ExtraOrdinary Assistance

Easy As 1-2-3 Marketing for HR Consultants

Donna Caissie — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:35:51 +0000

Have you ever found yourself wondering, “why does marketing have to be so hard?” Have you ever thought, “there’s got to be an easier way to market my consultancy?” Well, there is. Most marketing gurus insist that there’s a right way to market and a wrong way. The right way is to research, analyze, research some more, analyze again, plan and implement. The Easy As 1-2-3 way eliminates everything but the implementation.

As a solo entrepreneur, you lack the resources to market your consultancy the right way. You neither have the time, money or staff to research your market, analyze your market, plan how you’re going to reach your market and implement that plan. Your needs are more immediate; you need to find clients NOW. Long term marketing isn’t in your field of vision.

What would you say to a marketing plan that combines the immediate with the future? What would you say to a marketing plan that allows you to choose from among a variety of marketing methods? Would you give it a shot? The Easy As 1-2-3 Marketing Plan allows you to meet your immediate need for clients while laying the foundation for long-term marketing that meets future needs. Download your Easy As 1-2-3 Marketing Plan for HR Consultants here.

By the way, if you sign up for my monthly ezine, you’ll get more tips like this one direct to your inbox. The sign-up box is on the right; please take a minute to sign-up.

10+ Reasons HR Consultants Need A Website

Donna Caissie — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:10:15 +0000

As I wander through the Web seeking human resource consultants, I’ve found most HR consultants on social media sites, but I can’t find their websites. This fascinates me because social media isn’t a standalone product. Let me explain. Relying only on social media to market your human resource consultancy isn’t enough. Yes, social media reaches a lot of eyes, but it’s limited in what it can do. Take Twitter, for example. It’s impossible to explain the services your consultancy offers in 140 characters. That’s where a website comes in. Social media entices people to go and get more in-depth information about you and your consultancy. You can tweet until the peeps come home, but if you don’t have a home for them to go to, you’ve tweeted for nothing. Your website is the home you want those peeps to go to. Let’s talk about ten more reasons an HR consultant needs a website.

A website markets your consultancy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When you’re sleeping, eating or partying your website is providing potential customers with information about you and your consultancy. I, personally, can attest to midnight madness. I’m one of those people whose body clock runs from 12:00 p.m. – 1 a.m. I do my best work during these hours, and I prefer to roam the Web during the hours when most folks are sleeping.

A website gives you another source of Web exposure/visibility. The more ways you have of exposing yourself on the Web, the better your chances of being found by potential customers. Limiting your Web exposure to social media, limits your chances of being found by potential customers. It’s not that potential customers won’t find you via social media; it’s that you limit the number of potential customers that find you.

A website provides a foundation for all your Web activities. A website not only provides 24×7 Web visibility, it also provides you with a Web base for your consultancy. A website contains information about you and your consultancy. A website also contains links to your social media activities, blog posts, your email newsletter, reports/whitepapers, educational materials, etc.

People use the Web to check out a product or service before making a purchase. Personally, I go to the Web to check out the menu of a restaurant, my competitors and even apartment reviews. The last was especially helpful to me after I sold my home. A first-time renter, I didn’t know if what looked like a nice apartment was really a nice apartment. A website that included reviews of local apartment complexes told me that the apartments that looked lovely and had a lovely price tag to match were, in actuality, rodent-infested. Thanks but no thanks.

A website establishes your credibility and expertise. Your website is your platform for showcasing your human resource expertise. Whether your HR niche is compensation, training, or compliance your website is the platform from which you tell the world that you know your stuff.

Your competitors have a website. I happen to know this for a fact. Several months ago, I embarked on a series of telephone interviews with a number of independent HR consultants. Each and every one of these HR consultants had a website, and each of them knew the value of that website presence.

Your clients have a website. More often than not, this is the case. Everything from solo enterprises to McDonalds has a website.

Your potential clients use the Web to find the services you offer. If you rely only on social media to market your consultancy, a potential client may find you by typing your name into a search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., but if a potential client is looking for an “independent human resource consultant,” chances are good that your name won’t come up in the organic search engine listings. Why? Because you don’t have a website. In order for a potential client looking for a HR consultant to find you, the client must know your name, which is how search engines pick up people using social media, or you must have a website that uses the keywords (HR consultant, HR consulting and a slew of others) that clients would use in looking for HR consultants. If you don’t have a website, you’re limiting your opportunities to reach potential clients.

Businesses are expected to have a website. Decades ago it was expected that a business have a listing in the yellow pages of their local telephone directory. In the 21st century, it is expected that business have a website.

A website provides you with inexpensive advertising. Where else can you advertise your consultancy, in multiple categories, 24×7, for less than 55 cents a day? That figure includes web hosting, a domain name, unlimited email addresses and a blog that you can easily update yourself. Heck, a cup of coffee will cost you more than that.

