Consulting Mind: 3 Steps To Building A Stand Out Portfolio With Emma Sharley: Podcast #25

How to build up your portfolio, keep your momentum going, and find the critical work-life balance.

Description:

On this episode, I’m talking with Emma Sharley, an experienced and very successful brand and marketing consultant in Australia. She works with retail, technology, and lifestyle client companies on setting up market and brand strategies, brand positioning, transitioning markets, and marketing new products lines. She also has a complementary start-up in the retail technology sector called ShopYou, which she co-founded in 2016. Emma has worked with both large corporations and smaller operations, and she’s joined me today to talk about the keys to success that have taken her consulting business to the next level. She shares three major tips for building out your portfolio, finding the all-important work-life balance and — you’ll have to hear it to believe it — why 4 a.m. is the magic hour for her most effective work. It just may inspire you to start waking up early as well, and it’s all in this episode of the The Consulting Success Podcast with Emma Sharley.

Transitioning from Employee to Consultant

Prior to beginning her successful consultancy, Emma worked in sports marketing, fashion retail marketing, and telecommunications with companies in England including Westfield, Diane Von Furstenberg, Westpac, and T-Mobile. After returning to Australia, she worked mainly with marketing with fashion retailers, where she identified a need from retailers for accessible consulting and marketing advice. Following her entrepreneurial drive, Emma started her own consulting business and now works independently with retail, technology and lifestyle companies.

As Emma points out, your network looks completely different as a consultant than it does when you are someone else’s employee. There is great value that comes with building up a network of consultants and independents to help support each other and bounce ideas off of each other. Attending events that connect you with other such consultants will be of great value to your network.

The transition from employee to consultant for Westfield was made easier in part by the relationships that Emma had made in her first seven years with the company. I always recommend to consultants that are just starting out to try and secure work with previous employers whenever possible, and Emma is proof of the validity of this advice. You have already proven yourself to them and you are probably already aware of the needs within the company. By positioning yourself in such a way that you can continue to serve the needs of the company without working as an employee, you have easily created your first consulting project.

Emma’s first project as a consultant with her employer entailed launching a new product into market, which she worked on for five months. During that time she focused only on that one project. By scaling back on her overall involvement with the company, she was able to increase her value to the organization as a consultant.

Emma describes a valuable consultant as someone who brings a single focus to the outcomes that you are delivering. By allowing yourself to focus on one project, there is less noise and fewer distractions to keep you from completing high-quality work. The success she achieved on this first project then gave her the confidence she needed to approach other companies, and ES Consulting was born.

Three Steps to Building Your Portfolio

Emma shares the steps she took to successfully build her portfolio after securing her first client. First, she set up her own channel on LinkedIn and Twitter and began confidently sharing content with the world. Anytime that you can begin to build a relationship of trust with potential clients, even before your first meeting, you are building your portfolio. If people know what they can expect from you based on the content you have shared through social media, they will be more likely to approach you to fulfill their business needs.

Emma also started attending more events — a feat that was made easier by no longer being tied to her employer’s meeting schedule. Whenever possible, she took advantage of opportunities to build her network in the tech and fashion industries, and partnerships have emerged from her efforts.

As Emma points out, your network looks completely different as a consultant than it does when you are someone else’s employee. There is great value that comes with building up a network of consultants and independents to help support each other and bounce ideas off of each other. Attending events that connect you with other such consultants will be of great value to your network.

The third step, like the others, is one that you have heard me recommend many times. Building a better portfolio means that you have to position yourself as an expert in as many ways as possible. For Emma, this meant teaching with General Assembly and hosting workshops around digital marketing and brand and marketing technology. In this setting, she is able to share her knowledge with a more intimate group, with just 15 to 20 businesses present, and it was here that she was able to develop and refine her positioning and the value that she has to offer.

By meeting so many businesses in the first few months as a consultant, Emma was able to really understand where she wanted to position herself. The key expanding a successful portfolio is that she did the work and put in the time. She put herself out there and favorably position herself within her field of expertise. She clearly stated the kinds of industries she wanted to work with and how she would work with them, which set both parties up for success long term.

By following these steps and making the same commitment to growing your business, you will create for yourself the opportunity to experience the same kind of success as Emma. Be sure to listen to her story for ways that she found these opportunities and used them to build a stand-out portfolio.

