Originally posted on November 21, 2017, on LindaSuskie.com
From time to time people contact me for advice, not on assessment or accreditation but for tips on how to build a consulting business. In case you’re thinking the same thing, I’m sorry to tell you that I really can’t offer much advice. My consulting work is the culmination of 40 years of work in higher education. So if you want to spend the next 40 years preparing to get into consulting work, I can tell you my story, but if you want to build a business more quickly, I can’t help. I began my career in institutional research, then transitioned into strategic planning and quality improvement. These can be lonely jobs, so I joined relevant professional organizations. Some of the institutions where I worked would pay for travel to conferences only if I was presenting, so I presented as often as I could. And I became actively involved in the professional organizations I joined—I was treasurer of one and organized a regional conference for another, for example. All these things helped me network and make connections with people in higher education all over the United States. All institutional researchers deal with surveys, and early in my career I found people asking me for advice on surveys they were developing. Writing a good survey isn’t all that different from writing a good test, which I’d learned how to do in grad school. (My master’s is in educational measurement and statistics from the University of Iowa.) After finding myself giving the same advice over and over, I wrote a little booklet, which gradually evolved into a monograph on questionnaire surveys published by the Association for Institutional Research. I started doing workshops around the country on questionnaire design. I love to teach, so concurrently throughout my career I’ve taught as an adjunct at least once a year—all kinds of courses, from developmental mathematics to graduate courses. That’s made a huge difference in my consulting work, because it’s given me credibility with both the teaching and administrative sides of the house. Then I had a life-changing experience: a one-year appointment in 1999-2000 as director of the Assessment Forum at the old American Association for Higher Education. People often asked me for recommendations for a good soup-to-nuts primer on assessment. At that time, there wasn’t one (there were good books on assessment, but with narrower focuses). So I wrote one, applying what I learned in my graduate studies to the higher education environment, and was lucky enough to get it published. The book, along with conference sessions, continued networking, and simply having that one-year position at AAHE, built my reputation as an assessment expert. When I went into full-time consulting about six years ago, I did read up a little on how to build a consulting business. I built a website so people could find me, and I built a social media presence and a blog on my website to drive people to the website. But I don’t really do any other marketing. My clients tell me that they contact me because of my longstanding reputation, my book, and my conference sessions. So if you want to be a consultant, here's my advice. Take 40 years to build your reputation. Start with a graduate degree from a really good, relevant program. Be professionally active. Teach. Get published. Present at conferences. And get lucky enough to land a job that puts you on the national stage. Yes, there are plenty of people who build a successful consulting business more quickly, but I’m not one of them, and I can’t offer you advice on how to do it.