Unleashed - How To Thrive As An Independent Professional

Our guest today is Molly Leeds, a benefits account manager at Brown & Brown of New York. Molly helps  small and medium sized businesses to obtain the best package of employee benefits to fit their needs. In our discussion, we focus on healthcare benefits. If you are a solo, independent professional with no employees and no partners in the United States, your main option for getting health insurance is Obamacare, via healthcare.gov. But if you have at least one employee, or you band together with another independent professional to form a partnership and have at least two eligible members in your company, you can start looking at small group healthcare plans, which can be a better value in some, but not all, cases. Molly walks us through the various options for health insurance and we also discuss how to find and select a health insurance broker. Molly’s firm, Brown & Brown, helps clients with a wide range of products and services, including trade credit, business insurance, employee benefits, risk man

Our guest today is Johnny Warström, the CEO of Mentimeter, which is a tool that can help you make presentations, workshops, and meetings more interactive. Here's a link: https://www.mentimeter.com/ The tool lets you take a live poll of your audience, and the results get updated real-time in your presentation. The audience doesn’t need any special hardware – just a phone or any other device connected to the Internet. When I interviewed Johnny, I had not yet used the tool.  I just got back from facilitating a professional development event with about 25 independent consultants where I tried Mentimeter for the first time, and it was a massive hit. Some of the attendees said that Mentimeter was their number one takeaway! We’d be having a facilitated discussion and presenting regular slides, and the attendees were engaged, but you could see the energy in the room starting to flag. And then we’d get to a place with a Mentimeter survey, and, Bam!, the room came alive. Out came everyone’s phones, and you’d see the re

Our guest today is Josh Boltuch, the CEO of Fancy Hands and its subsidiary, On Demand Ops, and in this episode we talk about both firms. Fancy Hands is a network of thousands of U.S. based virtual assistants. You sign up for a set number of requests per month and pay a fixed monthly fee. Each request can be pretty much anything that can be done on the Internet or by phone – whether that is calling your utility company to complain about a charge on your bill, or researching the best BBQ joint to visit on your trip to Memphis. You don’t get a dedicated virtual assistant: each incoming request gets farmed out to the next available person who is a good fit for that assignment. On Demand Ops was launched by Fancy Hands in 2017 and is geared more towards the enterprise customer. A key service of On Demand Ops is large scale lead generation, for example. They’ll work with a client to develop and refine a script and a protocol, and then they will make thousands of phone calls that have the goal of setting up calls wi

Outsourcing research tasks via Upwork is a superpower that every independent professional ought to master. In this episode, I provide a range of examples that illustrate the types of tasks that I have outsourced to freelancers on Upwork, and then I discuss tips and tricks on how to use the platform effectively.

For many independent consultants, staffing firms are an important channel for getting connected to project opportunities. This episode presents 45 tips for independent consultants on how to work effectively with staffing firms and become their go-to resource.

On the show today Julia Bunte-Mein is back. Julia, a brilliant and accomplished sophomore at Harvard College, spent a day with me on a Winternship. On our last episode, Julia interviewed me about the advice I’d give to my college-age self, and related topics. On today’s episode, I share the tips that I’ve learned on Getting (Some) Things Done. I loved David Allen’s classic book titled Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. His system was a bit too complex for me, and I’ll be sharing what I do in practice to get some of the things done that I want to do. Then in the second half of today’s episode, Julia takes over and shares her productivity routine, which I must say is more disciplined and robust than mine. One of my goals this year is to improve my own ability to focus and get things done, and if you have tips, send me a message on LinkedIn. So there’s no one right answer, and in today’s episode you get two sets of ideas to think about incorporating – I hope you find something in here help

On the show today our guest is Julia Bunte-Mein, a sophomore at Harvard College, who spent one day with me over her winter break on a Winternship. I’m pretty sure that I learned more from Julia than she did from me over the course of the day. One of the things I learned was that if I were applying to Harvard today, I would have had a lot less chance of getting in, as the bar has been raised over the past couple decades.  Julia added real value on Day One. Little did I know, but she has deep graphic design experience, and she helped me dramatically improve a mailer I was designing that day.  Julia has worked as a Researcher-Writer for Let’s Go and had actual internships in Belgium, Spain, Australia, and South-east Asia. She is the Social Enterprise Director for Harvard Women in Business and all-around a very impressive person. In this episode, we turned the tables and Julia interviewed me, mostly about the advice I’d give to my college-age self, and related topics. It was a lot of fun being interviewed by Juli

