Consulting

This year, I’ve tried to maximize my earnings while minimizing the time involved. This is because of injuries from a car accident and the time crunch involved in raising a young family. I’m happy to say that I’m getting more bang from my time than ever before. Since the New Year, I’ve been focusing on […]

The consulting life can be awfully decadent sometimes. Work when you want. If you want. How you want. Where you want. In whatever clothes you want. But sometimes that lifestyle can get the better of you…meaning it’s time to get yourself in gear again and reset your natural rhythms. For me, that became painfully clear

Sparkline. The word stood out when I was reading Tony Rose’s Decision Support Analytics blog recently. I’d never heard of a sparkline before. So I went looking for a definition. Apparently, Edward Tufte invented the sparkline. He defines sparkline on his website as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”, but I prefer the explanation over at Wikipedia,

Where’s Waldo? On a Vancouver roof! You may have run across Waldo, the bespectacled, stripe-shirted guy, at some point in the 80s or 90s. Well, a Vancouver art school student has constructed a giant Where’s Waldo character on a Vancouver roof to make her own Google Earth game. What’s this got to do with business

Excited about closing a new consulting deal, Edward rushed to start the job. Mary, a VP at a local software company, had agreed to hire him to develop several sales tools to help sell software to call centers. He worked furiously on the new project for several days and fired off a draft and a

Tax time always tests my organizational skills. I collect dozens of business receipts in a month. Many of these are from retailers that print with disappearing ink. Typically, tax-collecting agencies prefer readable receipts should you—I shiver even mentioning it—ever be audited. Thankfully, a friend of mine told me about a solution, Neat Receipts. This small

I have a bit of a baby face. Always have. Hopefully, I always will. And that baby face has sometimes been the bane of my career, since people seem to think I’m younger than I am. "Aren’t you a little young to be a consultant?" people sometimes asked when I was starting out. Um, no.

One of my subcontractors recently asked me if she could add my client’s name to her resume, since she’d been doing work for them on my behalf. "No problem," I replied. "But why are you sending out a resume to solicit consulting work?" My friend often sends her resume to prospective clients. If that works

Have you signed up for your free copy of the Consultant Journal newsletter? Last week, I sent out the very first copy to 653 readers. And all but five people have decided to keep receiving the newsletter. What did we discuss in the first edition? Staying in touch with clients year-round Promoting your business for

Recession. Market downturn. Doom. Gloom. If you pay attention to newspaper headlines, you may be wondering if you should give up your consulting dreams right now. In spite of all the negative headlines out there, a recession may actually be your ticket to success. That’s right — consulting in a recession can be a great