How Women Consultants Can Find The Right Place to Flourish
This was originally posted on my Seven Figure Consultant LinkedIn Newsletter. Subscribe today to get insights about how women are building powerful and impactful consulting businesses.
You don’t fit the stereotype.
Yes, you run a business, and you want to be taken seriously. But you’re not a stuffy middle-aged man in a suit trading on 30 years experience of doing things exactly the same way. Women often do business really differently to men, so the traditional corporate ‘business breakfast’ networking groups full of ‘old boys’ don’t really fit for the kinds of businesses you want to get in front of.
Yes you want the freedom and satisfaction of being your own boss. But we’re never likely to find you in a cocktail dress on the beach with a Macbook Pro balanced on your lap. The pink and sparkly unicorn ‘female entrepreneur’ circles don’t appeal to you.
But nor do the macho ‘bro-preneur’ communities wearing sweatpants and baseball caps – those online communities with a very masculine energy and way of communicating. Emails with short to the point sentences. A very direct way of communicating.
None of this is wrong, but none of it quite addresses the situation of women consultants.
In normal circumstances, there is a strong in-person element to your business and the services you provide, but you also make use of online networking and online marketing in significant ways.
Your corporate clients expect a consistent level of professionalism from you and that you will be geographically consistent, even if you aren’t based in the same place or the same country they are. For a lot of my consultant clients, they will nearly always do at least some of their sales process in person with their corporate clients, and possibly also be physically present with their client for part of the project they are delivering.
And that has a knock-on effect in terms of how you present yourself and how you conduct yourself.
You might dress down at home, but you dress up for client meetings. They’re looking for professionalism, and someone who doesn’t look out of place in their corporate office. And as a consultant, you need to show up in ways that communicate visually and verbally to your clients that you understand their world, and that you can deliver your consulting services at the high standard that they themselves aspire to and expect from you.
Depending on your business, some of you may actually exclusively work with corporate women, especially if there’s a coaching element to your business. But the style of communication you use will often be genderless because the CEOs and C Level executives you engage with will feature men as well as women.
The content that’s designed to help businesses market to end consumers, or entrepreneurs, doesn’t work for people who sell to corporates. So be careful about what you focus on, and make sure you apply the right filter. Ask yourself ‘is this right for me? Is this right approach for my specific audience?’
You have to work hard to filter out the advice they’re reading and listening to and usually ending up focusing on the wrong strategies to grow their business.
If you’d like to find a crowd where you do fit in as a consultant, I run a mentoring group called the Work Less Earn More Mentorship.
It’s a safe space for consultant women like you to share, learn, grow, network, and most of all – find a way to run your business that energises, not depletes, you.
We’re all about collaboration over competition, sharing successes, brainstorming solutions, and getting back to making business FUN again.
If you’d like to find out more about the Work Less Earn More Mentorship and how to become a member, let me know and I’ll send you all the details.
Free Report – The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Consulting Business
I’ve created a free PDF report called The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Business. It’s my most popular free resource and in it I outline the 6 areas of unscaled businesses that need to change in order to move past being ‘booked up and burned out’ and shifting into that higher gear that gets you cruising again.
It’s the framework that helps consultant women like you find their feet and get back to leading the business, rather than being buried in client work and back-end business operations.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your feedback and future topics you’d like me to feature. You may also enjoy The Seven Figure Consultant Podcast, the show that takes you from booked up and burned out in your consulting business to THRIVING as the CEO of your 7 figure enterprise.