G.E. Dolbear & Assoc

"Solving technical and marketing problems for companies in the energy and environmental industries."

A consultant has been defined as a person who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is - and then sends you a bill. For a scientist working as a consultant, knowing how to read the watch takes a strong education coupled with years of experience. Technical consulting makes use of all the scientific, problem solving, communication, and personal management skills learned over years in large companies. It is a satisfying and rewarding career offering new challenges every day.

This paper tells how a physical chemist from the petroleum industry got into consulting and why. In it I will discuss some of the most important lessons I learned along the way. Chief among these is the importance of effectively marketing my skills.

This paper was presented at the Symposium “Nonlaboratory Careers in Chemistry and the Sciences” at the 213th ACS National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco, on April 13, 1997. It contains six sections:

Introduction

How I Got Here

Is Consulting For You?

Competitors

Tools

Conclusions

Where To Find More Information

The text is copyrighted 1997 by Geoffrey E. Dolbear. Permission to quote with attribution is given.

This August marks eleven years since I made the decision to become a full time technical consultant and nine years from the day in 1989 when I left my “real job.” During this time I have developed a challenging and exciting career, working from my home office in Southern California. Consulting gives me the freedom to live a good life with my wife and family. I do a variety of interesting projects of varying length in areas that interest me. My clients are a wonderful bunch of people, and I count most of them as friends. That is very important to me.

I have only one problem with my consulting career. I find that I always have more interesting stuff to do than I have time to do it. That means I am too busy having fun to spend enough time fishing. I have not succeeded in solving that problem.

A short talk does not provide the time for me or anyone else to teach someone how to be a successful consultant. Besides, a lot of it is just common sense – like handling your correspondence and accounting in a business-like manner. Instead, I will use my time to give you a short history of how I got into consulting. Then I'll tell you some of the things I have learned from it, in the guise of helping you decide if consulting is right for you. Finally, I'll give you some additional sources of information.

I mark the start of my consulting career in August, 1987. I was standing knee deep in Colorado's Frying Pan River, fly rod in hand, facing upstream, working my caddis fly as it drifted over rainbow trout feeding in a long, smooth run. The Frying Pan is one of the best trout streams in the world. I love fishing it.

Usually when I am fishing, chemistry and other career concerns are far from my mind. That day, from somewhere deep in my subconscious, I was struck by a hard realization: my career with the Union Oil Company had gone as far as it could go. For a lot of good reasons, most of them outside my control, the next ten or twenty years were not going to provide me with many opportunities to grow. I think I knew this intuitively before that day on the Frying Pan. That day, however, was when the knowledge settled into my gut.

For the next several months I pondered my alternatives. My position as a research associate in Unocal's Brea technical center paid well, and as far as I knew, I could stay there and "retire in place." I could also update my resume and find a job in another company. Or, I could try something completely different and become an independent consultant.

Frankly, this third alternative was one that I wondered about since the late 1960s.

Of course, what I did not know in 1987 is that the “retirement in place” option was not realistic. Unocal has closed its labs and has sold its refining and marketing operations to Tosco Corporation. Had I decided to stay, I probably would have been without a job and looking for new employment by 1995. Many of my friends experienced just that, and several of them have become consultants.

I wasn't going into this completely blind. I've had many contacts with consultants during my research career. Most were University Professors who consulted on the side, but one was an independent engineer from New Jersey. He taught me that consulting can provide a satisfying career.

I have since asked myself just why I chose the consulting alternative. The reasons are complex, but mostly I was just tired of having important decisions about my life made by other people. Those decisions were often made based on what was good for others, not on what was good for me. It was important for me to be in charge of my career.

My first step was to sketch a plan to take myself from where I was to full time consulting. I chose a two--year target to build a business in my spare time, collect a financial cushion, and learn the needed skills. I also chose to work outside the petroleum refining area to avoid conflict of interest with my position at Unocal.

