Starting Your CONSULTING Business From ZERO!

How to start a consulting business. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Raman, who's finishing up university and wants to start a consulting business and he wrote in to ask me this. Mr. Carmichael, you can always call me Evan, after taking a consulting role internship, I found consulting to be my passion. I'd like to start my own consulting business, but I don't have the credibility or customer references that would help me get my first customer. "I believe I have the knowledge to provide small businesses with great advice, but I need the opportunity and trust from a small business to get me started. What is your advice?" "Your videos are more inspiring than my university business classes." Happy face. So, uh, thank you for that compliment. Uh, here's the thing, okay? It's great that you did this internship, that you learned about the business. What I would recommend you to do, number 1, is go get a job. He's like, what, the entrepreneur guy Evan is telling me go get a job? Yeah, go get a job. It's going to do a couple things. One, it's going to really tell you, do you want to be a consultant or not? Right? So you found out about consulting that this is your passion through this internship. So continue on. Continue on and see if this is something you want to continue rising doing. But also it's going to give you credibility and it's going to give you experience. Okay, you're going to get some experience working from a consulting business and you can see hopefully how they built their business. I wouldn't go and work at a big consulting company. And work at a smaller one. Work at a company that is, you know, 10 people, somebody you respect, look up to, want to be like. Get involved in as many projects as you can, learn from the entrepreneur. You don't want to learn just how to be a consultant, you want to learn how to build a business. Because there's so much that goes into building a consulting practice beyond just providing the service to your clients. So go and get that experience, and instead of trying to do everything yourself, Here you are, you're getting paid, and you're getting paid to learn. So, you know, I have a Zuga guide called Work to Learn that goes through this step by step that can guide you through the process. It's a great resource, but it's so important to go out and do this because I don't want you to go out, try to launch your business, not get any customers, and then have to go back and get some kind of job, right? It's better to get the job, learn. You're getting the job for the whole purpose to learn, not just to make money. You're not just getting some job because it's high paying. You're getting to learn about the business. And again, that smaller company, 10 employees, where you can connect with the entrepreneur founder and learn about how they built the business, get involved in as many things as possible to learn. So when you go and you launch your own company full-time, you can hit the ground running. The second thing I would do is start part-time. So start your own business on the side, part-time. It's okay, you don't have to jump in full-time right out of university. Start part-time. So you're working At a consulting gig, you're learning everything you need to learn, you're building up experience, you're building up credibility, you're building up contact. At the same time, start on the side part-time. That may even be taking on a few small business clients for free just to get them started. But you're starting part-time to, to get the experience and practice of how to find clients, of working with them, of it being your own brand, your own name, but it's not like everything is hinging on this being successful because you still have your job that's paying you money, that you're learning from. You may even discover that small business isn't the right market for you. It's really hard to be successful as a consultant selling to small businesses because they don't have money, right? Entrepreneurs don't have money. We always need money. So it's hard to get what you're worth as a consultant selling to entrepreneurs. You're probably looking at people who are a little bit more established, otherwise you're doing things for free, right? Like, I don't have a consulting business Instead, I do videos and I do things on a, on a more mass scale because I can either sell advertising or I can incorporate partnerships and sponsorships because it's too hard to get money out of small business owners. So something to think about, but start part-time. You'll discover where your market is, you'll discover how to sell, but it's not totally dependent on you going out and doing that full-time for your business. Third thing is watch more videos. So if you've gotten a lot of inspiration from my videos, that's great. Thank you so much. Watch more. Like you can watch mine, but also watch other people. If you're learning, when I get on these videos, most of them are answering people's questions, right? This is the stuff that you are going to have to do. Answer entrepreneurial questions so you can learn through osmosis. You can learn from watching my videos and learning from the experiences that I'm going through, sharing my stories, and all the entrepreneurs who write in, you're learning from their stories and other people too. If there's other entrepreneur people who you like on YouTube, who have a great message, watch them as well. You're gonna learn and gain more if you find that more helpful and useful than your university classes, which I would probably happen to agree with myself. Then keep doing that because that's part of your education, something that you love doing, something you love watching that's gonna help build you up. And something that I say or something that somebody else might say may prove to be really relevant to one of your clients. And you know what, if you build a relationship, so you know me now a little bit, If you start working with a client, and it may not be for a lot of money, it may even be free, you can even write in, like you can ask me, how would I solve this problem? Or ask other people, how would they solve that problem? And so you're building off the experience of all these other people too that you can bring back to your client. So hopefully that helps. Thank you so much for the great comment and for your viewership and watching all the videos. I really appreciate it. For those of you guys watching, thumbs up below if you like it. Leave a question, leave a comment. I can make a video response for you just like I did on this one. And if you want to see more videos more videos like this, you can click on my face to subscribe. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.