I’ve had a few people ask me recently for advice on getting into business intelligence/analytics consulting. I have been in consulting for 6+ years and have worked for 3 different consulting firms, so I’m sharing my thoughts and experiences here in case they are helpful to someone else. My first response to people asking this question is usually to clarify what they mean by consulting.
What do you envision when you think about consulting?
Do you want to be an independent consultant, work through a placement agency, or work as a full-time employee (FTE) for a consulting firm?
Life looks a little different based upon your answer to this question. I have chosen to work for a consulting firm for a few reasons:
- I like the stability of a salary and paid time off (vacation, holidays, sick days)
- I don’t have to do my own accounting/taxes/collections
- I’m not solely dependent on my sales efforts to bring in work
- I like having smart coworkers that are in the trenches with me
If you are independent, you are responsible for everything. You must take care of (do yourself or outsource) your own accounting, legal, taxes, collections, sales, etc. Even if you outsource some of these functions, you need to stay somewhat involved – you can’t just throw your financial documents over the fence and wipe your hands of them.
And if you aren’t doing billable work and getting the client to pay you, you aren’t getting paid. This means you need some financial reserves to cover slow months.
My independent consultant friends tell me that sales takes up much more time than they had initially anticipated. They are always working to line up that next engagement to avoid having large gaps between projects. It takes work to build up a sales pipeline. Sometimes you can mitigate this by teaming up with other independent consultants or companies to have a lead referral agreement. They can refer clients to you when they need help in your area of expertise. But there is usually no guarantee of work from these other parties, and sometimes they take a cut of the revenue for sending the work to you. You can outsource a lot of things, but sales is rather difficult because you need the salesperson to understand what you do, the value it provides to clients, and what your values and preferences are.
Another issue you face as an independent consultant (and sometimes as a consultant for a very small consulting company) is how to get interesting projects that require multiple people. Let’s say you have found a potential client that wants to do some really cool analytics, but the project requires three people to work together. You’ll need to have with other consultants with whom you can team up to work the project. And even if you have good people you can work with in general, the work needs to fit into their schedules .
As an FTE, I am still responsible for some sales efforts, but we also have a salesperson and other employees to help. And if I don’t sell anything, I still get paid. This is a great thing for my mortgage and my stress levels.
But as an independent consultant, you also are your own boss. You get to make all of the decisions about how and where to spend your time, what office and tech supplies to purchase, what your website looks like, how much vacation you can take, and who you want to do work for. Want to take a month off to travel the world or spend time with your family? You don’t need anyone else’s permission to do that. But you won’t be getting paid if you aren’t working. One way to mitigate this is to create content that can be sold so you have some passive income in addition to your normal consulting engagements. An example of this is creating a business intelligence course and selling it on your website or through an online learning/education company. You could continue to get revenue/royalties as people purchase the course. But do your homework to get realistic expectations about how much extra income this would mean relative to the time it takes to create and update the content.
If you want to be a contractor where you do full-time, often 3- to 12-month, engagements with a company, you can get your own work or you can go through placement firms. Some placement firms offer benefits and some guarantee of work in exchange for a share of the income resulting from your placement. Others take a flat fee (either from you or from the hiring company). This type of consulting is usually paid based upon an hourly rate.
Do you want to be a consultant who is more project-based where you have a specified scope and budget, and you may work for multiple clients at one time? Or do you want to be embedded full-time in an organization?
All consultants/contractors must complete (most of) the tasks and projects they take on, but managing scope and budget are special skills. Some people enjoy that challenge while others do their best to avoid it. If you are essentially a contractor who spends your time with a single client and does whatever comes up, you may have to spend less time and effort managing scope and budget. If your work is more project-based, this becomes an important part of your work.
If you do project-based consulting, you may occasionally have to work with multiple clients at once. This means you have to do a lot of context switching. I have had days where I worked on a Power BI sales report makeover for Client A, helped a coworker with some DAX over lunch, and built a data warehouse with product inventory data in Azure SQL DW in the afternoon for Client B. Clients don’t really think about what we do when we aren’t working for them. They are expecting us to mentally pick right back up where we left off when we get back to them and remember all the project and organizational details. I rather enjoy that variety, but I know that it gets stressful and isn’t a good fit for everyone.
Another aspect of project-based work is the amount of time you get to stay on with a client. Some consultants focus on implementations or health checks and then move on. They aren’t there 6 months later to see how things are going with that new system they implemented, unless the client calls them back. There is good and bad in this situation. The consultant may get a lot of experience with building systems/performing health checks in a short amount of time compared to an FTE not in a consulting role. But they may not be around to understand and experience the consequences of their design, unless they client calls them back. You can always work out retainer or support agreements to hedge this a bit, but it is up to your organization and the client to do so.
Project-based work can also mean you have less stability in your life. It’s difficult to anticipate exactly when an engagement will start or end, when you will need to travel, which nights you may need to work late. But project-based work can also offer exciting opportunities, a great variety of technical work, and the opportunity to learn about different companies and industries within a short amount of time.
What would work best for you?
There isn’t a single right answer to these questions. It’s about what would give you the income, benefits, lifestyle, and type of work that you want.