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Avoid pitfalls

Avoid pitfalls

From the course: Consulting Foundations

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Avoid pitfalls

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- When you run a consulting firm, you're going to face a lot of potential pitfalls. Beyond the big mistake of not doing great work, here are the top pitfalls I've seen people face as they build their firms. First is being overly reliant on a small number of clients. Having a few big clients can be awesome. They're predictable and easy to work with. That is, at least, until there's major upheaval and they stop being a client. To avoid this, diversify your client base as quickly as you can. Monitor client concentration at least once a year. At thoughtLEADERS, every December I pull up all our client revenue for the year, and I make that pie chart to see where the revenue's coming from. In the early years of the firm, I noticed one year that we had two clients that were 65% of our revenue. That was pretty scary. If one of them stopped being a client, I had a big hole to fill. The following year, I invested a lot of time and effort into diversifying that client base to reduce that customer…

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