One year after I retired I was missing my professional work in Human Resources (HR). I did not want another full-time job, wanted to work when I wanted to, and wanted to do what I enjoyed. And, I was missing the professional relationships I enjoyed throughout my 34 years of corporate work.
Consulting was the answer. It fulfilled all of what I was looking for and, I could choose and concentrate on the “parts” of HR I liked and leave the rest behind. What I liked was teaching others — managing talent, leadership, workplace culture, coaching, and analytics, and travel, particularly international travel. So I opened my own one-person teaching consulting firm and enjoyed the work for more than 7 years. It was a profitable venture.
It was a lot of work to set up. In short,
- Create an identity and logo for the firm,
- Create the legal entity; a LLC was appropriate for the firm,
- Setup up a website; design business cards,
- Register the firm with the local, state and federal agencies for tax purposes,
- Create a financial records and reporting system,
- Create a flexible consulting agreement model
- Establish a dedicated bank account,
- Create the seminar summaries, materials, slides, business cases, evaluations, and group exercises used in the seminars.
Preparation for each seminar required about 15-20 hours to include necessary research. I did no marketing aside from using social media to let businesses know I was out there and ready to go. As it turned out most of the work was international in nature with customers paying professional fees, travel and accommodations. The customers handled the local logistics for the seminars.
Why did I close my firm after 7 years? As the years progressed it required more and more time to prepare materials as not being active in the industry (retired) required more and more research. So when it approached the point of more work than I wanted to do in retirement, I closed the firm.
I would recommend it to anyone who has the initiative, fortitude, creativity and drive to start and run your own business!!! Very rewarding!!!
**** S&E ****
Success & Excess 