There is a vast array of advisers and consultants available to you to help you develop your designs and to help you in business if you become an entrepreneur.
Your friends and acquaintances, including schoolmates you may not have seen for years, form a network of free consultants in an enormous range of subject matter. They will provide you not only with facts and ideas but also with criticisms of what you describe to them; such criticisms can be of great value in keeping you out of trouble if you teach yourself not to be emotionally defensive in the face of criticism.
Within your company, whether large or small, there are people who know things and can do things you cannot do but things which will help you. Your only price is persuading them to interrupt their own work and, if a lot of time is needed, asking your manager to give them some budget. The people themselves will feel some moral pressure to help a fellow employee. Some of these people, such as computer specialists and librarians, are assigned to provide service to others and may be eager to help. In general, they have no conflict of interest with you other than to get more of your budget.
Among the specialized consulting sources of information, guidance, and assistance within your own company may be:
- Advanced mathematical analysts
- People in fields of science and engineering other than your own
- Manufacturing-technology specialists
- Marketers
- Librarians
- Computer specialists
- Commercial artists (for slides, proposal art, etc.)
- Drafters and illustrators
There is a serious shopping problem in locating a good consultant. A cynical definition of a consultant is "an unemployed engineer." There is an affectation of many solo consultants, including some very good ones, to use the expression "and associates" to seek the prestige of bigness and broad scope. You can get a quick preliminary judgment of a hardware company from published data on credit, age, volume of sales, advertisements, and a catalog examination without subjecting yourself to the pressure of a face-to-face visit from a salesperson, but there is little of such material for consultants.
The ideal consultant for your problem may have started up on his or her own last month after quitting a successful job, may work on a kitchen table, may never have worked as a consultant for anyone else, has no catalog, and probably never heard about Dun & Bradstreet's credit ratings.
On the other hand, there are "universal experts" who will be glad to solve any problem you have since they can always walk away from a failure with your fee in their pockets. They may even believe their own line.
If you play it safe and hire a big consulting company, you will deal with a very impressive front representative who will sell you the services of someone else to do the work. You have not yet met the real worker, and his or her work may or may not be equally impressive.
It is less true in technical consulting than in management consulting, but there are outright crooks and con men out there. Remember that the essence of a con man is that you soon want him to hold the family jewels.
How Do You Find a Consultant?
After all these warnings, how do you get a consultant you won't regret?
- Ask people in your purchasing department. They only vaguely understand your technical problem, but they know whom they had hired in the past and left good feelings behind.
- Ask everyone you know in the field who knows a good source. Ask both people inside your company and friends outside. Ask acquaintances at technical society meetings.
- Look up consultant directories in the library.
- Telephone, visit, or write to an appropriate technical society office. The society will usually not refer an individual unless the field is very narrow and he or she is unique, but it may give you a list of names of society members in good repute.
- Call a consultant broker. Brokers maintain lists of consultants whom they have screened, at least superficially, and who may have built up good track records with them. The first of those listed will set you up with a phone call first, and you may get your answer over the phone for about $100.1 have been on the consultant end of such broker references.
- Some large consulting companies serve as brokers for "staff members/' who get paid when they have actual assignments.
- Telephone the head of the appropriate department in any university. Professors work as consultants for conventional consulting fees. If you are young, don't be embarrassed to approach your former lords in this way. If you come with money in your hands, you will be treated with full respect and no condescension. The professors may also refer you on to an expert they know about.
- Use the Yellow Pages in your phone book. It's a blind shotgun approach, but there may be no other.
- College professors
- One-person freelances, full-time, part-time, and moonlighters
- Small consulting companies, more or less specialized
- Large consulting companies, usually diversified
