For those of you who don't know us, we're sort of a co-op for computer
consultants. A co-op, like a nonprofit org., often has a short or underpaid or
volunteer staff, in order to minimize overhead, at least until it can grow
enough to do better. Members take turns doing administrative and other stuff
to keep it running as needed.

This is of course the opposite of a "typical consulting firm" or "broker"
which charges huge markups to pay for their expensive offices and perqs as
well as big marketing commissions and salaries for their staff. This enables
them to afford better or more dedicated help, but of course it costs a lot
more.

My strategy for growing our firm has involved providing good service (legal
and tax issues, benefits, infrastructure, admin. stuff, etc.) to our
consultants with enough advantages to attract experienced consultants who
usually find their own clients. It has worked fairly well so far but we need
to do more. We also have referral commissions for consultants who find clients
for each other, and some of our members have used this, but not enough. We've
also been trying to find the right marketing/sales partner to do pretty much
the whole marketing and sales thing for us, like a friendly, captive broker,
but still no luck, especially for commission only. We need to grow a bit more
to realize more economies of scale and have more ability to improve our
services in these areas.

So I figure that maybe we should ask for volunteers (at least at first) to do
whatever pieces of the marketing and sales puzzle we can get done; that should
be at least somewhat helpful. If we can get someone to organize, track, and
follow up on leads, consultants, clients, opportunities, etc. (which I don't
have time to do), that should be a big help. Several of you are between
contracts and are already doing this kind of work for yourself anyway, and you
don't get paid for it except that it finally pays off when you find a contract
(or job, as some of you might be looking for or willing to accept). Well, it
should take very little additional effort to do the same for all of us, and it
could be even more rewarding.

Such a volunteer would have access to whatever other resources we have, such
as our consultants (good for brainstorming on ideas too), email groups,
prospects, etc. plus any prospects our consultants may wish to share (which
will earn them referral commissions of course). There would have to be
appropriate confidentiality, non-disclosure, avoiding conflicts of interest,
etc. of course, but within that, it's entirely understandable if your first
priority remains finding work for yourself. What can make that helpful for us
is that the work you find would be performed through us, and also while you're
looking for work for yourself, you also look for work for the rest of us and
follow it up just as seriously.

I haven't taken marketing commissions for all the work I've done promoting
RMPCP, creating our lists and marketing exposure, following up, etc. although
I have every right to; I've been doing it as an unpaid volunteer. I wanted to
keep the overhead low and help us all grow. If you do the legwork and find
work for the rest of us, though, you should certainly get some kind of
referral commission or split or something. So it's volunteer only in that
there's no guarantee of getting paid anything. You could look at the
commissions as a bonus or a secondary incentive and see the volunteer work
itself (especially with our support) as something you'd be doing anyway and
therefore worth while. Or some of you might get so good at this that it could
generate a viable income for you.

You'd need to join RMPCP if you haven't already, and we want to give existing
RMPCP members first shot at this, but ultimately we could probably use several
part time volunteers (especially as you find work and then turn to concentrate
on doing it). In an ideal consulting co-op that doesn't have dedicated support
staff, members would typically work contracts/projects when they have them,
and in between, they'd do administrative stuff, marketing, sales, etc. as
needed to help bring in the next one, so everyone would be taking turns and
rotating as needed. This is sort of what we're looking for.

Some of you have volunteered to help revamp our web site, which we appreciate,
but I still need to do some strategic and marketing planning first. Some of
you have volunteered to create a database and application for us to help with
tracking and matching, but we need someone to do the tracking and matching
etc. Volunteers could help by following up leads, matching reqs with
consultants, calling up all our members to keep in touch and get updated info
and suggestions, processing applications, marketing our consulting services to
clients, and marketing our umbrella services to consultants and companies.
These are part of what I'm doing but we need more of it done than I have time
to do, since I also have to handle all the legal, tax, financial, etc. stuff.

Please feel free to discuss this and brainstorm a bit, then let me know if
you're interested and in doing what. Thanks.


Robert M. Pritchett - RMP Consulting Partners LLC - member ICCA
Quality means doing it right the first time - http://rmpcp.com
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