Your website can provide your clients with value-added services. You can add a “clients only” area to your website where your clients get together in a website forum or bulletin board and talk among themselves and share information. A “clients only” area can contain HR updates and other news just for your clients. What you can do with your website is limited only by your imagination and budget.

A website is environmentally friendly. No trees are felled when a website is created. It’s all bits and bytes and a small way you can get on the “green” bandwagon because every little bit and byte helps .

HR Consultants — Get Your Picture in FastCompany Magazine

Donna Caissie — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:39:19 +0000

Calling All Human Resource Consultants and Other Solo Entrepreneurs! Here’s your opportunity to get your picture and brief bio in the November 2010 issue of FastCompany magazine!

FastCompany has launched the Influence Project. You can go to http://fcinf.com/v/dlew/welcome to register yourself as an influencer or to vote for someone who’s already registered as an influencer. Everyone who registers gets their picture in the November 2010 issue of FastCompany.

Of course, you want to thank me for telling you about this hot, hot, hot opportunity . Go to http://fcinf.com/v/dlew and when my caricature pops up on the screen, click the big blue button that says “spread Donna’s influence further.”

What do you think of FastCompany’s Influence Project? Did you register? Did you vote for me ? How can you leverage your registration as an influencer in your marketing efforts? Leave a comment and let me know!

5 Elements to Social Media Marketing Success for HR Consultants

Donna Caissie — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 15:33:22 +0000

In order to successfully use social media for marketing you have to have a plan. You can’t just jump in, with your fingers crossed, and hope to achieve your goals, especially if you haven’t defined your goal. Defining your goal for using social media is just one element of a social media marketing plan. Answer the Who, What, Why, When and Where to make better use of your time and effort with social media.

Why: do you use social media or why do you want to use social media? Is your social media participation geared to staying in touch with friends? Is it to enhance client relationships? Is it to gain new clients?

Who: directly relates to why. If you participate in social media to stay in touch with friends or to enhance client relationships, then you already know the who, but if you participate in social media to reach potential new clients, then who refers to your target market.

Who is your target market? You’re probably thinking “everyone.” Marketing to everyone, though, is like trying to hit a bullseye with a needle from several miles away. Although “everyone” may seem like a large target that’s impossible to miss, it’s for exactly that reason that you don’t want to market to everyone — everyone is too large a target market. There are too many variables in the “everyone” target market. You need to narrow down your target market from everyone to a more manageable niche, and there are lots of niches to choose from.

Sit down right now and think about your strengths. What areas of human resources (HR) do you excel in or prefer? Maybe you should focus your effort on compensation or maybe training or maybe leadership development. Maybe you should remain a generalist but focus your marketing efforts on heavy industry, or small business, or new and emerging businesses. By narrowing your marketing focus away from everyone, you’ll save yourself time and effort and produce better marketing results.

Where: relates to where does your target market gather and hang out? What forms of connecting does your target market use? This is where the “birds of a feather” element comes into play. Chances are pretty good that your target market doesn’t hang out at meetings, forums, email lists and websites that HR consultants hang out in. The desire to hang out with others in your industry is primal, but hanging out and following other HR consultants won’t gain you clients unless HR consultants are your target market.

You need to invest the time and effort in finding out where the members of your target market hangs out, and then you need to hang out in those places yourself. LinkedIn and Twitter are very popular social media hangouts for HR consultants, but unless other HR professionals are your potential clients, you don’t want to follow other HR professionals. Utilize LinkedIn to find groups of people in your target market and join them. Utilize search engines to find your target market on the Internet. Spend 95% of your social media activity with your target market and only 5% of your social media activity with your specific industry (other HR professionals).

What: refers to what social media activities are you going to engage in to reach your target market? Will you join the same social media sites they join and lurk until someone asks a question you can answer? Will you go to in-person conferences, training and networking meetings that they attend? Of course, your best bet is a combination of the two, but you shouldn’t spend all your online social media activity time just listening.

Start by listening and after you’ve gotten comfortable with the flow, do some postings yourself. On online social media sites, don’t use in-your-face marketing. Instead, use information marketing. Post the url to an interesting blog post, preferably yours. Post the url for the Department of Labor (DOL) announcement about a new employment law/regulation; include a comment that you’re willing to explain the announcement to those who don’t understand government-speak. Tweet from an HR conference you’re attending.

When: actually refers to how often. How often should you participate in social media? If you’re using social media for keeping up with friends, how often is dictated by how much online time you want to spend with your friends. If you use social media for enhancing client relationships or to gain clients, how often translates to as often as possible. Because that can sound daunting, I recommend a minimum of once a week to three times a week. If you choose once a week, plan to spend at least an hour total time on social media sites. If you choose three times a week or more, plan to spend a total of 30 minutes on social media sites.

