Monica Gould is the president of Strategic Consulting Partners. In this story, she talks about her early days in consulting, when she fell prey to a common mistake of consultants (I can tell you from experience): the temptation to say you can solve any problem.
Download the story here (1min 57sec).
Transcript:
When I first started my business, I was dabbling, I was trying to make an income and keep abreast of what was going on in the business community. I really didn't think of it as, I was going to grow this consulting firm and make a million dollars a year. It wasn't my intent. So I don't think I had the focus of what services I could provide, why I could provide them, how I'm positioned in the market and why people need to hire me rather than someone else. I didn't really think through that.
Oh, you need some work? I can do that for you. I pretty much did anything anyone wanted me to do. Whether it was my key strength or not.
When you splinter yourself, because you're so hungry and you want the work, and you want to just move forward, you can dilute the quality of your service and dilute what you offer the market.
So what I've really learned to do, especially honing in on this in the last few years, is picking and choosing the opportunities that I go after. Making sure that it is part of the core strategic strength of the firm. That we can do the work. Not necessarily that I could do it, but our firm would have the right people in place. And that I can do the work. Not that I won't stretch, and look for opportunities that would stretch our skillset, but really trying to be strategically focused and not splintered all over the place, not confuse the market in terms of what we do.
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