Monthly Archives: May 2016

My retirement status… and what it means…

So is Uncle Daryl retired, semi-retired,  or what? Yea, I’ve been confused too, but I finally figured it out.

I’m retired three weeks out of every four.

One of the beauties of running your own consulting firm is no mandatory retirement date. And when you do retire, you don’t need to come to a complete halt.

You can taper off, pick and choose the stuff you still like to do, and hand the rest off to colleagues. But you can still be engaged with interesting work.

This is exactly what I’ve done. For the last several years, I pulled back from consulting (aka fire-fighting) but remained involved with training and publishing.

That worked well until my business partner died last year. He enjoyed the panic situations — in fact, his idea of a good time was when the call came in at 9 AM and he was on a plane at 4 PM. Me? Not so much.

So when Bill passed away, I was left wondering what to do.

The solution was to set up a stable of vetted consultants, and then pass the leads along.

To keep it simple, no money changes hands. The goals are simply to help our clients, and to help our younger colleagues (and a few not so young) with their businesses. So far it has worked well.

At the same time, I remain active with training – which I consider “group consulting.” With only one engineer now in the firm, the training load went up. But to keep my sanity (and to keep my wife happy) I limit classes to not more than one per month.

So far that has worked well too. April was the first month in a long time with no class, and I’m almost fully booked through 2016.

How long will this continue? I don’t know, but I’m flexible.

I’ve always enjoyed training. There is nothing quite like seeing the “light go on” a student’s eyes. Even Warren Buffet agrees — when asked how he would like to be remembered, he answered, “As a teacher.” Plus training allows one to set a schedule well in advance – no panic calls at 9 AM.

What about the three weeks per month of retirement? Pretty busy there.

  • I’m still winding down Kimmel Gerke Associates, the consulting firm. A new web site now archives much of our IP – articles, newsletters, books, and more. Much is free.
  • The JumpToConsulting project remains a high priority. I’ve got some ideas that I’m about to roll out, so if you are interested in consulting,  please stick around.
  • The rest of the time I plan to spend goofing off — playing with the grandkids, the dog, and traveling in the RV with my bride of almost 50 years.

Retired three weeks – working one week – it works for me. The consulting life is great!

© 2016 – 2019, https:. All rights reserved.

Afraid of selling? Don’t be…

This post was inspired by “Fear and Loathing in Sales” at Trusted Advisor. The author addresses the irrational fear that professionals often have about selling.

I once shared that fear. But realizing that if I wanted to be in business for myself, I needed to overcome that fear – or at least get some experience. So I sought out -and landed – a job as a sales engineer (Tektronix.) And did it again later for another company (Intel.)

What a pleasant surprise. I quickly realized that technical sales was different – in spite of some canned sales training programs to which I was subjected. I discovered it was not about manipulation, bur rather about helping the customer or client.

I found it to be fun –another set of engineering problems to solve. Not unlike consulting. 

It was really about having pleasant conversations with technical colleagues — about what they were doing, and how my company might help them. Sure, I had to deal with contracts and purchasing agents, but by the time they got involved, the buying decisions had been made. They were there to handle the business/legal details.

As a professional, you are like a doctor, not a car salesman. You are there to diagnose and prescribe, not to wheel and deal. You are there to help.

If you are still unsure and want to build your confidence, consider spending a year (or more) in sales as I did. No, you don’t need to be an extrovert. Many of the best sales engineers I’ve known were quiet introverts who were genuinely interested in their customers and their problems (and/or aspirations.) Just like good consultants.

But there is a process, which I first outlined in the Seven Steps of Selling. I’ll soon expand on each of those steps in a short series on selling consulting services.

Finally, don’t fear the selling process — embrace it. It is the essence of professional consulting. And remember FDR’s advice, “The only thing we have to fear…is fear itself.”

© 2016, https:. All rights reserved.

Opportunities Abound When Ecosystems Collapse…

This post was inspired by a 2011 post by Pam Slim (Avatars, Ecosystems, and Watering Holes), where she discusses creating you own healthy business ecosystem.

But what happens when an ecosystem collapses? Most people panic, but a few recognize the opportunities — often excellent for starting a consulting practice.

Scientists tell us every major extinction event was followed by an explosion of new life. A prime example is the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs, which gave rise to the mammals and ultimately the naked apes known as homo sapiens.

When an ecosystem collapses, the balance of nature is upset. Those at the top of the food chain (the huge dinosaurs) are displaced, and new opportunities explode (for the tiny mammals.) But eventually a new equilibrium is reached, and evolution resumes its slow grind.

So it is with business. Sudden changes give rise to new opportunities, at least to those willing to pursue them. The inertia of the dinosaurs often prevents them from doing the same. In fact, the dinosaurs usually fight the changes and thus miss the opportunities.

A minor engineering ecosystem collapse helped launch our consulting firm.

  • Thanks to the personal computer explosion, by the early 1980s electronic interference problems to radios and televisions were increasing exponentially.
  • As a result, the Federal Communication Commission issued new regulations.
  • But there were few engineers that understood the problems, and how to fix them.
  • Most of those engineers were well entrenched in the defense industry, and not interested in tackling commercial electronics.
  • Thus, the engineering ecosystem for addressing these problems collapsed.

Recognizing the opportunity, we jumped in with both feet. But the economy was teetering too, and the first day in business the stock market crashed (October 1987.) A double whammy. But thanks to multiple opportunities with very limited competition, we did very well.

A second collapse occurred in the mid-1990s. Driven by the same interference problems, the European Union passed strict laws on interference on a wide range of electronic devices. If you could not demonstrate compliance, you could not export to the EU.

  • Once again, many big players (the dinosaurs) missed the changes (the asteroid.)
  • Once again, the engineering ecosystem suffered a minor collapse.
  • Once again, the little guys (the tiny mammals) like us did very well.

This is when we launched our training business, which took off like a rocket. This time, people were hungry for both help and knowledge. We often joked that while the consulting paid the bills, the training funded the retirement.

Would we have the same quick success today? Probably not, unless the ecosystem again collapsed. The growth would be much slower under today’s more stable conditions.

So, don’t fear the changes. Rather, seek them out. Remember, when the ecosystem collapsed, the mammals proliferated and the dinosaurs died out.

© 2016, https:. All rights reserved.