I began to learn about being a consultant. I bought and read an excellent book, Herman Holtz's How to Succeed as an Independent Consultant, now in its third edition. I recommend it without reservations to anyone considering this business. I learned a tremendous amount from Holtz. The most important was that no consultant can be successful unless he is good at finding clients. That's when I started to learn about marketing.

When you work inside a big company, you usually know who your customer is and where to find her or him. The exception is in hierarchies with hidden agendas.

Finding a client outside is harder. If you look around for an example of someone who finds large numbers of customers, you think right away of Proctor and Gamble, Miller Brewing, or GM. Each spends hundreds of millions every year on advertising to keep sales and profits high. As a little guy, I cannot afford that kind of marketing. I believe it would not work anyway because people rarely buy consulting services from ads. The reasons for that would form the basis for another paper.

There are many ways to find potential customers without advertising, and I have become skillful at several of these. For several years, I served as a part-time Director of Marketing for a small engineering company, connecting my client with customers who do over a million dollars a year in engineering business for his staff.

I have recently begun using the Internet as a marketing tool. I now have a web page on Earthlink that my son Tim put together for me, and we update it regularly. I post my newsletter there, and you can find an earlier version of this paper there as well. The address is:
http://www.gedolbear.com/

So far, the primary function of the web page has been to provide information to people who already know of me. I am listed on search engines, so it may bring me work from others, as well.

My opening mentions that I work from my home. I am proud to be one of the growing legion of independent business people working from home offices.

I use two rooms on the second floor of the house. One of these is my main working office, with a large desk area, my computers, and everything I need regularly. This includes a two-line telephone and a small stereo permanently tuned to my favorite classical music station.

The second room contains filing and storage, along with a work table for my copier. This dedicated annex is a recent addition. Here I have books, files, and supplies that were previously stashed in various rooms and closets about the house. The annex also has a desk, which has been used occasionally by associates who were around for the day.

My office does not have space to meet with clients and associates. Usually I go to them or we meet on neutral turf, often over coffee or lunch. On a few occasions, we have held meetings in my living room.

Physically and emotionally, my home office is an excellent place to work. The overhead could hardly be lower. I tell people the commute is short, and the lady who runs the place treats me nice.

The major problem with a home office is that the work is always there. There is a great temptation to go back into the office after dinner for some little task. Another consultant told me that her rule of thumb for going into the office to do a task is “Would I drive thirty minutes to the office in the evening to do that work?” If the answer is no, she does not go.

My Random House Dictionary defines a mentor as "a wise and trusted counselor." My mentor is that and more. He is Ike Yen, a friend and former coworker from my days at Occidental Petroleum. Ike became a consultant after Occidental closed its labs in 1982. Ike's PhD is in chemical engineering, from MIT, but at Occidental he got into the environmental and safety areas. That's where he now consults, and he does very well.

During 1988 and 1989, Ike and I had lunch together about once a month. I'd tell Ike what I'd done since our last lunch and what I had learned from it. Ike listened and added information from his own experiences.

I owe a lot to Ike. I have no effective way to repay him for the value he has given me. Instead, I do my best to help others who want to break into the field.

By the summer of 1989, I felt I was ready to cut the corporate umbilical cord. I had more consulting work than I could accomplish nights and weekends, and I had enough in savings to keep us several months without income. September 6 was my last day as a corporate employee. I spent it passing out business cards to all the friends I was leaving.

That autumn was a very busy time, and I did very well. There have been ups and downs since then, but the ups are far in the majority. I have continued to add new clients, and I have lost a few as their needs changed.

In 1993, I finally did a project for my old employer, Unocal. I tell you this because I want you to know you should not expect consulting work from the company you leave. You must find new clients outside the old area or you risk catastrophe.

Through all of this, my wife Cathy has been my greatest supporter. At the start, she disliked the idea of giving up the regular income that came with a corporate job. We had a daughter in college and a son about to start. Her responsibility was and is to ensure the stability of the household, and my leaving a good-paying job doesn't fit with that. Through it all, however, her faith in me never wavered.

Things have worked out well, and we both love the lifestyle we have developed. Cathy and I go out for lunch almost every day. (In California, we call that "doing lunch.") It's our way of making sure I do not become a workaholic.

