Building a Virtual Consultancy

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organisations to embrace remote working. However for many of us in consulting working remotely is nothing new and there have been a deluge of blog posts and articles giving tips and tricks for working effectively from home.

This article is a bit different. I'm going to go beyond looking at how individuals and small teams can get by under lockdown and instead look at how you can setup and run a successful consultancy business without any office.

Starting Up

To get your consultancy off the ground you are going to need three things.
• Product
• Process
• Prospects

Product

For a consulting business you need to decide whether you are selling expertise by the hour or bundled solutions for a fixed price. Either way you will need to be able to deliver on your promises. So find a technology or niche in which you can be an expert and exploit it. To grow you will need to attract other people to join you who can also deliver the niche expertise so get networking and building a pool of trusted colleagues.

Process

All organisations have processes and so will your consultancy. However always go for cloud or online processes first. Don't be tempted to start storing databases on old laptops or building up stacks of paper forms. Migrating from an on premise process to the cloud is not fun so start in the cloud and scale up from there.

Prospects

You aren't going to get very far if you have no-one to buy your product. Identify prospects that align to your niche. Who has tricky problems that you already know how to solve? Find them and make contact. A great way to do this is to build a reputation in your niche. For example if you are aiming to build a Salesforce consultancy go to the Developer and Administrator meetup groups, speak at them, demonstrate your expertise to the people who can influence the budget holders at your target companies.

Building Out

Once you have your first couple of engagement sorted it is time to start getting structured about how you run your consultancy. You will need to consider the following:
• Business Support
○ HR Processes
○ Recruitment
○ Performance Management
○ Pensions and Benefits
○ Insurance
○ IT
○ Asset Tracking
• Sales
○ Sales Processes
○ Client Management
○ Partner/Alliance Management
○ Contracting
○ Invoices
○ Sales Tools and Assets
• Delivery Management
○ Resourcing
○ Project Tracking
○ Project Closure
○ Delivery Assets
• Knowledge Management
○ Training
○ Certification
○ Wiki

All of these myriad items can be delivered via processes implemented on cloud systems. I have experience of this on Salesforce. I worked at a consultancy where all our processes were implemented in our Salesforce org or similar cloud provider.

Growing and maintaining a positive culture

This is the most important area for a remote or virtual consultancy. How can you ensure that customers and employees get a consistent and good experience when interacting with your business? The answer is by fostering a positive and inclusive culture where everyone in the business is agreed and aligned with the goals and working practices of the organisation.

But how?

Start with a clear goal for your consultancy and communicate this to the people you hire. Are you building a lifestyle business or are you building something to sell? What is the point of your business? Decide on this and communicate it clearly to attract people who align with your goals.

To make the virtual organisation work you must get everyone to buy in to it. Look at the positive aspects of remote working and address the negatives with mitigations. Here are some of the more popular objections along with some suggested mitigations

Remote workers don't get to interact face to face

Use video conferencing on all calls to get face to face. Sometimes people like to hide that they are working from home but using video calling helps to fill in some of the non-verbal communication that is lost on a phone call. It also helps to keep people focused on the call and not getting distracted by emails or other tasks.
Suggested Tools 
Google Hangouts, Skype, Microsoft Teams

How can I keep track of where my team is and what they are working on?

Be disciplined about everyone having a daily 'check in'. This works well as a short message to your colleagues about where you are, what you are doing today and how yesterday went. This allows everyone to keep in touch and aware of what everyone is working on. Doing this as a post on a work social media feed like Salesforce Chatter or Slack means that people aren't deluged by email and don't have to sit through a long stand-up call for the entire company.
Suggested Tools 
Salesforce Chatter, Microsoft Yammer, Microsoft Teams,
Slack

It is hard to build connections with people if you don't meet them face to face

Have one day a month where you get the entire company into a room. Set this aside from client projects and use the time to review the state of the business in the morning then do some fun team building activity in the afternoon.
Suggested Action
Book a meeting room in a hotel or business centre

There are so many channels for communication how do we know what to use when?

To mitigate this one you need to decide what channels work best for what types of activity. Things to consider are timeliness, audit trail, search-ability and accessibility. As an example we decided that we would use Skype chats for messages that needed an immediate response. We used salesforce chatter desktop for non-urgent FYI type of information and the daily check-ins. Each project would have a separate skype channel for communicating between team members.  We minimised email completely and only used it for communicating outwards with prospects or clients where we could not use skype or chatter.

How can we manage our knowledge so that we don't lose it if people leave?

With everyone working in different locations you might think it would be difficult to retain knowledge about how things have been done, gotchas and mistakes etc. However take a look online and you will see a plethora of solutions. Stack Exchange is a particularly good example of knowledge management for very diverse communities. There are commercial versions of Stack Exchange that can be deployed internally for you to manage your knowledge in a natural Q and A style. The process should work as follows. Someone encounters a problem, they search the knowledge base of questions and answers for some keywords relating to their problem. If they find the answer, great they can stop and apply that answer and give some kudos to the answerer before moving on. If their problem is unique they create a new question capturing the crux of the matter and then push a link to it out on the more immediate channels such as skype or slack to find out if anyone else has an answer. The team then comes together to find an answer and the once found the person who encountered the problem writes up the solution as an answer to their question on the knowledge base.
Suggested Tools
Stack Exchange, Quandora, Wiki

How can I ensure everyone has a safe and secure working environment?

There are two aspects to this, one is the safety and suitability of each persons working environment, the second is the security of that environment.
Setting out from the point of recruitment it is important to discuss with everyone their preferred working environment. To work effectively each person is going to need a permanent desk in a quite room in their house. It will be necessary to do a home working assessment as specified by the HSE (https://www.hse.gov.uk/toolbox/workers/home.htm).
If the candidate does not have a suitable working environment at home there are however alternatives. Shared and serviced office space is a good alternative, although not in a pandemic lockdown situation.
To address security you should educate everyone about information and physical security and promote a paperless environment. Laptops should be locked away each night if left in a shared office space. Children should not be permitted to play on corporate laptops or phones. When left alone on a desk laptops should be secured with a lock wherever possible and if that isn't possible they should be packed up and taken along with you.

How can I meet face to face with clients if I don't have an office? 

There is certainly a lot of cachet in a swanky office with luxurious pot plants or a two story fish tank. However if you are building a new business there is no need to sink capital into an office. Professional bodies like the BCS and IET or IoD offer meeting room hire at reduced rates for members in their offices so join a professional body and make use of the facilities. Or meeting rooms can be hired at serviced offices or hotel business centres. Quite a lot of the time though prospect clients will be more than happy to meet at their office, it involves less travel for them. Some may even be happy with an informal meeting in a pub or restaurant.

Summary

In this article I have discussed what to consider when setting up a consultancy consisting of exclusively remote workers. The key things to remember when starting up are, Product, Process, and Prospects. Build all your processes in the cloud, go paperless. Be very clear about your goals and purpose, hire people who align with those goals. Build a positive culture using daily check-ins, monthly face to face meetings, video calling and through a shared knowledge management system.

Throw off the shackles of the physical world and build a virtual future.