Summary: There you go; the who, what, when, where and why of a successful social media marketing plan for your HR consultancy with the emphasis on plan. Everything you do in your consultancy should have a plan, including social media marketing.

What is your social media marketing plan? Does it include the five elements of who, what, when, where and why, or does it include different elements? Please share your social media marketing know-how with everyone by leaving a comment.

7 Ways to Find Corporate Head Honchos

Donna Caissie — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:18:42 +0000

Independent human resource consultants are always looking for contact information for the head honcho at specific companies. They just know in their heart of hearts that if they could talk to the head honcho they’d be able to convince her that she needs to hire them to keep her company out of HR hot water. Good news; there are a variety of tools online to help you find that information. In no particular order, I’ve found and used, to some degree, the following tools to find corporate head honchos:

Annual Reports: On this site you can find the annual reports of public companies. Once you call up the annual report, search it for Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance.

Lead 411: This site lets you search for companies and people. A company search brings you to a screen with tabbed content. The first tab contains a list of all the executives in the company, and the second tab contains a link to LinkedIn. Once you log in to your LinkedIn account, Lead411 downloads the profiles of company executives to the LinkedIn tab on Lead411.

If you’re an independent HR consultant, Lead411’s LinkedIn connection will be of particular interest to you. The test search I conducted on Lead411 lead me to three HR head honchos, which downloaded via Lead411’s LinkedIn connection.

An interesting thing to note about Lead411 is that you can use it to search for privately held companies too. Although it didn’t find my company, ExtraOrdinary Assistance, it did find a biotech company I know of that’s still in research phase.

Google Search: This is probably the easiest way to find information about any company. In the Google search box, enter the name of the company you want information on, and surround the company name in quotation marks. For example, if you want information about my company, ExtraOrdinary Assistance, you’d enter it into the Google search box like this: “ExtraOrdinary Assistance”.

Need to find a particular person at a company? In the Google search box, enter the person’s title (surrounded by quotes), followed by the plus sign, enter the company name (surrounded by quotes). For example, I recently needed to find out who was the vice president of human resources at Fidelity Investments. In the Google search box, I entered the following: “vice president of human resources” + “Fidelity Investments”. Within the first three organic listings on Page 1 was the name of Fidelity’s EVP of HR. Cool!

Jigsaw: If you already know the name of the person you’re looking to find contact information for, then Jigsaw is the way to go. Entering a person’s name in the Jigsaw search box, will yield full contact information. Looking up a company on Jigsaw yields too many results to make it worthwhile to find people on Jigsaw.

Manta: Manta allows you to search for information for both U.S. and non-U.S. companies.

Hoovers: A search of Hoovers led to a mother-load of information. Hoovers not only found the company I searched for, but they also indicated that D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet) had information on the company I searched for. The D&B information was available for a fee, but the basic information from Hoovers was free.

Yahoo Finance: Searching Yahoo for a company is a bit convoluted, unless you know the company’s stock exchange ticker symbol off the top of your head. If you do, all you have to do is enter the company’s ticker symbol into Yahoo Finance’s search box, and you’ll find all the information you could ever want on the company.

If you don’t know the company’s ticker symbol, look it up on Google. For example, to find the ticker symbol for Charter Communications, I entered the following words into the Google search box: Charter Communications ticker symbol.

How do you find the head honchos in your industry or target market? Do you do anything different? Please share by leaving a comment.

HR Consulting Success Stories Presents John Beane, President of Staff Development Services

Donna Caissie — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:00:28 +0000

This week’s HR Consulting Success story is with John Beane, President of Staff Development Services. Staff Development Services provides clients with:

Hiring Assessments
Coaching Assessments
Executive Coaching
Organizational Assessments
Training to Improve Hiring and Promoting Practices
Human Resource Consulting
Process Improvement
Management Training

The HRVA:	Well, we start our conference series today with John Beane President of Staff Development Services, and John, welcome to our conference. How are you this morning?

John:	Very good, Donna. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

The HRVA:	It’s my pleasure, and as I told you earlier, you are the first person we’re interviewing so you get to be at the head of the line.

John:	I like that.

The HRVA:	Great! Let’s get started. I’ve looked through your website; it was very informative, and I was very impressed especially with your bio, but I’m the one who knows who you are and what you do, but our readers may not, so tell me a little bit about yourself.

