4 Sep, 2019

Ask Nicole: Reasons for Turning Down a Prospective Client

By |2021-08-19T20:43:51-04:00September 4th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Here’s a question from Ashleigh, a social worker based in California interested in taking on part-time consulting work:

Hi Nicole!

I’m interested in learning more about your process of taking on client or partnership work. Specifically, do you have any criteria or lessons learned in determining when to take on a new client or project and when to turn someone down? I’m interested in doing consulting on the side to supplement my income, and while I’m cognizant of my capacity, I’m curious to know if there are other reasons I should consider when turning down an opportunity.

Thanks in advance!

Great question!

I’ve already talked about how I’ve gone about getting client work and my process for reflecting on a project, as well as some of my pet peeves, including the RFP process and clients who “ghost”. So, we’ll focus on turning down opportunities.

My reasons for turning down a client or partnership opportunity varies, so what may be a deal breaker in one situation may not be the case for another. Also, my reasons are personal to me and I don’t have to tell a prospective client or partner why I’m choosing not to work with them unless asked, other than to let them know I’m not the best fit.

Nevertheless, here are some reasons why I may turn down a prospective client or partnership opportunity:

I’m not interested in the project

The main reason I transitioned into working for myself was the ability to choose who I want to work with, what I want to work on, and why I want to be involved. Some reasons why I may not be interested in a project can include:

  • The focus of the project or collaboration doesn’t align with my current interests or learning needs 
  • Taking on this project will result in an imbalance of services provided (taking on more evaluation projects when I want to do more research or organizational sustainability projects, for example)
  • Project length (I may be interested in short-term projects while the client is looking for someone for longer, or vice versa)
  • Reputation of the client/partner (questionable leadership, people I know who have had a bad experience with them, etc.)
  • Budget (what the client is willing to pay doesn’t match up with the amount of work they’re requesting)
  • The client or partnership’s work doesn’t align with my business’ mission and values (see last reason)

Clients or partners with questionable communication patterns

If we’ve explored the possibility of working together…and you disappear…come back…and disappear again…only to come back and disappear yet again, I’m also going to assume you were either not serious, not ready, or there’s something going on with your organization’s stability.

Also, sometimes projects may not go forward due to factors not under the client or partner’s control, but when you don’t inform me if this, it makes me questions if dropping communication is something that happens often in your organization. If it’s my responsibility to follow-up with you within a given timeframe, I’ll make every effort to do that; but if it’s yours and you don’t, I’ll take it as a sign that you’re not ready to move forward, you’ve decided to work with someone else, or some other factor.

I like to spread out my projects and travel

I like to bring on projects and partnerships that vary in length and responsibilities. For instance, while I may be onboarding two long-term clients, I might have two projects that I’m halfway through, and two additional projects that I’m wrapping up and doing final reporting on. I also like to spread out my client travel as I try my best not to do too much traveling for one given client in case I need to be in person with another client.

Clients or partners who debate me on my process

How I interact with prospective clients and partners is driven by whether they’ve contacted me or if I’m responding to a solicitation. Along with this, it gives me and the client/partner the opportunity to feel each other out and for me to share how I’ve worked on similar projects with similar clients in the past.

Every agency, business, or organization has policies and procedures. As part of my policies and procedures, I ask prospective clients and partners complete my client/partner questionnaire. In the past year, I’ve buckled down on making sure everyone–prospective or previous clients–complete this questionnaire because I’ve observed that I’d been lax about it with people I knew personally. So now, everyone does it.

Also, depending on if the client has hired me for evaluation services, I have them complete an evaluation capacity measure assessment so I can assess what’s doing on within their organization related to evaluative thinking, leadership support for evaluation, and staff capacity, etc. I’ve had 2 prospective clients push back on this, even though they hired me to help them build evaluation capacity.

Similar to what I observed while working in a more direct service/case management setting, what I’ve learned is that, even when a client presents with one request, what really needs to be worked on and addressed doesn’t appear until after I’ve done a thorough analysis, so when a client is against this part of my process, I decline.

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10 Jul, 2019

Ask Nicole: My #1 Rule for Effective Networking

By |2021-08-19T20:42:09-04:00July 10th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to see answered? Let me know.

I (typically) don’t like networking.

I thought it was because I’m an introvert or that it seemed easier when I was in college, or that I’d say something stupid that would ruin my chances of making a great connection.

Some of my most memorable (and odd) networking experiences include:

  • A women coming up to me during an event, handing me her business card (for a service I didn’t need), and walked away.
  • A conference attendee watching me intently as I spoke, and I could tell that they were honing in on catching buzzwords they could use to determine if it would be worth their time to continuing speaking with me.
  • I was contacted about a potential collaboration with someone I’d never met before, and the only reason they were interested in working me was due to my location, but they didn’t know much else about me or if we’d be a good fit.

One day I realized why I don’t like networking: The focus is on what you can get from someone, rather than building an authentic relationship. The next time you have an opportunity to network with someone, ask yourself:

Would I care about this person if they didn’t have something I want?

I recently spoke to a researcher and evaluator. She contacted me, sharing how she and I were connected (we’re members of a few activists groups and listservs, and she reads my blog), and asked to have a conversation with me because we have many commonalities (being women of color with a passion for social justice and culturally responsive research and evaluation) and she’d like to be intentional in building relationships with potential consultants.

What I thought would be a 30-minute conversation ended up lasting a little over an hour. It was a great conversation where we learned each other’s work and the communities we worked with. We’ve decided to set up ongoing conversations to stay connected. I’m always excited to connect with another woman of color in the research and evaluation space to share advice and potential opportunities, but I’m actually more excited at the prospect of getting to know another researcher and evaluator in this case.

