Hello, my name is David Merves and I work for Evergreen Evaluation & Consulting, Inc. (EEC) in Jericho, Vermont.

What is a MARKET NICHE? Black’s Law Dictionary defines it as “a small, profitable market segment suitable for focused marketer attention.” Entrepreneur magazine says, “Niche marketing can be an extremely cost-effective method that targets carefully pinpointed market segments.” At EEC we viewed niche markets as an opportunity to expand and refocus our business, while competing against the scale economies that larger competitors are able to achieve.

This refocusing, rebranding, took the form of a name change and corporate structure. EEC was originally formed as Evergreen Educational Consulting, LLC and based upon our goals and with advice from our attorneys, accountants and mentors we shifted to a C Corp as Evergreen Evaluation and Consulting, Inc. The organizational realignment was linked to our objectives, resources, and capacities.  We spent a year discussing the culture of our business, our attributes, our strategies for achieving our goals and preparing our business plan, which included marketing.

Lesson Learned: It was imperative that we assessed the company’s strengths and weaknesses and aligned our marketing strategies to planned outcomes. We are a small company and our brand is our face to the world.  It is the perception of our values by our customers and potential customers that counts. Our brand is the principles woven into the fabric of our company. Our brand is not a flashy web site or logo. It is our promise and commitment.

Dawn Thilmany, Ph.D. at Colorado State University has written that there are five stages to fully addressing a niche opportunity:

• Strategic Planning
• Define Mission and Objectives
• Strategies and Action
• Monitoring Key Projects/Objectives
• Organizational Realignment

After EEC’s rebranding experience we would suggest the following:

• Think analytically
• Don’t try to appeal to everyone
• Be honest with yourself
• Learn the lingo of your niche
• Commit 100%
• You will make mistakes; move on

Hot Tip: As you build your business, be mindful of revenue streams, contractual cycles and invoicing patterns. You don’t want your niche to be so narrow as to have an unexpected event, say Sequestration, impacting the overall viability of your company.  Try to layer your contracts so that you are replacing 20 – 30% of your revenue each year and not having to scramble to replace 75%. When negotiating your invoice schedule consider your cash flow needs. Can your business operate on quarterly payments or do monthly invoices make more sense?

Rad Resources:

Pinterest: Branding and Design books

My favorite, The Brand Called You by Peter Montoya with Tim Vandehey with a forward by Al Ries.

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The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Promoting Your Consultancy Week with information on marketing and branding. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our colleagues who own evaluation businesses. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

consulting · Independent Consulting

Hi there! My name is Gail Barrington and I’ve been an independent evaluator for over 25 years. It seems to me that three factors help determine the size of your consultancy:

1. Your Vision—what do you see when you dream of yourself as an independent consultant? Are you on your own, working closely with clients on a few interesting projects but able to retreat to your own private world to get your thinking done? Or do you see yourself working with a couple of trusted colleagues whose skills complement your own, together making a well-oiled team? Or are you embedded in a dynamic organization with several layers of staff and yourself as leader and CEO? The vision that resonates for you will help decide your ideal firm size.
2. Your Skills—what are special skills you are known for? What did you like best in school? What have you received great feedback about on the job? Is it your technical expertise, knowledge of a specific sector, problem solving ability, project management skills, interaction with clients, or something else? Whatever these skills are, they should be the focus of your marketing efforts.
3. Your Market—based on the networking and competitive intelligence you have conducted, what organizations are hiring evaluators? In what capacities? What are the social changes, political decisions, and demographic trends that are shaping your community? Who is feeling pressure to demonstrate accountability? Where are your colleagues working these days? Answers to questions like these will help you identify market opportunities as they shift over time.

Of the many lessons I have learned, these three stand out:

Lessons Learned:

• Nothing is cast in stone. Consultants change their business name, size, and structure all the time. Changes to their vision, preferred skill set, or market cause them to reassess and reconfigure. They move in and out of partnerships, change from sole proprietorship to LLC , and reorganize from corporation to non-profit corporation. Don’t feel that the decision you make now will limit your options later.
• Once a consultant, always a consultant. Consulting is addictive. I have known many consultants who threw in the towel and returned to “a regular job.” Lack of a reliable income is usually the main reason.  Funnily enough, a year or two later, they are back at consulting again having found themselves unhappy working for someone else. Just a warning!
• Your business skills are transferrable. If you can run a consulting business, you can run any business. Even when you retire, you may find those small business and entrepreneurial skills surfacing again in unexpected ways. Many people can benefit from the skills you now take for granted and you may find that you never stop using them.

