Open ltr 2 all of u out there
Apr 26, 2010 @ 18:54
Today while I was doing some cleanup around the office I came across some letters and messages from people who had contacted me over the past few years either to ask for work or to ask to distribute some of my software products. I had kept them aside as a reminder on how not to do business. It is a pet peeve of mind that when you communicate on business purposes to do it properly and to write well and to try to do your best to use proper grammar and spelling.
I might be showing my age, but it does gets me very mad when I receive some business message that is either very badly written or written as it you are sending a SMS message like the title of this post. There are no reason for either ones, especially the first one as nowadays spelling and grammar correctors are ubiquitous on all computer platforms. If somebody wants to find a job or wants to do business with someone it looks very bad on you when you send messages like that as the first impression you make to your prospective client, employer, or partner is one that you cannot even bother to put your thoughts down and write them properly.
Professionally I write thousands of words daily on various subjects and for various purposes, all of it with minimal editing and proofreading, so I am the first person guilty of grammatical and spelling mistakes, but when you come across as if you have no idea of what you are talking about due to poor writing skills or worse you consider business communication no more important than a quick SMS to your best buddies you will have problems going forward with any goals you might have in mind. This is not just for the younger generations out there, a lot of people of my generation suffer from the same problems.
I deal with people from all over the world daily and I do understand that if English is not your primary language, you might have some problems in communicating perfectly. I know from experience as English is not my mother tongue, French is. I have also spoken English since early childhood, and essentially have studied and worked in English since my late teens so English is my primary language these days, even though that at home now for the past 2-3 years we have switched from using English to using Spanish. I find the same problem with French and Spanish speaking people, that the quality of the written communication has dropped down dramatically over the past 10 years, when it should have increase a lot with all the spelling and grammar correction facilities we now have. It seems that people just don’t care anymore.
Wake up people, you have the tools to communicate in a better and more effective way. If you are too lazy to even take the few second to communicate effectively life will pass you by as where it counts people will think that you are too lazy to work effectively. Also take pride in you language as if you do not use it properly who will? For those like me who communicate mostly in languages that are own, take pride in learning it properly so that you can communicate and work effectively.
Take this advise seriously as we human can make something with our lives and progress with effective communications and those who do not even make the effort to do so will be left behind. It is not just an old consultant like me who says it, it is the entire business world. When faced to choose between two candidates, which one do you think a decision maker will select, the one that sounds like a professional or the one that sounds like some street gang member?
Don Luc
Why be a consultant?
Apr 25, 2010 @ 20:17
There are many reasons why one would want to become a consultant.
Some would love to ditch their corporate jobs and be lured to become self-employed. After being self-employed all of my adult life I would not know what to recommend to those as I do not know any other way. I know that my wife Norma had problems getting adapted to the consultant way, as she had the opposite experience of being employed all of her adult life by banks or investment firm. Being self-employed to her was very traumatic at first, and still is when business slows down. Leaving the security of a good job is very hard to do, especially if you are used to have and count on a regular income. It becomes very difficult to plan things like mortgages and car loans or other regular types of expenses, when you are never sure of exactly of what your income will be next month. For some this is something they cannot live with, and to others like me, it is something so normal that you never really think about it. You just have to be very careful with your expenses and plan your life and budget accordingly. Those who cannot live with that kind of uncertainty should no even think of being a consultant or to be self-employed for that matter.
Other people would love to work at home like a lot of us do. For that too you need to have a certain sense of organization to be able to do it without all the normal distractions around the house preventing you from doing any works. It all depends on how well organized you are and how you can isolate yourself from other things and concentrate on your work. Most people find it difficult at first, but get used to it with time. For those who can’t it might be better to think about working for some consulting firm that will place you at their client’s site.
Others are lured by the large fees that some consultants charge. This might look very tempting at first glance, but when you start analyzing it in depth once you take this high fee, deduct from it your operating expenses, the equipment, tools and software you might need to perform your consulting, publicity, legal and accounting fees, office expenses, and the fact that you are rarely billing the full time you are working each week, you might not be making a huge amount more than you are doing right now at your current job. Add to that all of those other things that you never think of, like the fact that normally when you are on your own you do not have the niceties of things like health and other types of insurance, retirement plans, benefits and more.
Does that mean that you should not become a consultant? Of course not! If you can live with all of the above and more and have the personality to enjoy those kinds of challenges and live your life differently than most of your neighbors and friends, consulting is an immensely rewarding profession that can offer you things that you would never have the chance of experiencing otherwise. I would not even dream of doing something else and if I have not become a consultant so long ago I would never had the life and the experiences I have had. Sure, it can be very hard at times, all the good things in life are hard to achieve, but the rewards are huge for those who like a challenge and can focus to achieve their goals.
Don Luc
What type of consultant am I?
Apr 24, 2010 @ 14:29
There are many ways of defining oneself as a consultant. The traditional consultant is normally somebody who is an expert in his field with either a long career behind him or very specific specialized knowledge that is not common in a field. He is hired to resolve specific issues by clients or “consulted” when his client need information on some topic that they are an expert.
The term is also used for people who do contract work in a specific field. They usually work one contract at a time and they will build something, or deliver a project for their client. This used to be called a contractor, but these days the definition is getting fuzzier as a lot of “Consulting” firms are normally placing “Contractors” at their client’s sites and calling them “Consultants”
More and more self-employed workers, or workers moonlighting in their spare times are now calling themselves “Consultants” though they might not be doing much actual consulting or contracting work.