My #1 rule for effective networking is to focus on relationship building from place of really wanting to get the know the person as an individual, and less about what you think this person can do for you.

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27 Jun, 2019

Back to Basics

By |2021-08-19T20:40:54-04:00June 27th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

It’s that time of year, where nonprofits, community-based organizations, and other entities spend down their budgets, finalize funding reports, reflect on their successes and create goals for the new fiscal year.

It’s a pretty hectic time for me as well. While most of my client contracts start on the calendar year, I’m rushing alongside them to get things done by the end of the fiscal year.

One of my goals for Year Four of my business is to go back to basics. Specifically in these three ways:

  1. Blogging about reproductive justice and intersectional analysis was the initial reason people started following my work. While I’ve embedded RJ into the content I’ve created in the past, what I want now is to make more explicit RJ-related content by way of my blogs, future webinars, and trainings. There’s a major difference between learning about RJ and actually incorporating it in our personal and professional lives, and I want to help people bridge that gap.
  2. After processing everything I’ve worked on in the past year with my clients, I’m noticing that there’s a greater need for me to strengthen how I teach and coach my clients, hone in on their learning styles and information retainment, and figure out how to best break down concepts into digestible and easy to understand formats.
  3. When I say “raise your voice for women and girls of color”, how am I working with my clients to actualize this? What does this look like for them? How are they currently doing this, and how does my working with them as a thought partner help them reach this level of engagement with the communities they serve?
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7 Jun, 2019

Ask Nicole: What Does Your Day as a Consultant Look Like?

By |2021-08-19T20:38:46-04:00June 7th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like answered? Let me know.

I’m asked this question often, or some variation of it.

I think it’s because people want to probe what it is I’m actually doing with my time because “consulting” can mean different things. Plus, there’s the assumption that I have more time on my hands compared to someone who doesn’t work for themselves.

The short answer is: It depends.

The longer answer is: It depends on what’s occurring at that point in time during a project, which projects are operating simultaneously, what’s going on with my clients, and what’s happening with my own non-client projects.

On any given day, I may have 2-3 client calls, a webinar meeting to either attend or host for a client, prepping for an in-person presentation or workshop, invoicing, planning out my blog content and newsletter editorial calendar, scheduling social media posts, participating in online forums to seek or give advice, writing a project proposal or end-of-program report, 1:1 coaching with client staff, doing an informational interview for someone interested in what I do, or scheduling a meeting with a prospective client.

Some days I get up and prepare for the day in the way I used to when I worked in an office setting, and some days I literally roll over, grab my laptop, and get started. Some days I work from home, or I’ll head over to the nearest cafe or coworking space.

Some days I’m more productive in the morning, where other days I feel more productive in the evenings. You may see people in online blog posts give a by-the-hour breakdown on what they do, but unless I have to do something at a particular time, I allow my day to flow the way it needs to.

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29 May, 2019

Play Bigger: What I’m Learning After Three Years of Full Time Consulting

By |2021-08-19T20:38:20-04:00May 29th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

On to Year Four!

This Friday will mark 3 years since I left my day to run Nicole Clark Consulting full time on June 1st, 2016.

Time flies, and it’s true what they say about a running a business: It really is like caring for a baby.

In my first year, I hit the ground running. Everything was new and exciting, like a baby taking in all of the new sights and sounds. I was trying to make up for all the time I’d spent building up my business while working full time.

When I entered Year Two, my business started experiencing the Terrible Twos. It literally felt like my business was running me, and not the other way around. All of the business systems I had in place that helped me during my first year were no longer working. I also compared myself to others who have been at this for a while, and I started to doubt myself a lot.

In Year Three, I started to hit my stride and realized that it’s like a marathon, not a sprint. I didn’t have to scale up as quickly as I thought and I started to give myself more grace. I became more mindful about my capacity to take on certain types of projects, and I also gained a greater focus on capacity building in addition to working with clients to implement their projects.

I also made these observations in Year Three:

  • Evaluation has been the focal point of my business, but I no longer want it to be the main attraction
  • I want to do help audiences apply Reproductive Justice thinking on a broader scale and in a variety of settings
  • While working one on one with clients has been great, I want to do more one-to-many work
  • I’m craving more collaboration and collaborative projects with other consultants
  • I did a lot of behind the scenes work in Year Three and it’s time to play bigger

So what’s on deck for Year Four? A few things:

Build up my non-evaluation services: As with many businesses, you cultivate what’s been working well. I did that with evaluation, to the detriment of my other services. So, I quietly took on smaller projects related to research and program/curriculum design and added some program sustainability components to my evaluation projects. I also scrapped the strategic planning services after taking on a few of these projects and realizing that it didn’t interest me all that much to continue this service. I’m also going to be more mindful of the types of evaluation projects I take on, with a focus being on capacity building and incorporating evaluative thinking within organizations.

Go back to basics: The main reason why people started to follow my work is because of my blogging about reproductive justice and intersectional analysis. While I’ve embedded RJ into the content I’ve created in Year Three, what I want now is to make more explicit RJ-related content by way of my blogs, future webinars, and trainings. This was spurred by the recent abortion bans in Alabama and Georgia and other states, along with more spotlight on improving maternal and infant health outcomes in communities of color. There’s a major difference between learning about RJ and actually incorporating it in our personal and professional lives, and I want to help people bridge the gap.

Finding more ways to engage people on a broader scale: Doing one-on-one client work is great, but I have a desire to do more trainings, webinars, and workshops with a broader audience. If I’m wanting to scale up, this would be a great way to do it. I also have a project that I’ve placed on the back burner for too long, and Year Four is when I’ll finally buckle down and get it started, so stay tuned for that.

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