Our guest today is Chris Doig, who has thought more about enterprise software selection than anyone else I know. I’d like to thank David A. Fields for introducing me to Chris. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Wayferry, a boutique consulting firm with a very tight focus: their entire focus is on helping enterprise clients select software.  The firm has developed its own proprietary software and processes to support enterprise software selecton. Chris is also the author of a book that was published in October and is available on Amazon: “Rethinking Enterprise Software Selection: Stop buying square pegs for round holes.” For me, the takeaway from my conversation with Chris is broader than what I learned about software selection.  He is a great example of how a consultant can build a successful practice by carving out a niche to serve one pain point. I know at least a dozen firms that provide a range of IT consulting services. But I know just one person with an exclusive focus on enterprise software selection.

Our guest today is Diane Mulcahy, a McKinsey alum and the author of The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want. Her book grew out of the MBA course at Babson that she developed titled “Entrepreneurship and the Gig Economy,” which was names by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Business School Classes in the U.S. Diane’s book is structured around her ten rules to succeed in the gig economy, and in this episode we discuss several of those, including #6: Take Time Off Between Gigs. Independent professionals almost inevitably have time off between gigs, at least occasionally, and in our discussion Diane details an exercise she recommends to develop a set of ideas on how to use that unbilled time productively. Pursuing the life of an independent professional requires us to rethink many of the assumptions that employed professionals can take for granted. Diane’s book is a great guide for getting us to think about the life we want to lea

Our guest today is Roger Lee, the owner of F1 Consulting. Roger provides remote IT support for independent professionals, home offices, and small businesses. He helps his clients with network design and installation, cloud services migration, remote monitoring, and offsite data backup and disaster recovery. One of the tools that Roger mentions in this episode is LastPass, a password manager. After Roger and I spoke I adopted LastPass myself and I strongly recommend it. Roger asked me to point out that he misspoke on the cost of LastPass – the monthly fee is two dollars, not one dollar. If you are an independent professional, you ought to have an IT professional like Roger on your virtual team.  I picked up a ton of useful tips in this discussion and I hope you find it helpful.

Our guest today is Jennifer Hartz, a McKinsey alum and the founder of Corporate Hartz. Jennifer has several focus areas including business-driven community relations strategies, nonprofit strategic planning, and personal philanthropy. Her philosophy is that generosity and profitability can, and should, go hand-in-hand. Her lessons learned from helping families take a strategic approach to philanthropy can be useful to all of us – you don’t need to have a $100 million fund to start a family conversation about giving. With the holidays coming up, and the tax year coming to a close, after listening to this episode you might be motivated to set up your own donor-advised fund. With a donor advised fund, you get the charitable deduction off your income taxes today when you contribute money to the account.  Then you can disburse the funds over time to approved charities.  You can start a fund at Fidelity with a minimum $5,000 contribution, and over at Vanguard with a minimum contribution of $25,000. In our discussio

Our guest today is John Dranow, the CEO of Smart Revenue. John’s firm has hundreds of trained, vetted field researchers available around the world, and his firm can help you fill in the data white spaces. Big data can help us analyze in exquisite detail what is happening, but it is hard to know from the data what isn’t happening. How many people walk by a store but don’t look at the window display? How many people look at the window display but don’t enter the store? How many people enter the store but don’t walk down the center aisle? How many people walk down the center aisle but don’t buy your client’s product? John’s team has a range of tools to help fill in these white spaces.  In our discussion we discuss field interviews, vision tracking goggles, how Panera might study a customer standing in line to order, and much more. John’s firm does regularly work with boutique consulting firms as well as independent professionals – so if you have an upcoming project where this type of anthropological field work w

In this in-between-isode, Will Bachman shares four tools useful for any independent professional: 1) DocuSign - to avoid the need to print/sign/scan/email 2) Expensify - to keep track of your expenses.  3) ScannerPro - to create multipage PDFs with your phone 4) Rev.com - quick and affordable transcripts

Sinisa Slijepcevic studied with Stephen Hawking, among other professors, while earning his PhD in applied mathematics at Cambridge University.  Sinisa is a McK alum and independent consultant and runs a firm called Cantab Analytica, which is based in the UK and Croatia. Sinisa’s firm leverages machine learning to help clients make better decisions and to focus energy on the right decisions. In our discussion, Sinisa provides several case examples to illustrate how machine learning can help make decisions in three ways: First: decisions that may be subject to unconscious bias, such as the investment decisions made by venture capital firms Second: decisions that are complex and also occur very frequently, such as dynamic pricing of hotel rooms. Third: focusing management attention on the most important decisions, such as figuring out which purchasing decisions are the most critical in a supply chain. You can learn more about Sinisa’s firm on the website: cantab analytica.com