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The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Promoting Your Consultancy Week with information on marketing and branding. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our colleagues who own evaluation businesses. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

consulting · Independent Consulting

I’m Patti Bourexis, President of The Study Group Inc. Back in the 1980s I was thrown into the world of marketing. Some of the enduring lessons I learned were from the marketing books of Al Ries and Jack Trout – particularly Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. “Positioning,” wrote Ries and Trout in 1981, “is not what you do to a product, service, or company. It’s what you do to the mind of the prospect. Marketing is …securing a worthwhile position in the prospect’s mind. It’s about getting heard in our overcommunicated society.”

So when we launched The Study Group Inc. in 1992, we applied this positioning concept. We debated about whom our clients should be, how we should work with them and our intended results. We considered Ries and Trout’s first law of marketing: Find a category in the client’s mind that you can be first in. (“It’s better to be first than it is to be better.”)

Our goal became adding value to our clients’ own programs and we worked to create a new category in our clients’ minds focused on how we work. We insist on interacting with each client to define the exact assistance required before any contract is signed. Then we convene a “study group”– not unlike student study groups– which combine skills and expertise to tackle a specific task. Our study groups are temporary task forcesthat concentrate on a single assignment to provide quality services in a short period of time.  Work is intense; client participation is required.  The plans, products, and solutions belong to the client; work does not stop until the client is completely satisfied.  Then the study group is dissolved. We are delighted when a prospective client says, “What is The Study Group?” or, after learning about how we work, exclaims, “Gee, you guys are different.”

Lesson Learned: Sticking to our company positioning has led us down interesting paths. We decline clients who don’t agree with our positioning, which is dicey in tight times. We don’t have a web presence, which differentiates us from competitors. (We prefer word-of-mouth referrals.)  We employ only top talent. We only co-publish results with our clients because the work belongs to them, not us.

Hot Tip: Your path will be different than ours, but sometimes old sources are still good sources. Positioning is broader than product branding. Positioning means deciding how you do your work, with whom you work, and what sets you apart from potential competitors.

Rad Resources:

Al Ries and Jack Trout’s books: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Promoting Your Consultancy Week with information on marketing and branding. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our colleagues who own evaluation businesses. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

consulting · Independent Consulting

Hello! My name is Stella SiWan Zimmerman and I am the President and founder of ACET Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the evaluation of educational, health, and human services programs. ACET has been in business for close to 15 years and we rebrand our image every 5 years. A ‘brand’ is anything that differentiates one business or product from another. A brand is more than a logo and can incorporate colors, images, jingles, slogans, and even tastes and scents into a comprehensive package that represents a company, product, or service. We prioritize branding so that ACET’s products and services stay fresh and are recognizable to our clients, even without a logo.

Our most recent branding project began in early 2012 and included the development of a new logo, tagline, mission statement, website, and office templates (letterhead, business cards, fax coversheet, etc.). During the rebranding process we recognized a need for all our deliverables – reports, memos, agendas, etc. – to be consistent with the brand and visually complement one another. And we needed those deliverables to be consistent across all staff. So, we created a branding book.

ACET’s Branding Book is a compilation of brand-consistent guides, settings, and templates. It includes:

• Default settings for computer software we use most often (e.g., margins, tabs, and font sizes);
• Ready-to-use templates for a wide range of deliverables (e.g., reports, memos, meeting agendas, and email signature);
• ACET’s logo in different sizes, resolutions, and colors; and
• Primary and complementary color palettes for multimedia, reports, printing, and the website. (See also the “Rad Resource” below.)

Hot Tip: Look on the internet for examples of branding books (there are some out there!) then decide on what you need a branding book to do before creating your own.

Rad Resources: We used the online resource from Stylephreak to identify a palette of colors that complemented our logo. There are a number of similar, free resources available. In order to use most of them, you will need to know the RGB or hexadecimal value of the color you are interested in. But if you don’t know the RGB values, try using Instant Eyedropper (a free Windows utility) or DigitalColor Meter (preinstalled on most Mac OS X machines).

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The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Promoting Your Consultancy Week with information on marketing and branding. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our colleagues who own evaluation businesses. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

branding · consultants · Independent Consulting

I’m Rita Fierro, Ph.D. the founder of Fierro Consulting, LLC. As part of the Independent consulting TIG, I’m sharing with you resources and lessons learned from my branding process. I coined the expression “authentic branding” to indicate a process that focuses on one’s inner strengths and desires instead of the external market.

When I first started my business, I avoided marketing as long as I could. Eventually, I realized that branding was not separate from other aspects of my life:

Lessons Learned:

1)    Branding is the continuous evolution of a process of self-reflection: who am I and what do I really want from my life?

