Hey, how's it going everyone Paul here with Profitable Freelancer and I want to
go over one of the most profitable niches in freelancing that anyone can really start to
work into and work towards and if you already have knowledge and you already have expertise
in a specific area or with a specific platform then you may already be a perfect candidate
to become a business consultant because being a business consultant is actually
one of the most lucrative roles you can find yourself in because business consultants have
the ability to earn hundreds of dollars an hour for their time and their expert advice
and when you go on Google and you just look this up you'll see that a business consultant is
really a project role. It's a job role and you serve as a business consultant to help provide
expert advice and professional advice and that is based on your past experiences, your knowledge,
and what value you have to offer. That's what you're doing as a consultant and you're really
kind of combining your expertise the value that you can provide based on past experiences
and you're helping companies solve problems in specific areas in their business.
Now the reason companies hire business consultants is because they need advice. Sometimes they need
just someone to help them make a specific decision on a strategic level in the company.
So for example let's say it's a company and they need someone to help them for an online marketing
position strategy. That's what they need because they know they need help with where should their
marketing dollars be going are they currently getting the returns that they could be? Is their
budget being allocated correctly? And it really takes a specialist to know what the best thing
to do is in that circumstance. So that's when a company will hire a freelance business consultant
to come in analyze the situation and come up with a strategic plan of action. Now on the other hand
businesses will also bring consultants on board sometimes to actually train their staff.
So let's say in another example you're really good at providing Google Ad services or let's
say Facebook Ads. You can actually get hired as a very high-paid consultant to come into companies
or virtually train companies and train their employees to do those certain skills services etc.
So they are basically paying you because you're teaching their employees how to "fish." So instead
of you just showing them and doing it for them as a consultant, you're getting paid because you're
showing other people and you're helping provide advice that they otherwise wouldn't have had and
that's why this is such a profitable role and I'll throw on the screen right now just some successful
examples. You can just go online go to Upwork, see some people that are doing business consulting
services and just see how much they're making. Like literally hundreds of dollars an hour and I'm
not saying you know everyone can just start there but what I'm saying is if you think freelancing is
just something that is for the side and you can't make a full-time income from it's really not that
way anymore because the way the world has shifted and the online marketplace has allowed companies
to pull high-end consultants from different areas where they otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
Now I want to get into some of the top myths of business consulting and one of the biggest myths
is that you need to have a certain college degree or some sort of certification in order to be a
consultant and in reality all you need is your advice and all you need is your expertise. So I'm
not saying a college degree and a certification doesn't help you but it shouldn't hold you back
because if you can go and you can actually provide some results and you can build your
portfolio up and you can build case studies that show that you've actually helped companies in the
area of consulting that you're providing, that's how you're really going to be able to start to
get ahead of the competition, because they're not just looking at if you have a college degree or
what it says on paper. They want to know what can you do for them have you helped companies in the
past with this. So let's go back to our example before where you're an online Ad consultant for
businesses if you go to a company and you just say "Hey I helped another company that's just
like yours get a 500% return on investment." That means so much more to them than someone saying "Oh
I graduated with a marketing degree," because let's be honest even in college you know I got
a marketing degree they touch very briefly on the online aspect, and yeah of course that's kind of
the strategy in some of the lessons but it's not hands-on. So until you get out there and you're
actually able to make a difference in different companies and get those case studies, that is
really what can help you. even if you don't have a degree. Now let's get into another myth
of business consulting and that's that it needs to be face to face. So you constantly need to be
meeting up with people and traveling all over and taking flights and
that's just not true either and this has really been once again thanks to the real acceleration
of freelance work of remote-based work but all you need to do is have an internet connection,
have a quality computer that you can facetime on a webcam. Something like that maybe a nice
microphone, some lighting and you can start to be a high-end business consultant and you can provide
your knowledge, your expertise, to help businesses and that can all be virtually. So you can do
screen share meetings you can also do one-on-one facetiming where you actually do a demonstration
you can also just do email reports. So there's a lot of different types of actual consulting that
you can do but the whole point of this is that it can be virtual. Also, realize that you can really
maximize your earnings because you can work with businesses and companies that are from all over as
a business consultant so just to kind of recap a business consultant provides their knowledge and
their expertise to help companies solve problems and a lot of the times it all results in the
bottom line right. That's what people go into business for is to make money. So a lot of times
a consultant is helping figure out either where can the business make more money or where are
they kind of spending too much money so there's a lot of different areas you can dive into but on an
overview on an overarching view of what consulting is you're really doing three things and the first
is you're researching. So you're researching the specific company, you're researching the industry
the second thing you're doing is analyzing the data, you're looking at what the company you're
consulting for is doing and the specific issue at hand, and then the third thing you're doing is
presenting all of your findings into suggestions on how they can implement those changes
to help solve the problem. So I know that was a lot to unpack there I just wanted to start to
open this conversation of business consulting. If any of you have done consulting work before
I'd love to hear your experience with it. I'm diving more and more into consulting
because I found that you can only do so much done for your hourly work and things like that but once
you start to get to the consultant level you're really providing your expertise and your value
for money instead of trading your time for money and that's when you really start to see that big
shift and that big difference in your career. I hope that was a helpful video for you
on business consulting and until the next one, I look forward to your success.