John:	Well, I began my interest in human resources years ago when I had a business where I actually had to hire people. I quickly discovered that I wasn’t very good at it. My theory at that time was you take a warm body, you stick them in a job, and if they’re successful great. If they’re not, you just find someone else. I’ll have to admit that at that time I had about 200% turnover a year. As I began to recognize the costs associated with that turnover, I said well, there’s got to be a better way. I was kinda dumb; I hadn’t heard about human resource people and all that. My company was not really big enough to have a human resources professional on board, so I began to do some research to improve how I hired people. So that was really the spark that, you could say, got me interested in human resources as perhaps a career or business or whatever, but it was mainly self-preservation as a businessman. That literally took my turnover from about 200% a year, with the last couple of years that I had that business, to zero. Because of financial circumstances and things transitioned from that business into starting a training and consulting firm. At first I did general things, just kind of making a living, and over the years slowly specialized more and more on human resources. For about 10 years I worked for a national firm that did seminars and became their sort of HR specialist. If they had a need for interviewing, training, or human resource issues training, I conducted that sort of training. I guess the epitome of that was I was invited into the U.S. Senate to do a training session with some of the leadership of the Senate at that time in how to interview and hire good employees. So that has been my career over the last 25 years as a consultant and previously doing training. I traveled many, many millions of miles doing that sort of work. So that just gives you a little bit of an idea of where I came from and how I got to where I am.

The HRVA:	That sounds like a route that most HR Consultants don’t take into the field, from what I’ve been able to gather. Most of them go to school and learn how to be HR consultants, and they don’t get their real world experience until after they get out of school, so I’d say that probably makes you very valuable as an HR consultant to have gone through the school of hard knocks, so to speak.

John:	It has because in most cases the scenarios I run into, I have seen and had to deal with some variation of that scenario previously, so it gives me some insight that I would probably not have gotten had I not had to learn how to do this on my own many, many years ago.

The HRVA:	Right, and you said you’ve been an HR consultant for about 25 years now?

John:	Just about 25; yes. I started doing the training and some of the typical types of training such as time management, supervision. I began to focus more on the supervision and management training. Really, that kind of led me into the human resource area because one of the things I discovered as I tried to train people is quite often the company or the organization had hired badly in the first place, and my job was to try to train people, who weren’t really suitable for management, but tackling it in reverse. I began to realize that I could be more effective, as a consultant, if I helped those folks hire the right people who had character traits that would permit them to fulfill the job effectively and then the training could be beneficial. You’ve probably heard the old saying, “you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse” and yet that’s what many, many companies try to do. They take people who just aren’t really suitable for the job and try to make them capable of doing it, and most people are unable to make that type of transition.

The HRVA:	I’ve worked in a lot of high tech companies where they hire engineers because they’re good at engineering, and then they promote them into management positions, and they flounder because they don’t have the background or people skills to manage or supervise others.

John:	If you kind of think of a funnel, I started out at the very broad end of the funnel. Over the last 25 years what I’ve done is focus more and more intently into a very narrow area of human resource consulting that’s behavioral based. What it’s permitted to do is manage my client base better, if you will. What I mean by that is when I was a generalist, just doing any kind of work, whatever I ran into I was gonna say, “sure I can do that”. Well, I never became very good at any of that. By focusing almost laser-like on a narrow area of human resources, it permitted me to become a much better expert and better with my clients, helping them solve whatever problems they were having. It means that there’s a lot of things I don’t do anymore.

The HRVA:	Well, I would guess there are enough HR generalists out there to pick up the slack, but finding your niche is very important for an HR consultant because instead of just throwing darts indiscriminately it just helps you to narrow your focus for your marketing efforts. So congratulations getting that done for yourself.

John:	Well, I wish I could take credit for it, but I really can’t. In the past, I’ve been fortunate to have people who decided they wanted to mentor me and gave me the benefit of their experience or advice. I don’t know whether I was smart enough to take it or dumb enough to just not know any better, but I was able to listen to what they told me. Over the years, and, this is the absolute truth, I was able to reinvent myself in order to stay an independent contractor rather than having to look for work, which quite often happens to consultants.

The HRVA:	Right and along those lines do you have any advice for someone just starting out as a human resource consultant?

John:	When you first start out, I think it’s important to be more flexible, before figuring out where you are most comfortable. It doesn’t hurt to say :I think I can do that: and to embrace different areas of the human resource field, so that you can find an area where you say I’m good at this; I like doing this. If you’re going to do something for many, many years you need to love to do it. Basically that’s what I’ve been able to do. I’ve been able to find which area that I have a passion about, and I can do my work with a great deal of passion even though I’ve been doing this part of it for 20+ years, and that’s important.

The HRVA:	Yeah, it is; it is. That’s very important, and that’s fantastic. It usually takes people forever to figure out what it is they enjoy doing and pursue it so you’ve short circuited that one, and you’ve gotten where you need to be. That’s great!

John:	I will tell you that technology in today’s world has made what I do feasible, whereas it would not have been as feasible as when I first got into this business. I’m an early advocate of computers. When I bought my first computer, years ago, a 10 MG hard drive cost $10,000 so in those days it was a thousand dollars megabyte. Today it’s just unbelievable when you’re practically talking pennies per gigabyte. Computers were used in that early business, and as I got into my consulting work, I continued to recognize it was important to stay up with current technology. Actually what it has permitted me is to do most of my work without having to travel. I’m a little bit unique in that regard. I seldom go outside my office to do my job.