2)    Branding brought law of attraction to my work life once I got clear about who I wanted to be in my work: what resources and experiences do I want?

3)    Be brave! Someone told me once: “It’s the most quirky aspects of you that are most useful to branding.” When I present myself as an intellectual artist, no one ever forgets it.

4)    My best resources in branding were the bridges I created between seemingly opposite and irreconcilable aspects of my personality or interests.

5)    Spend some time focusing on the umbrella that embodies EVERYTHING you do. Once you are clear on what motivates your life, it will help with your tagline.

6)    Create personal vision and mission statements before business statements; it will help you identify the core principles you abide by in your life.

7)    Stay open to signals from the field. If in a year, 90% of your work is in a certain area, you probably should expand in that direction.

8)    Explore different frameworks at AEA; the field is so vast that I’m sure you’ll find an area that excites or motivates you!

9)    Commit to your ongoing professional development. Learn new skills and frameworks every year (at different conferences or trainings) and do the things you love that bring you joy and excitement in your work!

Rad Resource: Most branding books are targeted to men. Instead, Make a Name for Yourself is written with women in mind.

Rad Resource: This  Virtues Project^TM list can help you identify your guiding principles and priorities.

Activity: Make an exhaustive list of the opposites among your personal passions (For instance: Academia and freelancing, artistic and academic writing, training and creating documentaries.) Include hobbies, profession, and historical passions.

Build a bridge between each pair by identifying a way these opposite can intersect (For instance: in the examples above: consulting for universities, writing two versions of the same research for different audiences, creating documentaries on how organizations changed after training). One of these bridges may be your brand!

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The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Promoting Your Consultancy Week with information on marketing and branding. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our colleagues who own evaluation businesses. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

branding · consultants · Independent Consulting

Greetings! I’m Pat Mueller, President of Evergreen Evaluation & Consulting, Inc. of Jericho, Vermont. EEC’s business focuses on evaluation of federally funded Special Education programs. You’ll hear more about the rebranding of this niche firm later in the week.

The purpose of this week’s blogs is to share some thoughts, resources and musings on the marketing and branding aspects of promoting your evaluation business. Do you know your brand? If your brand was a person, what kind of person would it be? How would you market your brand for the digital age?

For some of us, marketing comes naturally and is an enjoyable part of owning and advancing our businesses. For others, it can be an after thought or “the last thing on the to-do list” that never quite gets done, or if it does, the results may not be particularly satisfying…how many times has the web site been redesigned?! Do I really use business cards? We hope this week’s blogs stimulate your thinking about creative and new ways to promote your consultancy.

This week’s posts will feature content on authentic branding, rebranding, positioning yourself and your business for success, determining the size of your consultancy, and the implications of niche businesses on branding.

Rad Resources:  In preparation for the week, we suggest that you preview the web sites for this week’s bloggers as they illustrate the range of marketing and branding approaches employed by the featured consultants. One of our bloggers does not have a digital presence, as you will read later in the week.

www.evergreenevaluation.net

www.ritafierro.com

www.acetinc.com

www.barringtonresearchgrp.com

To read more about building your consultancy, marketing and branding, check out these resources:

• Entrepreneur Magazine
  
• Gail Barrington’s recent book:  Consulting Start-Up and Management: A Guide for Evaluators and Applied Researchers

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The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Promoting Your Consultancy Week with information on marketing and branding. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our colleagues who own evaluation businesses. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

consultants · Independent Consulting

Hello, I am Maggie Miller, the principal of Maggie Miller Consulting.  I conduct program evaluation for small to mid-size nonprofits in the Denver/Boulder area.  Sometimes I think I should change that tagline because I’ve gotten referrals to larger nonprofits (whom I adore), but I am still very attached to the small identity.

Hot Tips:

• Trust that being small can be an advantage: when people hire you, they do so because you’re you; you’re not going to be delegating to staff.
• If you’re really small, you won’t have employees, so…
• Have subcontractors instead.  I work with some wonderful people who do data entry, multicultural interviews, and web development.
• Try to get some work as part of a team.  This will give you the camaraderie and learning opportunities that you would have if you worked for a larger company.
  • Know what you’re good at; know what has your name on it.
  • Know your limits:
  • When asked, “Oh, you consult with nonprofits…do you do strategic planning?” the answer is NO.  (Unless you do that too.) Get to know consultants who do related work, and make referrals.
  • Don’t take jobs that are too big.  Be happy to refer people to the larger shops in town.
    • Try to get one gig that brings in 40%-60% of your income, then you can be free to help smaller clients with the rest of your time.