If your reason for becoming a consultant is to get rich, consulting is probably not for you. I make a lot more than I ever did working for a company, but I'd have to build a hierarchical organization to generate a really impressive income. If getting rich is not your goal, here are some things you should consider.

All the management books tell you to write a business plan before you start. They are right. Unfortunately, many of the books are written by people who think a business plan is a cash-flow analysis. Before you start thinking about money, I recommend you create a short written plan about what you will do and how you will do it. That will lead naturally to the part about money. The plan will tell you what strengths to emphasize and what you need to learn to overcome your weaknesses.

All the management skills you learn in your career are valuable in running a consulting practice. Those include but are not limited to planning, budgeting, and reporting. Reporting includes both written and oral reports.

If you know anything about business and accounting, you know that profit is the standard measure of business success. These days profit seems to have been placed above godliness as a goal. However, cash flow is at least as important as profit for a small business. Cash flow is a measure of how the checks arriving balance the expenses going out. If a client’s accounting group holds up my checks for several months, I cannot easily defer house and utility payments to make up. My check book begins to look anemic. This is a cash flow problem.

A measure of cash flow problems is “working capital.” This is the amount of money I have tied up in balancing cash flow. I typically have about ten thousand dollars difference between what I am owed and what I owe. A few years ago, this gap grew to more than twenty thousand, as companies were holding up payments for several months. In the last year, the number is shrinking again.

Your business plan must consider ways to overcome short-term cash flow problems and the inevitable surprises. I recognized that need early, and I went to my bank six months before I left the corporate womb and set up a home equity line of credit. This has been incredibly valuable. Credit was easy to get while I was in a corporate job, but not so easy after the break. Bankers demand nice long financial track records when they commit money.

There is an old joke about a musician asking directions in New York City. He approaches a cop on the corner and asks “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The cop responds “Practice, practice, practice!”

In consulting, the answer is marketing. This is the task of finding clients who will use your services. This is usually harder than solving their technical problems. Marketing will require you to work with many different people. If you like that and are good at it, then marketing should not be a problem.

The best kind of marketing is personal networking. This is the slow but effective method of getting to know people and helping them get to know you.

My most important marketing tool is my newsletter, The Freebie. It allows me to keep up with my network of contacts, prospects, and clients on a regular bimonthly basis. It goes to more than three hundred readers and is posted on my web page as well.

Before your marketing can be very effective, you must define what kind of service you want to sell. Is yours a narrow specialty, such as emulsion polymers used in paints and adhesives? Are you a broad problem solver who can add something useful in many areas? Are you multidisciplinary, with several years deep experience in several different areas?

That last one describes me. My thesis work was in physical inorganic chemistry, studying the mechanisms of solution reactions. I spent about seven years each in heterogeneous catalysis, coal chemistry, and petroleum refining process chemistry. (I also did polymer chemistry for three years at DuPont.) Along the way I became a freelance writer and published articles in CHEMTECH, Chemical Engineering, and several fishing magazines.

Whatever describes you, it can probably be the basis for a consulting practice. You have to decide who you are before you can tell a prospective client what you can do for him or her.

Herman Holtz suggests having several profit centers. These are related business areas with different time constants. An example Holtz uses is writing books for publication and writing proposals for other people. Books take a long time to write and they can be worked on intermittently. Proposals take a month or two and must be written to a deadline.

Big companies try to do this. Oil companies, for instance, find, produce, and transport oil and natural gas. They also refine oil and operate gas stations. Many make and sell chemicals. They structure these businesses so some are up when others are down. Companies that do only refining or only production can look very good when their area is up, but they are hurt when it is down.

Consultants can have profit centers on a much smaller scale. I have clients who use me every month, year around. I have others who use me a lot for two or three months and then may not need me for a year. A half dozen or so have used me for one project and may not need me again. This mix works very well for me. Some use my refining experience, others my writing, and one uses a combination of the two. Several use me to help them find new customers.

