Your career
One of the key make or break challenges you’ll face as a freelance consultant is going to be your ability to market yourself to new and existing clients to find a new freelance project.
With a growing number of permanent consultants opting to sample life as a freelancer, a greater emphasis has been put on developing new business channels to find project work. It’s now difficult to rely on your trusted black book to keep your project flow healthy – it’s time to get out there and make new connections.
Now to the key question – what are the possible channels to find new freelance projects?
Movemeon
Naturally, the first (and best) place to look for new freelance project roles is right here on the movemeon website (don’t blame us for being a little biased).
Existing clients
Good business development is not just about trying to market yourself to new clients. It’s imperative you maximize your existing relationships by keeping former clients updated on your availability/new skills. It could just be a subtle catch-up e-mail to a former client to ask how the project is going. You’ll be amazed by the amount of new work that’s generated from clients who magically think of a piece of work you’d be perfect for, now they know you’re available.
Your network
Keep things like your LinkedIn/Xing profile updated with availability/skills etc. This ensures you’re maximizing your chances of inward business development. There’s nothing nicer than a client knocking on your door with a new freelance project, but they’ll only be able to do so if you keep your profile updated.
Other freelancers
Networking with other freelancers is a great way to develop new business and share experiences/insight. If a freelancer is contacted about a role but is unavailable, a natural instinct is to refer someone else who matches the profile. This is particularly useful if you’re on the more junior end in terms of years of experience. Senior freelancers are always on the lookout for good junior consultants when building a team and with utilization rates remaining high at the junior end of freelancing, it’s always useful to be referred by another freelancer for new projects.
Agencies
Although not ideal, the majority of new projects that are not directly sourced will be through recruitment agencies. We suggest using 1-2 good agencies who are able to deliver a healthy project flow and operate with transparency and honesty. Be sure to read this article on what percentage of day rate you are really receiving – food for thought when thinking about day rates and using agencies.
Job boards/Career pages
Companies sometimes do advertise freelance project work on their careers page/through jobs boards so it’s always worth having a quick look once in a while.
Team up
If you’re finding new projects tough to come by and you have a specific skill/domain knowledge, find other freelancers with similar skills and team up. This will allow you to take on new larger projects and assemble teams to execute project work. An additional benefit of teaming up is, with a consulting ‘brand’, you’ll be developing brand equity through strong client reviews that should keep new project flow healthy as word spreads of your consulting offering. If you’re teaming up and need additional resources – Movemeon already partners with a number of smaller consultancies providing freelancers.
Word of mouth
If you build up a strong track record of solid performance as a freelancer, you’ll find clients contacting you directly. Good work speaks volumes, and clients will feel at ease engaging you because of your track record.
Network
It’s simple: the more potential clients you meet, the more likely it is one of them will call you with a new freelance project.
These are just a few possible routes to finding new projects as a freelancer. It’s always worth bearing in mind that it’s difficult to predict future project flow – so it’s imperative you remain proactive in your business development. Don’t run the risk of assuming another project is waiting for you at the end of your current engagement; start your business development before your current project wraps up.
– The MMO Freelance team
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Your career
The private equity series is a collection of articles written by Quentin, movemeon member who moved from consulting to private equity through movemeon.
You can find the others articles of the series here:
Many strategy consultants dream about one day joining a ‘private equity (or ‘PE’) fund’. Those three words seem to be surrounded by some form of magical aura magnified by the fact that, most often, consultants have a limited understanding of what the private equity world really entails. With approximately $800bn worth of transactions closed annually – the equivalent of 30% of the UK GDP –, private equity investments can actually take multiple forms. Listing those forms at a high-level is the aim of today’s post.
The private equity industry has developed over the years and now constitutes a funding source that can be made available to companies irrespective of their development stage:
- A nascent (or even not born yet) company can solicit venture capital (‘VC’) or seedCompanies may exist solely on paper and are almost never profitable at this stage. Venture capitalists are here to assess the future perspectives of entrepreneurs’ business models and decide whether they are ready to bet by buying a stake – often a minority one. The chances of failure are very high but the rare successes generate extremely high returns. Successful VC firms distinguish themselves by having the flair to identify great ideas – which explains why former entrepreneurs are very much in demand – and the network to hear about promising opportunities before they attract too much publicity. Analytics and valuation skills are of little relevance given that a VC investment very often comes down to ‘all or nothing’. One of the most famous examples of successful ‘all’ investment is the 10% Facebook stake Accel Partners bought in 2005 for $12m. This share today is worth more than 2,800 times more.
- The fact that a company finally becomes profitable does not mean that it does not need further capital inflow. Managers may want to open new points of sale, enter new markets, enhance their IT systems, hire a new team etc. Revenue growth is the key area of focus. Banks may still be wary of lending too much and as a consequence existing shareholders may also turn to growth equity. Beyond money, these funds also provide expertise in business development and operations to ensure that internal processes are scaling up fast enough to support the expected development. Last but not least, growth funds leverage a network of senior advisors who can act as mentors and/or board members. Given the typical private equity investment timeframe (5 to 7 years), growth equity funds target fast-moving industries such as Technology or Biotech. TA Associates and Summit Partners are two famous growth funds.
- Once a company has matured and is able to generate steady cash flows, it starts attracting leveraged buy-outs (‘LBO’) funds. In fact, the general public often tends to restrict private equity to LBOs, which benefit from more media exposure. Indeed, LBO funds manage the vast majority of assets devoted to private equity. Each fund has a different area of focus, typically consisting of a mix of industry, geography, company size and degree of involvement. But all LBO funds always rely on significant amount of debts to put pressure on the teams and ultimately boost their equity returns. To do so, LBO funds will rely on a mix of revenue growth and operations improvement – including cost-cutting. In terms of company size and type of issue, this is probably the form of operational work closest to the one offered by external strategy consultants. Depending on the total size of the fund, LBO firms are divided between small-cap (roughly under $250m), mid-cap (from $250m to $2bn) and large-cap. In this segment, you will find many of the behemoths, such as KKR, Blackstone or Carlyle. Within LBOs, funds investing in infrastructure assets are often categorised separately – motorways and retail companies have little in common. Funds such as Ardian (formerly AXA Private Equity) and Macquarie have developed expertise in that area.
- Turnaround funds focus on companies in financial doldrums, either close to bankruptcy or even already under administration. Turnaround funds are very heavily involved and focus on renegotiating the financial structure of the portfolio company with existing creditors while fixing the company’s operations. Oaktree is probably the renowned.
- Last but not least, some funds do not stand on the front line and prefer to team up with existing funds instead. This is the case of funds of funds – private equity funds whose investments are stakes of other private equity funds – and co-investment funds – funds which will buy a minority stake alongside a larger private equity sponsor. Since they are not in direct contact with portfolio companies, professionals working within those funds rely less on their operational skills than their financial abilities to ensure that they choose the right partner. LBO funds can decide to invest part of their commitments as co-investors.
The next post in this series will discuss the optimal timing for a strategy consultant to make a move to private equity. This timing partly depends on the type of fund that you are targeting. In the meantime, readers willing to discover more about the intricacies of private equity can have a look at Private equity demystified: An explanatory guide, written by John Gilligan and Mike Wright and freely available on the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales’ website.