This confuses a lot of people looking to hire external resources as a lot of people are calling themselves “Consultants” and actually offer a wide variety of services only some of which are actual consulting. It is a good thing for people who which to hire external help, consultant or other, to make sure before they start looking that they know what kind of help they are looking for.
Coming back to the main topic of this post. I started in the mid 1980’s as a traditional consultant in the food and wine business. My various clients hired me for my specialized knowledge and consulted me on various topics and I would also do specific contracts for them on a regular basis like travel to various places worldwide to purchase various things for them or just analyze what was available in the market. I started during that period doing consulting work in computer graphics and animation which was a new field in those days and then I started to consult more and more about IT using the knowledge I had as I trained as a mainframe programmer at university ten years earlier.
In the early 1990’s I was doing more and more IT consulting for local clients and prior to the advent of the Internet, in the old days of the original CompuServe network of which I had been a member since around 1986, I started consulting with many clients worldwide from my office at the edge of a lake in Northern Quebec. I also started doing more and more contracting for various large companies in the United States and elsewhere. I spent most of the 1990’s traveling over 6 months of the year to work onsite with many clients worldwide. The rest of the year was spent either consulting or contracting, as I do differentiate, for my clients from my office in Quebec.
In the late 1990’s during the time of the big Internet crash, I started developing my own line of software products for retail business management, point of sales, ticketing systems, kiosk systems, and decision support systems. In 2003 I moved to Mexico City to promote some of my products and to get away from the cold of Quebec as my Mexican wife was feeling somewhat unaccustomed to the long winters and isolated over there.
Today I am back to being a traditional consultant full time, though I still work regularly on my software products and actively promote and find new markets for them. I continue my IT consulting as always and consult with businesses looking for new markets or with startups looking for advice. I also do contract work developing innovative software, integrate software with hardware, and of course I still do consult in the food and wine industry, my first love.
My motto has always been since I was a kid that I need to learn something new every single day as if I do not that day is wasted. Since I have been in the consulting business for so long, and tried hard to not waste any day of it, I have accumulated a lot of knowledge over the years. This is why for many years now that I love to teach and give conferences to pass this knowledge to others. I tend to be very passionate about this, as I have always love to educate people and convince them that they should learn something new every day. My wife Norma always says that I should have been a preacher, but what I am really is a traditional consultant that likes to share is experience and knowledge with others.
Don Luc
Why Consult Ants?
Apr 22, 2010 @ 19:23
As you main have noticed the blog is launching its new look today. I spent the last hour creating a quick and dirty theme for the blogs with a few simple graphics and over the new few weeks I will probably refine the look when I have a bit more time.
Some of you might be wondering why I named the blog “Consult Ants”. Besides the obvious bad pun, the name reflects my view of what the consulting business has evolved over the last decade. When I started as a consultant over 25 years ago, the profession was very different and was guided by some standards, which of course a lot of consultants were not following and giving a bad name to the profession, but it did meant something to the users of our services as the consultants that were doing a good job were respected in the industry and by our clients.
Today it seems that everybody and their cousins is a consultants, and just mentioning the name “Consultant” brings a bad connotation to a lot of people’s minds. It used to be that one would rise to the top of their field and then become a consultant, but now I see teenagers that label themselves consultants and want to sell their services at $5 an hour. That is not good for them, their clients, and for all consultants. I will rant and rave about this at length in the future, but this is what brought the name of this new blog to my mind. It seems that in lots of people’s minds us professional consultants are like a bunch of little interchangeable ants that are just running around in circles doing work and that every ant is doing the same job mindlessly. I want to bring this piece of information to the surface and dispel it, thus the name “Consult Ants” is there to bring it to the attention of most.
Since this blog will not be a structured one and will be more of a stream of mind type of blog, I am not sure exactly where this will lead, but bear with me when I try to find its directions and feel free to participate in the comment section.
Don Luc
Welcome to our new consulting industry blog!
Apr 20, 2010 @ 12:35
I have been blogging for over 5 years now in other venues and I thought that it was time to post my thought about what has been my main business for over 25 years. I started as a food-wine consultant back in the early 80’s. I was also active in the emerging field of computer graphics and animation at the time and also started to be more and more involved in the IT world as I had trained as a programmer at university. By the dawn of the 90’s I was a full time IT consultant/programmer/graphics/animation specialist. Then the industry changed rapidly with the event of the big Internet crash of the late 90’s and I became a software developer and launch my own line of products. Now I am back where I started and I am a Business/IT/Programmer/Hardware/Robotics/Graphics/Animation/Web/Food/Wine specialist.
I have seen many trends come and go, good and bad, and lived through many major industry changes. I do deplore some of the current state of the industry, and applaud some of the new trends. My wife had been telling me for years to write about the the industry as we discuss things a lot and she always tells me that I was born to teach, or preach when I get excited about a subject. Since my motto has always been to learn something new daily, and that a wasted day is one where you learn nothing new, I decided to share some of that hard-earned let’s call it “wisdom” for lack of a better term.
I know that I am considered as a dinosaur in this business where you are considered old when you hit 25, but there are some of us old fogies at over twice that, that are still active and can still provide a full contribution to this or these fields.
Don Luc