Persistence is critically important. Building your business will be slow, and it can take one to two years before you develop a living income. During that time it can be tempting to toss all your work aside and go to work for someone else. That's especially so if you have a family to feed.

Self discipline falls in the same category. Working for yourself, building a business, takes many, many hours. It would be very easy to take off a couple afternoons a week and go fishing or play tennis or watch old movies on TV.

I make it a practice to be at my desk by nine every morning. Except for my long lunch, I work until six thirty. I used to do a couple more hours every evening, but that is becoming less common. I still work most Saturdays, but take off most Sundays.

Self discipline also means dressing the part. I am always dressed for work, usually in levis, a sweatshirt, and sneakers. Some people feel more business-like in a white shirt and tie; that is what they should wear. When I visit clients, I dress to the occasion. My clients are paying for a top notch consultant, and I do not want them to have reason to doubt that's what they are getting.

An effective consultant also must be comfortable with people. I have a good friend who is uncomfortable around people he does not know. He is very good is his technical specialty, but his inability to approach new people makes it very hard for him find new clients. His consulting practice has suffered.

Only you can decide if you have the personality to be happy and successful in this career.

I call my company G.E. Dolbear & Associates. When people ask how many associates I have, I usually respond with the joke that “When you’re a consultant, you must call your company something and associates - it’s a rule or they toss you out of the consulting club.”

When we finish joking about that, I tell them the real story – I have more than 50 associates. They include chemists, engineers, physicists, geologists, a couple of writers, two attorneys, and a marketing specialist. Some are consultants, some work in big companies, several own small companies. One is a recruiter. The association is informal in most cases, although I am listed formally as an associate in a company in Salt Lake City.

All of my associates are super people. We trade information, cooperate on projects, refer business to one another, and help each other for free whenever asked. They make it much easier for me to do my job, and I like to think I make life easier for them.

All the successful consultants I know make use of some kind of network of associates.

No business operates in a vacuum. The marketplace is filled with competitors of all kind, providing similar services at a range of prices. At first blush, you might suppose that my major competitors are other consultants. I rarely find that to be the case. In fact, I have never had a prospect call and tell me that he had decided to go with another consultant. For that reason, I have no reservations about working and sharing information with other consultants.

Over the years, I have had a lot of potential projects come my way. I have found these usually have one of three fates:

In the latter two cases, potential clients are often using me and other outside consultants as sources of free information. Sometimes it is clear from the start that he wants a detailed proposal as a means of “picking my brain.” I consider this dishonest, but it is common. For instance, the prospective client may not know whether the project is right for him. By collecting proposals from one or several consultants he can get a better estimate of time and costs, allowing him to estimate potential profit. In essence, he is getting free consulting.

I have already mentioned many of the physical tools I use. In addition to my computer, I have a fax machine and a small copier. I also maintain a good technical library, including several file drawers filled with reprints and old reports.

My personal computer is my most important and most valuable. I use it to do calculations, analyze data, write reports, record my income and expenses, and to track who owes me money. I use a dedicated database program as a computerized Rolodex for clients, contacts and prospects. Since so much of my business data exists on the hard disk, I am fanatical about daily, weekly and monthly backups.

I also have a laptop computer for use when I travel. It allows me to monitor my email daily when I am on the road. If I were starting today, I would buy only the laptop, the best I could afford. I would use it with a docking station and large monitor in the office.

I have an answering machine for calls that come when I am not at home. An answering service might work as well, but I prefer the machine.

I was on my own for a couple of years before I added a fax and a small copying machine. Both are very useful, but each cost about $500 at that time. I deferred buying them by using my neighborhood mailbox store for these services. This store provides all the functions of a company mail and copy room except the office scuttlebutt.

Fax has become an indispensable tool, and the price has fallen by more than half. I would not defer buying one today. It is easy to send fax messages directly from the computer, but I find the computer somewhat unreliable for receiving, so I rely on the standalone machine.