Lesson Learned:

• The better you know what you can and cannot do – and what you like to do and don’t like to do – the better able you will be to attract your perfect clients.
• It’s all about relationships.  Enjoy them and keep them strong.

Rad Resources:

• This book: Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez.  This is somewhat woo-woo (i.e., law of attraction) but has guided my business philosophy and is full of useful exercises that brought me wonderful clients!
• All of the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA’s) amazing and affordable educational offerings, and fabulous resources like Stephanie Evergreen’s blog and Ann Emery’s Excel videos.
• See other AEA365 posts on Small is Beautiful

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. 

data visualization · Independent Consulting

Greetings!   My name is Jesse Burns, and I am part of the OL-ECB TIG leadership.  Outside of AEA, I am an independent consultant that works with a variety of organizations to design, implement and evaluate new products and services.

As an independent consultant, I have learned that managing the uncertainty with innovation projects is critical for gaining internal support.  While I received training with developing rigorous formative and summative evaluations, I’ve noticed that trying to inject these methods into uncertain innovation projects can lead to push back from the client.

In working on projects where clients were not interested in applying traditional evaluation methods to a project, I learned that clients often wanted to first understand the implications of a new innovation and then understand how they could evaluate the impacts of the innovation.  With this recognition in mind, I started applying insights from work by Amy Edmondson about the different processes that individuals and teams face with learning:

Hot Tips:

Addressing the different types of learning challenges can help different stakeholders to understand and engage in a project that requires them to learn.

Team Challenge Activities:  Rather than talking about learning, engaging individuals, teams and units in a puzzle or game can help illustrate how these different challenges manifest in individuals and teams. Using a game or puzzle to highlight and discuss these challenges can help surface the tensions between individual and organizational learning.

Problem Framing Activities: As a consultant, part of my work involves framing the problem that a client has to help them see their options a little more clearly. On innovation projects, engaging clients in framing their problem via Force-Field Analysis, SWOT analysis, or other visually-based activities can not only help frame the problem, but also uncover the learning challenges that individuals and teams will face in addressing the problem.

Rad Resources:

• “Evaluation Social Innovation”

Written by Preskill and Beer, this a great report on how to use developmental evaluation methods to evaluate social innovation projects. They provide a great overview of the limitations of using traditional evaluative methods to evaluate innovation projects as well as outline how developmental evaluation might be the right approach in these instances.

• “Is yours a learning organization?”

Written by Garvin, Edmondson and Gino, this classic 2008 HBR article teases apart the challenges of learning in organizations, as well as provides a great tool for assessing whether your organization (or the organization you are consulting with) is a learning organization.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Organizational Learning & Evaluation Capacity Building (OL-ECB) TIG Week with our colleagues in the OL-ECB AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our OL-ECB TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Independent Consulting

Hi, I am Amy Germuth, President and Founder of EvalWorks, LLC and blogger at EvalThought.  So you are an evaluation consultant.  You evaluate programs/projects as part of an evaluation consultancy you own, co-own, or work for.  But how often do you evaluate your own business?

Hot Tip #1: Think logic model.  Do you have a business plan (in writing/on paper) that describes your goals/objectives, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact? If not, create one – it could be really mind-blowing.

Hot Tip #2: Develop an evaluation plan linked to your logic model. Identify the evidence/data that  you will need to collect to formatively and summatively assess whether you are meeting your outcomes and outputs.  For example, if your goal is to write a winning RFP proposal, one activity may be “Respond to Evaluation RFPs”. Your output may be “Complete 4 RFPs” and your outcome may be “Improve the quality of my proposal submissions”.  What data do you need to collect to assess whether this is happening or has happened?  I can think of peer feedback, feedback from reviewers, comparison of your proposal to the wining proposal (if not yours), etc.

Hot Tip #3: Collect data – whatever you identified – and lots of it – related to costs/profits, proposal outcomes, media exposure, name recognition, etc.

Hot Tip #4: Review the data. What data triangulate? Which data are most reliable / valid? What can you conclude? Where do you need to do to make improvements? How will you improve -  Coursework? Self-teaching? Mentoring? Better marketing?

Hot Tip #5: Repeat – at least annually.

Click here to link to an article on creating effective dashboards. Develop one for your own company that tracks critical indicators of success to gain practice and then identify ways to incorporate dashboards into the work you provide clients.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Independent Consultants (IC) TIG Week with our colleagues in the IC AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our IC  TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Independent Consulting · logic models · triangulation