstract of the above article at see abstract (PDF format). The full article is available to members at Informs PubsOnLine, at http://pubsonline.informs.org/; search by author Beam, Carrie; Interfaces, Vol. 34, No. 4, July-Aug 2004. (If you encounter a problem with the above link, simply copy and paste the URL into a new browser window.)

For other articles, visit the Articles & Talks page of this site.

Read a lot.
The following books proved especially valuable to me during the launch of my consulting business: