Of all the companies I’ve worked with almost none of them are truly serious about growing their business. They all THINK they are. And I work diligently to show them what it would take to get serious. It rarely works though. It finally comes down to one thing:

Just WHO is driving the bus (their business) – and who SHOULD be doing it?

Many people hire consultants and are consistently disappointed because:

• They can only get out of the consulting relationship what they’re willing to put into it.
• They have unrealistic expectations.
• They hate to read.
• They make their consultants chase them.

Seriously. I hope those who can really use and get benefit from this message will read it; I suspect it is likely to be more popular with the consultants who are worn out from trying to pull answers and information out of their clients.

Do you want to get the most from working with consultants? Here are some sincere tips that will totally change the dynamics of the consulting relationship:

CLIENT RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Take an active role – YOU should be driving the bus (your business) – not expecting a consultant you hired to magically do it without your input
• Make an effort to truly understand EXACTLY what the consultant is going to do for you. Most dissatisfaction arises from unrealistic expectations due to the client’s lack of specific knowledge of what they’ve requested be done.
• Promptly provide requested information and answer email, voicemail, and other communications from your client. The longer it takes you to respond the less your consultant can do for you and the longer it will take!
• Make the consulting relationship a priority. Schedule time for meetings. Insist on regular updates and communication and READ THEM.

CONSULTANT RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Do your best to provide structure to the client relationship – in writing – even if you already know they will not read it. Document what information you need, how often you will update them on the progress, provide the best times and methods for contacting you, and – even though they should do it – you may have to be the one to consistently move the project forward.
• Communicate well: provide updates, be clear in your questions, understand what your client does and does not yet know. Remember that if they knew what you know they could do it themselves! Don’t expect that; expect them to at least try to understand – “the big picture” – not the detail of how to do it – what you are doing on their behalf.
• Define the project scope carefully and tightly. Scope creep is the largest challenge for every project. No matter how long we work to determine precisely what the client REALLY wants and explain what is involved – even if hours are spent in discovery and you believe you know PRECISELY what that is – expect to find out otherwise.

Here is a brilliant explanation of Scope Creep:

“…scope creep is not only inevitable; it’s natural. As with other natural forces, when we resist it, it seems evil to us. It thwarts us, but scope creep is no more evil than gravity. Scope creep is the pejorative name we give to the natural process by which clients discover what they really want.

This puts our attempts at “requirements gathering” in a different light. Most project managers try their best to discover what clients want at the beginning of the project. They use meetings, questionnaires, personal interviews – and still, the most common experience for developers delivering a final product is customer dissatisfaction. It may come as a slap in the face – “this is no good” – or it may be couched in gentler terms – “you know what would be nice” – but the same message is being delivered: we aren’t giving clients what they want.”

I recommend consultants and those who hire them read the rest of that article on Scope Creep.

A disparity of Internet knowledge is a particular challenge for online consultants. Even if your clients use the Internet, recognize that your client may not understand the difference between PPC, SEO and SEM…or organic versus paid search… or local listings versus organic listings and so on.

Do your best to ensure they understand the differences and precisely and exactly what you will be doing for them (in writing!). Then realize that it is VERY likely that they still will not “get it” – especially if they are not very Internet and Marketing saavy.

The bottom line is this: the client MUST be willing to learn at least what is necessary to fully understand what they’re asking consultants to do. They MUST communicate. Don’t make your consultants ask the same questions over and over and never get an answer. BE INVOLVED. DRIVE THE BUS.

The BUS is YOUR business – not the consultant’s. YOU are the limiting – or growing – factor. No matter how brilliant, talented, or conscientious your consultants, they simply can NOT do their best for you WITHOUT you!

Do you ever forget where you wrote or saved something? Like to do research and need a way to keep track of it all? Wish you were more organized? Don’t keep beating yourself up – you’re probably gifted and need a better method to track it all. The free Open Source application Tomboy Notes which is now available for Unix, Windows and Mac is an elegantly simple solution.

