[Advice] Interviewing for Your Project

The interview process is rife with problems, and the solopreneur consultant has more problems than most at the beginning.

Think about it: If you’ve solved the problem of scaling up from a freelance, “I hire myself because it’s cheaper,” mindset, and have developed a proprietary process that you can sell to others at a price high enough to justify having an employee, only then can you make a hire.

And many solopreneurs/business owners, approach hiring with a mindset grounded in the back end UX they suffered through when they were looking to work for somebody else.

Typically the process goes as follows: You bring people into a room, after putting several of them through a grueling process of assessment—both psychological and sometimes physical. Then you ask them a series of ridiculous, HR designed, pre-formatted questions.

After this, everybody leaves the room and the consultant/solopreneur/business owner makes a blind decision to hire or not hire the people put through the process. This decision typically follows a series of arbitrary, meaningless, showy conversations with partners and others, that have told nothing about how well the potential employee can perform in the position; and, have everything to do with intangible–and potentially illegal to consider–character traits.

This is the interview process and a lot of times both the interviewer and the newly hired individual is dissatisfied with what happened in the room.

Look, if you’ve successfully leapfrogged to business owner from freelancer, then there are three things that you should be looking for before you even think about going down the hackneyed road of interviewing:

Is the person that I am talking to conscientious?
Is the person that I am talking to accustomed to failure and does this person have the grit to get through it?
Is the person that I’m talking to going to fulfill the material needs of my business at a human level?

That’s it. Those are your interview considerations.

Now, you’re an entrepreneur first and a business owner second. Go blow up the model of the process.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Working From Home

The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. Right?

When you’re working from home, there approaches a point of contention, unless you are very clear right away, around what working means and doesn’t mean.

There are children who don’t think that what you’re doing is work.

There is the partner who leaves the house everyday and leaves you with a stack of “Honey-Do’s” that could choke…well…an old gray mare.

There are the general disturbances of the household and addressing household emergencies that crop up during the day, as well as distractions from other forms of entertainment in the home.

The savvy consultant working from home knows that defining lines, particular boundaries and even the well articulated IRS deduction can determine whether success or failure knocks at his door—or at the door of the co-working location two streets over.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Making Yourself Livable With Others

If you are dedicated to building your entrepreneurial business, it’s going to be tough for someone to live with you.

There are two ways to deal with this:

You can hope that your idea is so good, that it stands out above the other 95% of ideas out there in your niche/target market and that customers, clients and vendors in that very narrow space, will beat a path to your door. Then, you will become the darling of Silicon Valley (or whatever valley you find yourself in) and you partner—in life or in business—will just come along for the ride, relieved that it only took 3 years for you and your idea to make the cover of Fast Company or Inc.

Or…

You can take a long, hard look at your idea and determine that the only thing that separates you from everybody else is—well—you, and then talk to your partner—first the life one—and explain to him or her, exactly how all of this is going to play out.

Explain the long nights, the depressive moods, the brushes with financial, emotional and spiritual failure.

Explain the loss of courage and the regaining of it.

Explain that all of this might not work—as a matter of a fact, in the first year there is a good shot it won’t work–and you’ll have to go back to your 9-to-5 to pay back that massive home equity loan you foolishly took out to fund your dream.

Neither way is good, but the most clear eyed, entrepreneurial consultant, knows that she has to have the courage to have this first, most important, sales conversation with her significant partner, before she can have another…and another…and another…

In the meantime, she should get a hobby that is as far away from what she is doing as possible so that she has something else to talk about, other than either being on the cover of Fast Company or her latest near miss.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Talking to the People Who Don’t Matter

The people who never believed in you.
The people who said “that’ll never work.”
The people who mutter under their breath at family dinners or cocktail parties.
The people who write ridiculous, inflammatory comments on your blog.

These are just a sample of the people who don’t matter.

Why, if you’re building a consulting or coaching business, are you still trying to convince them of the rightness of your pursuit, the importance of your ideas or the validity of your life?

The people who fall into these categories (and there are many more) have never mattered to the success or failure of this project you are on.

And, fortunately, they never will.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Talking to Your Partner

The professional consultant and coach most often acts as a solopreneur.

She is most often alone in the pursuit of dream.

She is typically overwhelmed by concerns about accounting and how much she must charge to make a profit, how her marketing is working (or not) and multiple other competing priorities.

She is alone in her business and her business practice, but she is not alone in her overall life.

She has a partner and/or friends. No woman is an island. She’s driven, but she has to make two decisions early:

How to pick a partner or friend

How much to tell that person about her solopreneurship.

The best practice is to be as honest as possible with intimate partners (and business partners are about as intimate as possible without taking off your clothes) and tell the other party, just how long it’s going to take to scale.

One less conversation to be had can make her life easier and less complicated.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Presenting to the People Who Matter

There are people who matter and people who don’t.

The tough thing is telling the difference between the two.

The line between the successful consultant or coach and the “also ran” is the one who strikes a balance between knowing who are the smartest people in the room…and who are just hanging out waiting to applaud.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Presenting to the Audience You’ve Been Dealt

Consultants and coaches never really choose the audience in front of which they will present.

It is impossible to go inside the mind of each and every individual in the room and determine their motivations, needs, desires and wants.

For the professional consultant or coach—at a certain point—you’re always kind of just winging it.

In fact, the smaller the room, the more intimate the setting, the more winging it looks like a lack of preparation, concentration and expertise.

Which, of course, has the effect of reducing trust and increasing the likelihood that the audience will turn on you.

Don’t worry about the audience that was chosen for you. Worry more about developing the tools to present effectively no matter who—or how many—show up to see you present.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Not Boring People to Tears

When presenting, varying pitch, tempo and word order can help a consultant or coach not bore the audience to tears.

So can having a really awesome twist on a really boring and basic idea, concept or problem solving approach.

The first approach takes time to develop and cannot happen without a good deal of self-critique and continuing training and improvement, on the part of the individual presenting the information.

The second approach involves employing an angle that—once the audience is no longer amazed—can lead to even greater boredom as the thrill of the initial spectacle wears off.

A professional will focus on both of those areas, but there is also a third area with which even the most seasoned professional may struggle:

Being tuned into the emotional vicissitudes of your audience through being aware of body language, micro-expressions and other nonverbal cueing can create the daylight between the presenter who arrives in spectacle and leaves in boredom; and, the presenter who gets invited back time after time.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 1

There are three hard parts to launching any project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).
The second hard part is getting the necessary hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly when the learning curve is steep.
The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience.

Unfortunately, many people get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively about how hard the three hard parts might be, rather than actually taking concrete steps to complete at least one of them.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] ABC for the Consultant

If you’re a consultant, you’re going to want to know the difference between selling and marketing.

So, let’s be clear here at HSCT.

Selling for the consultant is what happens when the client calls you back, signs the check and you deposit it.

Marketing for the consultant is what happens at every step before and after those three moments.

Now, some will say that you are always closing, in the manner of Glengarry/Glen Ross, but we here at HSCT would argue that you as the consultant are always marketing.

-Peace Be With You All-