The HRVA:	Ahhhhh, okay

John:	I was just going to say that in the 10 years of working for a national seminar company, I was a lot like the guy up in the air. I was up in the air about 40 weeks a year and got to the point I’d had my fill of all that travel, and started to look for a way of modifying my consulting business where it can be done like this by phone, email, or voicemail, if necessary. I don’t really care much for voicemail, but it’s made it feasible to make a good living without having to spend half of my life in an airplane or in an airport.

The HRVA:	That’s fantastic. Do you run into difficulties with clients perhaps not appreciating the technological aspects of your business?

John:	Not actually. Most of the people that I deal with are at least somewhat fluent in technology, and so I actually have clients that I’ve worked with for years but I’ve never physically met.

The HRVA:	Okay.

John:	All of our work is done by phone or email, and it’s made it, in one respect, enjoyable because it makes me very efficient. On the other hand, there are times when you talk to people for years and years, and you’d really like to meet them. You’d like to see them face-to-face for a change, but its just not feasible in many cases.

The HRVA:	Right, right. All that travel can be very wearing on someone.

John:	Right, and about the only time I travel now is if I go give a speech at a meeting/convention, marketing meeting, something like that.

The HRVA:	Ahhh, and do you give many speeches at conventions, marketing meetings, whatever?

John:	I know this is gonna sound strange; not if I don’t have to. When I got into this current work configuration, I did go to a number of meetings as a speaker and picked up a lot of clients that way. I haven’t done as much of that in the last few years mainly because the types of things I get into are typically by invitation only. I’ve spoken at a lot of them so many times that I’m old news now. They’re looking for something new and different, and a lot of the people in those meetings are my clients so it’s not as necessary for me to go to those meetings.

The HRVA:	Ahhh, okay.

John:	Quite often a lot of my clients come from people going to those meetings that don’t know me, and they hear about me at the meeting because people are talking about using my service, and they will contact me after those meetings.

The HRVA:	Yes, the best marketing going is word of mouth, so you’ve established that – great.

John:	It really is. As a matter of fact, in a lot of cases, I market myself two ways. One, as a company name, and one by my personal name. Many times people will use my name, and I’m not that good in English, but I think they use it like a verb like “you’ve gotta John Beane them”. They’re referring to an assessment I provide clients, and they just use my name instead of the assessment’s name.

The HRVA:	Well, you know that’s good; you are the brand and that’s practically all you need to have a brand that stays in people’s minds.

John:	And I’ve been very fortunate in that regard, in that my name brand has stuck. I also use Staff Development Services because most of my marketing today is email and having a web presence, so I want people to use that name as well. If I were ever to sell my consulting practice, it’s kind of hard to sell your own name.

The HRVA:	Right.

John:	So, that’s part of my reasoning behind that.

The HRVA:	That’s excellent reasoning and not to skip, hop and jump through questions we’ve spoken about previously, is that one of your future plans to market your consultancy and go retire to Baha or someplace else?

John:	Probably not. I like working. I really do have a passion for what I do. I don’t know that I would be as happy if I didn’t have the work to do everyday because I do enjoy it. I’ve been able to develop a lifestyle that’s fairly flexible. As a matter of fact I’m probably a little too obsessive about my work. What I’ve tried to do is set it up so that I don’t have to work all that hard. My work is in my home so I get to enjoy my home. I might retire someday, but I don’t have any plans to do that anytime soon.

The HRVA:	If you’ve developed a business style and a life style that gives you an opportunity to work from home and the flexibility to take time off when you want it or need it, I can understand why you wouldn’t be looking at retirement. You’ve built what everybody dreams of.

John:	Well, it’s like you being a Virtual Human Resource Assistant; I’m a Virtual Human Resource Person because as long as I have Internet access and cell phone service I’m good to go. My son got married at a Sandals this past summer, and my clients never knew I was packed.It was wonderful! I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Caribbean Beach Resort but they can certainly be lovely.

The HRVA:	Oh, yes they can. Many, many, many, many moons ago, before I bought the money drain that I call a house, I used to take some really fantastic vacations down south and it is very,very beautiful down in the Caribbean.

John:	(laughing) Oh it is, and so that’s the nice thing again about the business I’ve developed. It is very flexible from that vantage point and that has made that a habit. It couldn’t be feasible 20 years ago, but it’s certainly feasible now.

The HRVA:	Right, and speaking of technology, in my wanderings around the world wide web I often see a lot of HR consultants that aren’t heavily into technology. Is this something that differentiates you from the rest of the pack?

John:	It seems to; I’m virtual like you. I don’t interact a lot with other HR consultants but it does seem that a lot of folks still are more face-to-face. They feel like they gotta go meet people first, which I’m not against; it’s just not a driving force in my practice.