Our guest today is Karen McGrath, who runs a firm of virtual assistants called Awan’s Assisting. If you are an independent professional and feel crunched for time, this episode is for you. Karen and I discuss why an independent professional should consider hiring a virtual assistant (a VA), the types of tasks that VAs are most commonly asked to do, how to find and screen a VA, and some tips on how to build an effective working relationship with a VA. Karen clearly knows her business, and you can find her firm at http://awansassisting.com/

Our guest today is Kenny Jahng, the founder of Big Click Syndicate LLC, a strategic positioning agency offering content marketing consulting & advisory to nonprofit, cause-driven & faith-based organizations and churches across the country. Kenny has an amazing list of clients that includes the Princeton Theological Seminary, California Baptist University, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, The United Methodist Church, & Wesleyan Investment Foundation, among many others. In our discussion, Kenny educates me on what content marketing is all about. The core of what he does starts with helping clients on their strategic positioning, building internal alignment on the mission and the vision of the organization. Often, this exercise has implications beyond communications and informs strategic decisions the client makes. We also discuss lead generation, and how Kenny helps clients build thirty or more custom landing pages that each focus on a niche audience, providing something of value to earn the right to c

Sri Kaza, a former McKinsey partner who specializes in sales and service, left the firm to put his sales expertise to work as the SVP of Commercial Operations at Viking Cruises, and subsequently led sales for a company offering a SaaS-based solution to obtaining tax credits. Sri is now running his own independent consulting practice while also developing two separate SaaS startups. One of them is a tool to help companies hire the employees most likely to perform well and stick around, based on academic research and testing that looks at 70 personality traits. The other one helps companies optimize their incoming leads by routing that lead to the right sales person. Sri’s consulting is focusing on these areas, allowing him to better understand unmet needs.  So while he serves clients he is also doing market research for his startups. In our discussion we explore in some detail the concept of how to optimize incoming leads, and Sri shares some initial steps that you can help your clients with. Sri also mentions

Our guest today is Jason Korman, who entered the world of consulting via the wine industry. Jason is the founder of Stormhoek Winery, a South African wine label. While running that label, he retained Hugh MacLeod to blog and draw for Stormhoek, creating one of the the web’s earlier social media campaigns. Even if you don’t recognize the name Hugh MacLeod, you have probably seen his cartoons, which are absolutely distinctive. Hugh’s cartoons are generally about the world of work and marketing, and the drawings are beautiful and abstract, often resembling a cross between Rube Goldberg and Pablo Picasso. I've been subscribing to his daily blog for years and years – check it out at GapingVoid.com My hero Seth Godin is a huge fan of Hugh, and I think that’s how I first discovered him.  Hugh is also the author of the book Ignore Everybody, which I highly recommend. So Jason hired Hugh, and the campaign that Hugh developed was widely successful and won all sorts of awards – while the work helped sell wine, they foun

Our guest today is Ahmad Munawar, who helps boutique professional services firms build actionable marketing plans that generate more leads so they can win more business. He’s got a podcast that I encourage you to check out called “Forecast – Marketing for Boutique Professional Services & Consulting Firms” He’s also got a free video course on lead generation that you can take at fiveleadgen.com In our discussion, Ahmad walks me through the five steps that he suggests we take to build a marketing plan, namely: identifying our target market; developing our positioning; establishing what solution we’ll offer; building a marketing funnel; and creating an action plan. While those may sound like phases that our common to any marketing plan, we dive into what each step means for a boutique consulting firm. You can learn more about Ahmad’s firm at boutiquegrowth.com

On today’s episode, the tables are turned, and our guest, Sophia Dai, interviews Will Bachman. Sophia received her MBA from Kellogg and then spent the past two years at Boston Consulting Group. Now a Senior Associate, she’s decided to leave BCG, and independent consulting is one path that she is considering. Two or three or four times a week Will Bachman has a conversation with a top tier management consultant considering this option. This episode captures one such discussion.  In today’s episode , Will does his best to answer her questions  - including among others: why people decide to pursue the independent path, the first steps to take to start generating project opportunities, and the biggest mistakes people make when they start out.