Like other consulting firm, most of retirement consulting business is using expertise gained over a career, or through other life experience, to get income after retirement. Everyone who has reached the level of maturity where retirement is possible has acquired expertise of one sort or another. Then he or she can use that expertise in the form of retirement consultants. It is expertness that consultants sell in blocks of time. It is obvious, both expertise and time are the only commodities stored by consultants.
Living as a successful independent consultant has numerous rewards. You don’t have to be involved in office politics with which to contend. The consultant is also not responsible to a superior. Consultant’s client is rarely the consultant’s superior; indeed, it is the customer who is in need of assistance or has a problem to be solved, not the consultant. Sometimes a consultant may need to go around extensively at a client’s expense. Missing a client rarely involves the financial tragedy of losing a job because there are normally other clients (with new projects to step in and to pay a consultant’s fees) come to pay for your expertise fee. Perhaps the best of all, it is the privileged as the consultant chooses the number of hours to work and the amount and time of days to take off. Most of the time client will accommodate to the consultant’s working schedule.
The first issue is to clearly identify the expertise around which the consultancy will be established. For many people, this will be clear from the experience of having been a source of information to colleagues before retirement. For others, it will be a non-work-related field of interest that has always occupied leisure time and attention. For others, it may be a field that has been a lifelong interest that can now be developed into expertise with the extra time available after retirement. However it has developed, the first step is to clearly identify the area of expertise that will be marketable to and required by a sufficient number of prospective clients. Yet expertise is not all that is required to set up a successful consultancy. Other essential factors include a person’s personality, character, and own makeup.
It typically takes six months to one year of marketing consulting expertise to make a retirement consulting venture successful. Perseverance and patience are required by an aspiring retirement consultants, or this career path may prove too frustrating to maneuver. Retirement consulting firm will seldom create a steady and fix income. If you and your partner cannot get used to going without a steady salary, then retirement consulting is not a wise path to pursue. Also, most consultants work out of their homes, and a disciplined approach to self-appointed tasks is imperative so that family affairs and household chores do not interfere. Finally, even though many potential clients will engage in conversations that do not lead into any payment or fee, a newbie retirement consultant cannot take this personally or build a gap to client universe.
By setting home as the base for consultancy’s office location, there will be much advantage incurred. Most retirees have few tax deductions, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will allow a deduction for any utilities rent or mortgage for whatever percentage of space in one’s home is used for an office. Education and training, automobile, health care, insurance and other expenses in connection with the business may be allowable as well.
Based on statistics, ninety percent of beginning consultants do not make it past the first year. It is obvious that it is not due to they are not experts in retirement fields; most of them are. They main reason why most of them failed is because most of them do not understand how to run retirement consulting. And although consulting is considered a profession, it is also a business. Accountants, doctors, and dentists are also professionals who must acquaint themselves with good business principles and practices in order to succeed. Please take note that statistic is not presented to dissuade or discourage anyone from consulting but to reinforce the requisites of consulting success.
Finally, some may be discouraged from being the profession because of bad publicity in today’s media about the misdeeds of a few large consulting firms or unflattering jokes about consultants. Some consultants are rethinking the use of the word consultant altogether and are calling themselves “counselors” or are changing the names of their businesses from consultancies to “advisories.” A final blockade in today’s economic environment is the raising numbers of middle managers who have been downsized or who have taken early retirement and now have calling cards as “consultants” but may not be taking consulting seriously. Nevertheless, consulting—when practiced by an expert who is honorable, helpful, ethical, and innovative—is a noble profession from which great rewards can be reaped during later life.
No college or university yet to offers study with retirement consulting subject. While some universities (notably Wharton School and Harvard Business School) offer courses in consulting as part of their M.B.A. programs, the courses deal essentially with management consulting only. Retirement business courses such as those outlined above are often available at local community colleges or extension programs, as well as on the Internet.
At Last, many independent retirement consultants who have enjoyed a successful career may do so in a phased manner. The workload is always within the consultant’s control, and they may enjoy the great feelings accompanying the successful closing of a project well done for as long as they wish after normal “retirement.”