Overcoming Early Challenges

Once her consultancy started taking off, one of the greatest challenges Emma faced in the early stages was accurate pricing. Her answer didn’t surprise me one bit — many new consultants deal with this same issue. Placing a monetary value on your time can be a difficult problem to solve, especially if there is no known pricing structure that you can model your pricing after. It is essential that you know what your weekly time and efforts really look like so that you can more effectively price your time for your clients.

Emma encourages new consultants to not overlook this major aspect of successful consulting. Yes, it can be difficult to know where exactly to place your pricing at first, but it is essential that you take the time to get it right.

Another hurdle Emma faced early on was finding the right people to work with. There is a vast variety of work that consultants can offer businesses — but you can’t offer everything to everyone. It is critical that you set yourself up for success by connecting with the people that best fit with your skill set. This does take time, but like all of the legwork that you put into your consultancy, the rewards will come quickly if you do it right.

Emma shares some of the ways that she has positioned herself for finding like-minded people and has secured new clients as a result. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by organizing events. By bringing people together to talk about the latest developments in the industry, connections are easily made and new clients often appear soon afterward. Tools like meetup.com can help you organize these kinds of events locally, and these collaborations can have a great impact on your network. You’ll want to listen to our conversation to hear how exactly she made this tool work for her.

Finding Balance and Maintaining Momentum

When I asked Emma about the one thing that she had to figure out before she really started enjoying her consulting success, her answer came quickly. You have to set yourself apart. In any industry, your reputation is everything. People want to do business with you based on who you are. Cultivating your personal brand is essential to set yourself apart in your industry and your marketing and content will sell your expertise for you — if you do do it right. When potential clients can get a good feel for who you are and what you have to offer them, you are establishing a relationship of trust before the first contact is ever made.

Additionally, as we discussed before, placing a high value on your time is vital to your success. For Emma, that means starting the critical focus work at 4 a.m. every day. Blocking out half days or whole days on her calendar — rather than scheduling her work down to the hour — actually enables her to accomplish more work over the course of each project. For anyone who is selling their time, it is critical to determine how to make the most of it throughout the week. You’ll want to hear the details on how this works best for Emma.

Just as important to this is finding ways to step away from the work so that you can exhale. If you are constantly in high-stress work mode, you won’t be able to perform to the best of your ability. Finding ways to balance your work with the other facets of your life is far more effective than constantly operating in deadline mode.

I often observe consultants that think they are too busy to effectively balance their work with personal life, family, or their health. Guaranteed, the first thing that takes a hit when consultants aren’t maintaining a good balance between work and personal life is their marketing. Your marketing is the key to the forward momentum of your business. If you don’t take the time to step away from your business recharge yourself, your work will start to coast. It’s like a car — your business can coast for a period of time, but if you don’t step on the gas, the car will eventually stop moving forward. It’s critical that you find a way that works for you to keep the momentum going.

Prioritizing Your Day

Emma shares the reasons why waking up at 4 AM has been a game changer for her success. From fitting in exercise and feeling more energetic to maximizing her most creative hours so that she can consistently deliver her best effort work to her clients, Emma has found what works for her and is using it to her advantage. By ensuring that the high priority items are finished at the start of the day, she’s more readily available to handle whatever else the day may throw at her.

My newest book The Elite Consulting Mind is a perfect example of the kind of work that can emerge as a result of harnessing your most creative hours. I rented a hotel room for a few days, removed myself from my family and from other external distractions and was able to make great headway in my book.

For some, creative hours can be found in a new environment, whether it be in a coffee shop or in a new town, and for others, creativity comes in a different time of the day. If your days seem too long with not enough creative work getting done, you just may want to try Emma’s advice of utilizing the early hours of the morning. Whatever it may be, try something new, pinpoint what works and then make it work for you.

I can promise you that the success that follows will make your efforts worth it. Building out your portfolio means expanding your network, positioning yourself as the authority, and then protecting yourself so that you can be the most successful consultant you can be. It’s worked for me, and you can hear how it’s worked for Emma, as well as how to connect with her in this episode of the Consulting Success Podcast with Emma Sharley.

Key Takeaways:

[:14] Introducing Emma Sharley, Australian brand and marketing consultant.
[5:27] Making the transition from employee to consultant.
[7:21] Building your portfolio starts with tapping into your network.
[11:35] Overcoming the early challenges of setting up a consultancy.
[14:08] Ideas for securing additional clients through networking.
[17:00] Finding the critical work-life balance.
[22:04] Why waking up early means success for Emma.
[28:34] Connecting with Emma Sharley.