Ubuntu and other Linux based operating systems come with an accessory called Tomboy Notes that is far more powerful and still easier to use than Notepad or Wordpad. Look for the icon that looks like a yellow pad and pencil at the top or bottom of your desktop or click on Applications, Accessories, Tomboy Notes.

Tomboy has better formatting than Notepad or Wordpad and automatically organizes your work for you. There is a list of the primary features below. There is almost no learning curve required. Look for the Start Here note for easy instructions.

It has an interesting differences from any other program I have ever used. You don’t have to save anything; it seems to be saved the instant you type or paste it into a note. Just close a note and the information stays there.

Click on Search from within any note to see all your information or search all notes by keyword. Clicking on the word “note” in the search view puts all your notes in alphabetical order. Clicking again puts them in the order you created them. Clicking on “Last Changed” to sort newest to oldest or oldest to newest.

Here is an example of an everyday task to help you understand how powerful this little tool is:

Click on the icon, select “create new note” and give it a name. For this example I will change the TITLE to “Shopping”. I move the cursor to the underlined text that defaults to New Note # and type in the word Shopping. Where it says “Describe your new note here.” I add the items I plan to buy soon.

Now create another note called To Do List. When I add the word “shopping” Tomboy automatically links your Shopping note to your To Do List note. Anything new added to your To Do List that has an existing note of exactly the same name will automatically be linked. Tomboy will even update the links if you change the name of a note.

If you want to create a new note from within your existing note, simply highlight the words you want to use as the title, right click and select “Link to New Note” (or use the keyword shortcut Ctrl + L). The new note will open. To get back to the original note, click on the name on the bottom of your screen. All the notes you are currently using will stay open until you close them.

Using Tomboy Notebooks to get organized:

If you have a lot of similar notes you can put them in a Notebook. Each note will indicate the Notebook it is in at the top. Click on the word Notebook to add that note to an already created Notebook.

• Create a New Notebook: Click on Search, File, Notebooks, New Notebook and give it a name.
• Add a note to a notebook: From within the note click the Notebook Icon and select the Notebook.
• Organize your notes into Notebooks: Click on Search from within any note. Your existing notebooks are listed in the left column; notes are in the right column. Drag and drop the notes into the appropriate notebooks. Use the process above to add more notebooks as needed.

To continue with our example, you could create a Shopping Notebook and store multiple shopping lists in it. You could create one for the grocery store, and add others by the name or type of stores you frequent (hardware, drugstore, feed store, etc.)

NOTE: You must create notebooks before you can add notes to them. You currently can not create a notebook from within a note. (If this changes please leave me a comment and I will update this post. Thank you.)

Later when you don’t remember what you did with your shopping list or what you called it just open up Tomboy and search for any word you know is on the note you’ve temporarily misplaced to quickly and easily find it.

Main features of Tomboy Notes:

• Searchable by keyword(s)
• Instant hyperlinks – copy/paste or drag/drop Web site links you want to visit again and click to get back
• Clickable email links – click to
• Automatically provides links between notes when you type in a word that has a Note with that name
• Inline spell checking
• Highlighting – improves readability, makes it easy to find
• Undo/Redo – easily correct mistakes and restore anything you accidentally erased
• Bulleted lists
• Fonts – change the size and look of your text right in Tomboy
• Organize your notes into Notebooks

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ABOUT TOMBOY:

• About Tomboy Notes
• How Tomboy Notes Works (This is an older post but much useful information is still applicable.)
• Staying Organized Using Tomboy Notes
• Tomboy Notetaker Keeps You Organized
• Installing Tomboy Notes on Windows
• Tomboy on Windows
• What Do You Think of Tomboy Notes
• More Reviews of Tomboy Notes
• Wish List and Cool Ideas for Using Tomboy Notes – Check out Application Grouping

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON GETTING ORGANIZED:

• Five Simple Reasons You Should Use Plain Text to Store Your Data

If you know of additional resources not listed above, please add a comment with links for this post. We will periodically link them to the additional resources section above.