The HRVA:	Right, right. In your early days as an HR consultant, did you find clients had misconceptions about what it is you do?

John:	Constantly. The most difficult thing to get across to people is what you do and how you can help them. I never will forget one time, when I was fairly new in consulting, I had a businessman basically look at me and say, “you’re too young; how can you help me?” And I looked at him and I said, “You know I think you’re right; I don’t think I can”.A person’s gotta have an attitude that you can work with, if they don’t there’s no sense in wasting your time.

The HRVA:	Right, right; I agree. In the Virtual Assistant business, they hammer at us all the time that there’s an ideal client and there’s a not so ideal client and that you want to run away from the not ideal client as quickly as you can, and those are the ones who don’t place any value on what it is you do or what you can do for them.

John:	That is absolutely true. One of the questions you asked me a bit earlier was if you’re starting out as an HR consultant it’s important to realize that you can’t help everyone. It is a partnership between you and the client, and you have to be able to explain to the client what it is you do, how you do it, and how it’s going to help them. If that’s suitable to them, then you have a good relationship. If someone contacts me about working with them, the first thing I say is “we’re a partnership”. :I can’t do any better for you than you permit me to do. What I need from you is information. Your information will tell me what I need to know in order to be of help to you.” If we don’t have that sort of relationship, then things generally have not worked out well with those clients.Quite frequently, during the conversation, I’ll come to the conclusion this is probably not gonna work, and I don’t pursue the client.

The HRVA:	And I assume that if you decide that it’s not gonna work and you don’t pursue the client you don’t waste time and energy thinking “oh my god I just let a client go.”

John:	Exactly because again, the type of human resource work that I do, where I basically focus on helping clients hire people, has also been very beneficial for me to use at looking at my own business even though I don’t hire people. I look at it as if a client is going to hire me then I need to be the right person to help them. And so it’s really been very beneficial in that regard. In the early years I took on anybody and would bend over backwards trying to make the relationship work, mainly because I needed the money. It was very stressful, and it was very difficult. I probably wasn’t a very good consultant for the client. By finding my particular little niche, what’s happened is the clients that I do work with really appreciate the efforts I make for them. It makes my job easy. It makes it easy for them because they’ve developed the trust that I’m going to give them 120% when they need me, but I’m not going to bother them all that much when they don’t have a need.

The HRVA:	Right. That sounds fantastic, and it sounds exactly what the VA industry preaches to the Virtual Assistants, so that’s great. I hope that any new HR consultants that are listening to us make a note in the back of their head to do a little bit of a mind-set change so they can stop running as hard as they’re running and maybe become more successful by focusing in on what works for them.

John:	Exactly, and you know sometimes your information comes from the strangest sources. Like what prompted me to focus my consulting practice the way I did was a book that came out in 1995 called “Emotional Intelligence”. I read the book, and I still say it’s the best book in all the books that have been written by emotional intelligence. What it pointed out to me was that what was being discussed in the book was what I was doing at the time. I just didn’t call it what the book called it. I realized that’s where my passion had always been even back in the old business when I was learning how to interview and how to hire people, I had almost by accident fallen into what he was saying what you had to do to be successful with emotional intelligence. It so it kind of let me build the practice around it. Now I will say that I don’t think of the same ideas of emotional intelligence and then apply them to clients. Most of the people who’ve written all these books about emotional intelligence, and the reason for most of the emotional intelligence books that have been written are designed to sell training. We will train you to be a more emotionally intelligent person. What my research has come to show is that we have a very narrow range of emotional intelligence and what emotionally intelligent people do is they figure out what that is and they find the right job that lets that flourish, but they don’t try to change themselves into something they cannot be. And interestingly enough, although I started for many years in my practice as a trainer, I have really come to the conclusion that most training dollars are wasted because they’re trying to change people into something they cannot become.

The HRVA:	Right. That really resonates with me that its really a waste of time and money to twist people inside out trying to make them what you want them to be.

John:	Exactly. A very simple one is if you are not a good time manager, I can teach you all the tools to manage to time, but unless you have a desire to do that, you still will not be a good time manager.

The HRVA:	Right, right; exactly. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, John, you just really roll with it, and said things that were totally unexpected but really valuable. Is there anything else you’d like tell us about or anything else you can share with us before we wrap this up, and I let you go back to your virtual consulting?

John:	I’d just like to leave people with the thought that everybody has passion, and it’s your job to find whatever your passion is in life. If you don’t, you’re probably going to be somewhat miserable with your life. When you find your passion, things will tend to flow much easier; life tends to be better. I’m not saying that you don’t have problems, but they’re problems you can deal with more easily; a lot easier than if you’re trying to be something that is not really you. That’s how I’ve learned to approach life. I think the more people do that and take responsibility for themselves – their success – their future, they’re going to find their lives to be a much, much happier time than many, many people get to spend on this old earth.

