5 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 16 Aug 2023
Share by emailAssuming you do decide to offer consulting services, the next question will be how you integrate consulting services within your portfolio of products and services.
In this article, I’ll discuss some of the higher-level approaches you should consider when integrating consulting services. While the approach you take will depend on your chosen speciality, the approaches below will provide a useful start point for shaping your approach to integration.
You’ll need to be selective regarding the types of consulting services you provide. Don’t try to do everything and definitely don’t fall into the trap of trying to match the offerings of the larger security consulting companies. As an independent security professional, you won’t be able to offer consulting services that require a large team to deliver the service. That constraint alone limits your options. The optimum approach is to focus on your chosen speciality and design consulting services that leverage your unique knowledge and experience.
It would be perfectly okay to start with a single consulting service. For example, you could focus on one of the following consulting services:
Any one of these consulting services is a solid stand alone business. The first enables clients to meet international standards and best practice. I’d suggest there’s a short-term opportunity in this specific example, and you would want to add a second or even a third related consulting service within a year or so. The second example, focused on security guarding, is an evergreen solution because security technologies are always improving, risks are always changing, and clients are always looking for an opportunity to save on security expenditure. The third example is a higher tier approach designed to bring more discerning companies to the next level with their crisis management programme. Of course, not all companies are as discerning as you may like.
Avoid basing your entire business on consulting. Instead, leverage your expertise to develop a complementary range of products and services. I’ll provide some examples of how you might do this shortly.
One way to approach consulting services is to provide an end-to-end solution. Taking this approach, you would lead a client engagement with a consulting project and then follow up with other related services. For example, you could lead with the a consulting project and then follow up with more general services, such as training.
One of your key objectives is to design consulting services that enable a reliable revenue stream over the long term. One obvious approach to achieving this is to integrate a consulting service that’s in demand and that you could deliver to multiple clients. The challenge with that approach is that you have to close a new sale each time you deliver the service. Closing a sale in this context is going to include calls or meetings with prospective clients, writing and submitting proposals, and enduring lengthy and complex procurement processes. These activities are non-billable. At a practical level, they’re going to eat away at your time and could have an impact on your profitability.
A better approach is to design a consulting service that enables ongoing engagement with a client. There are two ways you can approach ongoing engagement. The first approach is to deliver the same service to the client on a recurring basis. For example, you could deliver the same service every year. If you have 10 clients wanting the same service once a year, that will provide a strong future revenue stream and will also take some of the pressure out of finding new business. The second approach is to deliver the same services to the same client across multiple locations. For example, you could deliver the same services to a client’s locations across different cities in a region. The optimum approach would be to achieve both annual recurring engagements AND deliver these engagements across multiple locations.
As noted in last week’s article, it’s difficult in practice to deliver one consulting project consecutively after another. The better approach is to blend consulting projects with other projects that require less effort to deliver.
For example, you could aim to schedule one major consulting project a month and run multiple other smaller projects with other clients alongside that consulting project.
In addition to the points above, you should also consider building related products into your portfolio. Let’s explore how you might do that as an independent security professional.
If you’re intending to integrate consulting services into your business, I strongly suggest you also consider developing products. The key advantage of products is that they scale far better than services. Once developed, products require minimal ongoing effort to sell. In fact, if you produce digital products, they take no additional effort to sell.
I’ll be getting into products in more detail in future articles, however here’s a few initial thoughts on how you might develop products that complement your consulting services:
Writing and publishing a book is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge and experience in your speciality. If you’ve developed a particular framework, consider publishing a technical reference about that framework. Writing a book also enables you to articulate your unique position on a particular topic. Once you’ve published your book, you’ll have an ongoing revenue stream (provided of course you spend the necessary time to actively promote your book).
In addition to writing a book, articles are a great way to demonstrate your competence in your niche. A key benefit of writing articles is that they arrive in your current and prospective clients’ inboxes on a regular basis. As such, they provide a continual and hopefully useful reminder of your competence in your chosen speciality. Another advantage of articles is that they enable you to focus your attention on emerging issues. You’ll benefit as a professional be exploring such issues, and your clients will benefit from your insights into those issues. As I’ve done with 51CM, you can even compile your articles into a book.
Another option is to build templates. You could charge a fee for these templates or offer basic templates for free. The benefit of templates is that they provide a readily accessible sample of the quality of your work. Let’s say you created a framework for assessing the crisis management capabilities on an organisation. You could offer an abridged version of your framework in the form of 10 key questions (with an explanation each each). Of course, don’t give too much away in your templates as you don’t want to cannibalise your consulting services.
Overall, consulting services are relatively easy to integrate. The key is to focus on your speciality and limit the number of services you provide. Experiment with different consulting solutions to learn what will get you traction with potential clients. At the same time, don’t try to be all things to all people. Taking that approach as an independent security professional is potentially a pathway to failure.