Start up business

First of all, you need to audit your knowledge, skills, experience and expertise. What have you learned in your career that you can sell to others? Do you really have a wealth of knowledge, accumulated over decades working in ever more demanding environments, or do you simply have the same couple of years' experience repeated many times over?

The simplest way to find out is to review your CV and list all the projects you've undertaken over the years: what you did, the outcome, and what you learned. Summarise this into a set of areas where you can provide useful and powerful insights to others. That is the product you have to offer.

Consultancy requires a wide variety of personal attributes that will make a real difference to your success. These are self-motivation, good inter-personal skills and confidence.

Self-motivation

In start-up mode, you must be able to work alone and motivate yourself. Even getting up in the morning will be a challenge if your only incentive is your self-will! For many, the fact it's your own business you're getting up for is motivation enough.

But working alone demands more than just the skill to self-start. It also requires the ability to be comfortable in your own company and not feel isolated or lonely. Many projects offer little human contact for days on end. If co-workers' banter is vital to your happiness, consultancy may not be the right choice.

You will also need strong inter-personal skills. Some consultants' skills are so specialist, and in such demand, that they can get away with behaving like operatic divas. Under certain circumstances, these characters can achieve significant success. But in most cases their consultancies flounder.

The fact is, clients expect to be treated with respect. They know they are the paymasters, and they like you to acknowledge this fact in your dealings with them, just as they do with their clients. They may ask you to provide them with powerful insights, innovations or other interventions in relation to business help and advice, but they also expect you to do so with sensitivity.

“What have you learned in your career that you can sell to others?”

Saving their face while at the same time telling them they need to change is a skill requiring empathy and finesse. Clients rarely want this delivered via the sledgehammer of the unvarnished truth, even if they say they do.

Confidence

You will need to balance these inter-personal skills with bucketloads of self-confidence. Your clients are buying your expertise. If you come over as unsure of the value of your experience, they won't buy from you. At the same time, you need to contain this self-confidence on the right side of the boundaries of arrogance, otherwise you'll end up back in the land of the divas.

In the early stages, you may have to fake some of this confidence. After all, if this is the first time you've encountered a particular combination of circumstances as a consultant, you're likely to be a little uncertain of your skills. Just convince yourself that if you're unsure, the client is even more unsure. Keep reassuring them (and yourself) it'll all be fine, even if you can see how easily it could all fall apart. Chances are, it'll be fine anyway.

Know your market

It's one thing having a long list of knowledge areas you're confident you can provide to others. The real question is, are they valued by the marketplace? Are you offering skills in the next big thing, or the last big flop? To successfully make this assessment you need to understand what's going on in the world around you. Ideally you want the skills you're offering to match a growing area of demand, where they will be in short supply and the competitive environment is at least manageable.

You must first analyse whether market trends indicate if your skills are strengths or weaknesses in relation to current and emergent environmental opportunities and threats.

Look at the next few years' likely socio-economic climate. Base your research on economic forecasts, legislative changes and imperatives, political developments and social and demographic trends. Take into account changing technology and its likely impact on the world around you.

Business trends

Next, look at the business trends. In what sectors are the most popular business start-ups? What are the major current business developments? What's the latest management thing? Which sectors seem to be enjoying robust long-term growth and which are declining?

Your experience

Now consider the specific sectors where you have experience, and in which you want to work. At this point, take a broader view, and think about the consultancy sector. What are the trends here? What are people talking about, in relation to consultancy? Where's demand rising and falling? Are the type and style of offerings changing?

Resources

There are many possible sources for this information. Your bank can provide economic forecasts. The national press and popular culture – T.V. shows, adverts, films, music, magazines, even food fashions – can help inform you of social trends. And don't forget all the readily accessible desk research on social trends, like the Office of National Statistics' excellent Social Trends survey, conducted on behalf of the Government.

You can also source and discover business and sector-specific trends by evaluating desk data; regularly reviewing the business and management press; looking at business book publishers' new publications lists; and reviewing conference and seminar promotional materials, to discover popular topics. And don't forget polling business people you know for their views on the latest issues impacting on business as a whole, and on their sector and their business.

Making a decision

Once you've analysed your marketplace, overlay the skills and experience you plan to offer against these trends, and assess whether there will be sufficient demand for your expertise in the business community that you can target, given a sufficiently benign competitive environment.

• Know your product, know your market, know yourself.
• Make maximum use of all your personal skills, including marketing and networking.
• Get good, professional corporate design.
• Pay for a well thought-out web site.
• Ensure you get some good PR, even if you do this yourself.

Implemented with enthusiasm, commitment and care, these steps should lead to a successful and rewarding new business opportunity that's open to most people to get involved in, for a very low cost of entry.