The HRVA:	Fantastic! Well, thank you John. You’ve been a great leading interview. I can’t wait to get this transcript up on my website and issue the press release and having millions and millions of people shouting your name from the rafters.

John:	Well me either, Donna, and thank you for inviting me on your podcast, and I look forward to talking with you again sometime.

The HRVA:	Great, Fantastic John.

John:	Thank You.

The HRVA:	Bye, Bye.

John:	Bye.

HR Consulting Success Stories

Donna Caissie — Sat, 29 May 2010 22:26:51 +0000

Back in April, I began interviewing a number of independent human resource consultants to find out the secret to their success. My thought being that the success techniques used by these successful HR consultants, who had been consulting for a while, would be a valuable resource to the newcomers in human resource consulting.

The consultants I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing so far include:

John Beane, President of Staff Development Services;
Frank Cania, Founder at Caniahr, LLC;
Alison Grace, President and Founder of Instant HR Solutions;
Sharlyn Luby (aka The HR Bartender), President of Internal Talent Management

These interviews will be presented in this blog as both a written transcript and a mp3 for download. The interviewees will also have the written transcript and mp3 for their information. Later in the summer, these first interviews will be packaged for podcasting and available for listening via iTunes.

The first interview is scheduled for publication June 1 with the remainder to be published once weekly throughout June, so please return to this blog Tuesday, as I’m sure you’ll be as fascinated by the path traveled by these successful independent human resource consultants as I was.

Marketing Opportunity for HR Consultants

Donna Caissie — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:56:52 +0000

HR Consultants: Is there a potential client you’ve been trying to snag without success? You’ve probably tried all the usual routes:

Networking venues.
Recommendations of trusted colleagues.
Lunches, dinners, etc.

Give It Away

Have you tried giving away an inconsequential, yet important piece of information? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is giving you just such an opportunity. In two weeks, a law will go into effect in Massachusetts governing the protection of information. The law has far-reaching effects, in that it also applies to businesses residing outside of Massachusetts but doing business with Massachusetts consumers and businesses. The law applies to both brick and mortar and online businesses.

How It’s An Opportunity

Self-employed human resource consultants can use this new law as an opportunity to showcase their expertise to potential clients.

If you have email addresses for potential clients, send them an email alert about the law. Include a brief explanation of the law, compliance dates and penalties for non-compliance. Last paragraph of the email alert should include a call to action, something along the lines of “if you have any questions or would like help complying with the new law, please contact us at __________.”
If you have telephone numbers for potential clients, call them and alert them to the new law. Give them the information outlined in the above item, and include your call to action.
If you have the postal addresses of your potential clients, postal mail a pdf copy of the law to your potential clients. Paper clip or staple your business card or a compliment card to the pdf and include a handwritten call to action.
This is an ideal opportunity for a teleseminar or webinar, which is a bit more work than any of the above listed items, but a teleseminar or webinar enables you to showcase your expertise to a large group of potential clients all at the same time

If you don’t have the time to do any of the above, a new-fangled careerist known as a Human Resource Virtual Assistant (HRVA) can do all of the above (and more) for you. An HRVA will also track the number of responses you receive relative to this marketing campaign as well as design (draft the email message, pretty-up the pdf with your logo and consultancy information, etc.) the elements of the campaign.

A pdf copy of the new law is available at: http://mass.gov/Eoca/docs/idtheft/201CMR1700reg.pdf.

If you would like to know more about HRVAs, and how they can help self-employed human resource consultants create the levels of success they’ve always dreamed of, please email hrva@extra-assist.com.

P.S. Remember to notify your current clients about the new law too .

=>Donna Caissie, the ExtraOrdinary HRVA

hrva@extra-assist.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/donnacaissie

http://twitter.com/donnacaissie

Lifestyle Benefit Programs

Donna Caissie — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:44:07 +0000

Imagine working for a company that arranges to have your dry cleaning picked up and delivered to you. Imagine that this same company can arrange for someone to go out and buy a birthday gift for your child, niece, nephew or grandchild. This company can also arrange for someone to wait on the telephone for hours and grab those hard-to-get concert tickets for you (personally, I’ve got a yen for Eric Clapton concert tickets). Imagine what it would be like to work for a company like that.

Easy to Implement

Lifestyle benefit programs are relatively easy to implement and surprisingly no-cost or low cost to the employer. For example, here in the northeast there is a chain of dry cleaners called Zoots, and they pick up and deliver dry cleaning for FREE. Don’t have a Zoots in your area, talk to your local dry cleaner and see if he’d be willing to pick up and deliver your employees’ dry cleaning on a weekly basis.