Electronic mail has also become an indispensable tool, and I rely on my CompuServe subscription for my e-mail address. Besides routine messages, I use it for moving text around when working with other consultants on joint projects. Surprisingly, I find that many people resist using this valuable tool, hobbling themselves in the process.

A consultant is in the information business. If I do not know the answer to a client's question, I must be able to find it in reasonable time. I rely on a variety of tools for this.

I have a good, small technical library, built over three decades. This is a must. It includes books, handbooks, and three journals. I also have drawer upon drawer of reprints and photocopies. One bookcase is filled with catalogs, phone books, and special directories. My collection continues to grow as projects evolve and old texts become out of date, giving support to my wife's contention that I am a like a cancer, filling all the space available in the house. I budget a thousand dollars a year for books and subscriptions.

I am fortunate to have several good technical libraries within an hour's drive of my office. These have journals and abstracts that I need. I have arranged for borrowing privileges at four of these.

For on-line searching I rely on another consultant, Shirley Radding. I have not mastered the subtleties of effective on-line journal searching, and Shirley does it well. She's a good chemist, so it's easy to explain what I need. She's prompt and always reliable. I also use a service that will send me photocopies of any article by mail.

I must mention the growing availability of on-line resources. One of the newest is IBM’s free patent site, allowing me to search that patent literature rapidly and thoroughly. It is easy to review claims, and full-text information for most patents is also on-line. They have an arrangement that allows users to have photocopies sent by mail or fax off-line for a few dollars.

Medical insurance has been our most vexing problem. For people with a working spouse, insurance is easy. For the rest of us, the story is tougher. This is especially true for anyone who ever had any health problem. Plan to pay extra and to settle for reduced coverage.

In the last year, we have been fortunate to link up with a group of self-employed people with reasonable coverage. The group is a labor union, independent stone masons from San Bernardino County. We joined in 1997 and have been very pleased – so pleased that I will be quite willing to carry a picket sign for them if they find themselves in a labor dispute!

Technical and management consulting is an excellent career for me. It satisfies my need to be my own boss, and it gives me the opportunity to help some great people solve interesting problems.

A consulting practice takes a while to build. I think it would be more difficult for someone under forty to build a practice than it was for someone in middle age. Many of the needed skills and contacts take years to develop. A good industrial research job is one place to develop them.

Consulting takes no special schooling or licensing. The capital costs are low, and the freedom is large. The major entry cost is loss of income during startup.

Libraries and bookstores are filled with books and magazines on every conceivable aspect of business, from marketing to accounting. All of these can be useful.

The best overall reference is Herman Holtz's How to Succeed as an Independent Consultant, now in its third edition. It costs about $30 in hardback from John Wiley, and will save you many times that in mistakes and wasted effort. Holtz knows his stuff, and he writes clearly, making it easy to learn from him.

For small businesses, a good way to learn about marketing is Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing, (about $10 in paperback from Houghton Mifflin). Levinson has at least two Guerrilla Marketing follow-on books, as well. Another source is Getting Business to Come to You by Paul and Sarah Edwards and Laura Clampitt Douglas, (about $10 in paperback from Jeremy Tarcher). It covers much the same ground from the perspective of the small, self-employed business person. Paul and Sarah Edwards are experts on operating home based businesses. They have written several other useful books, have a syndicated weekly radio program, and contribute a regular column to Home Office Computing. This is easily the best current magazine on operating a small business, especially from home. It has a continuing stream of good information on starting and running many kinds of small businesses.

Many courses are given by colleges and individuals. I spent a very worthwhile day in William Mooney's How to Build and Maintain a Profitable Consulting Practice. He teaches the widely used Howard Shenson course. Call him at 310-719-1760 for information. I know several other consultants who have also found this course to be valuable.

Audio tape courses are widely available. They cover marketing, sales, negotiation skills, and so on. I have used several from Nightingale Conant.

Computers can supply information of all kinds through direct access via the Internet and through special interest forums and groups on CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. Most of these services are free, and will give you free time on-line for signing up. I have learned a tremendous amount on CompuServe’s Working From Home forum on topics ranging from accounting to marketing.