Negligible Cost/FREE

If you’re a self-employed human resource consultant, designing and implementing lifestyle benefit programs for your clients could be a huge, value-added service you provide to your clients, especially those small or micro businesses. Do you have startup companies among your clientele? Employee-paid benefits can be the answer. There are many companies that provide medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance at group rates without an employer contribution. 401(k) plans can be instituted without an employer contribution too. Some of these plans may require administration fees, which can be rolled into the cost to the employees, but hey, the administration fees are negligible compared to what an employer would have to pay if he used traditional benefit plans.

Perfect Timing

I realize that with the job market the way it is now, there’s no motivation for employers to even think about benefit plans, never mind implement them. In today’s job market, employers can cut back on benefits and not worry about employees jumping ship. What you and I, dear HR consultant, know is that the job market isn’t going to be this sad forever. It will bounce back, and employers will be competing for workers again. If they want to be competitive in that job market, employers will have to beef up the benefits they cut back, or they’ll have to find another way to lure candidates. Imagine how perfect your timing will be, if you can suggest a lifestyle benefit program all ready to roll out. If you do the work now, while things are slow, you’ll be at the ready when the time is right.

Lifestyle Benefits Resource

Want to know more about lifestyle benefit programs, or want help designing a lifestyle benefit program for your clients? Contact me at hrva@extra-assist.com. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have or to send you my one-page document with tips for designing a lifestyle benefit program.

What do you think about a lifestyle benefits program? Got your own ideas for lifestyle benefits, let everyone know by leaving a comment to this blog posting.

=>Donna Caissie, the ExtraOrdinary HR Assistant

Writing Tips for Virtual Assistants, Bloggers, Human Resource Professionals & Everyone Else

Donna Caissie — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:56:38 +0000

Did you know that how you present yourself in writing, as well as what you write about, affects your image? If your writing is riddled with typos, misspellings, bad grammar, incorrect word usage, etc. then the image you portray of yourself is less than professional. If you want to be taken seriously by those who read what you write, then you want to write without obvious errors.

Is Proofreading is Out of Style?

It’s not hard to write like a professional. All it takes is a little proofreading. The problem is that, thanks to technology, proofreading is out of style. Before everyone had a computer, most writing was proofread by a secretary, administrative assistant or a publishing house’s proofreader or editor. You didn’t need to proofread what you wrote because a secretary, administrative assistant, etc. would proof it for you. They also made the necessary corrections. Your grammar’s not up to par? No problem; the secretary will fix it. Don’t know your “to” from your “too”? No problem, the secretary does, and she’ll fix that for you too. Mistakes in grammar, incorrect word usage, spelling errors, typos and incorrect capitalization and punctuation were caught by the secretary, administrative assistant, etc.

Typos, Misspellings & Incorrect Word Usage, Oh My!

With the advent of the computer, word processing programs and spell checking software, everyone can write and self-publish a book, a blog, an ebook or whitepaper or just comment on someone else’s blog. Unfortunately, many of these writings are so riddled with typos, misspellings, incorrect word usages, etc. that one begins to despair about the quality of education our citizens are receiving.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a grammarian, but I do take the extra steps necessary to eliminate obvious mistakes.

Technology is the Culprit

After chewing on the subject for a while, it began to dawn on me that the problem wasn’t that people are uneducated and/or illiterate; the problem was that people were relying on technology to correct their mistakes. Instead of proofreading their writing before publishing/submitting/posting, they were running them through a spell checker and assuming that the spell checker would find everything that’s wrong. As any professional virtual assistant (VA) can tell you, that’s not so. (Sorry, but I had to slip that in there; it’s an important keyword for me.) LOL!

Spell Checkers Alone Won’t Cut It

A spell checker doesn’t know the difference between to, too and two; their, there and they’re; here and hear; your and you’re; whose and who’s; and a rash of other commonly misused words. Spell checkers won’t find grammatical errors unless you tell (set) it to find grammatical errors.

Tips for Professional Writing

So that your writing always portrays you well, here are some writing tips that will help you look like a professional in everything you write.

If English isn’t your native language and you’re writing for an English-speaking audience, hire someone to proofread everything you write.
If English is your native language and you’re writing for an English-speaking audience, proofread or hire someone to proofread everything you write.
Don’t just rely on spell checking programs; spelling checkers don’t find instances of incorrect word usage. They don’t find all misspellings, and they don’t find all typos. Proofread as well as spell check.
Set your spell checking program to check grammar too.
If you’re going to blog, write articles, write ebooks, whitepapers or reports, invest in grammar checking software.
After you’ve spell checked, grammar checked and proofread, put your writing aside for ten minutes, and go do something else.
After the ten minutes is over, go back to your writing and proofread it one more time, or ask someone else to proofread it for you.

Now you’ve done everything (short of hiring someone to do your writing for you) in your power to make sure your writing portrays you as a professional and not a hobbyist.