PICA Member Spotlights
Q&A with independent consultants who successfully “made the leap” and created the consulting career of their dreams
Q: Please introduce yourself and tell us your area of specialty?
A: My name is Abby Coppock and I am going by the super original name of Abby Coppock Consulting. My specialty is around helping leaders create great culture, both at the organizational level and within individual teams. Most of my work is helping organizations live their values by building them into structure and processes and helping teams navigate conflict and work more effectively together.
Q: Did you have any consulting experience before you went independent?
A: I did. I worked for a medium sized consulting firm for about seven years before going independent. Some of the circumstances around going independent were that the medium sized firm was bought by a big consulting firm and I wasn't interested in being a part of the bureaucracy of a large firm. I'm a very values driven person, and I really wanted to be able to choose the type of projects and types of clients that I worked with. So that was what led to it.
Q: Had you thought about going independent prior to the mid-sized firm being bought out?
A: No. I really enjoyed working on a team. The thought of working alone was my biggest fear, so it never really appealed to me. But I'm finding that I'm not alone because there are a lot of independent consultants out there. I call this my two year experiment of being independent. One of the things I'm testing is how to develop a community of people that I either work with in terms of actual collaboration on projects or just being my behind-the-scenes source of community, feedback and expertise. And it’s working, which is great.
Q: So you've been independent three years now. What has surprised you the most?
A: I think the surprise has been that it's been easier than I thought it would be.
Q: Really? In what way?
A: I thought I would spend a lot more time on business development and proposals. But it turned out that a lot of work came to me organically through my network. I would be fed projects, or I would be contacted by other people who had already won work and they needed my expertise as a subcontractor.
I've done a handful of proposals, but they've all been warm leads that went really well. I've never done a cold call proposal on work that I didn't have a connection to. So that's made my acceptance rate pretty high in terms of the amount of time I spend on proposals, which has been good.
Q: What were the first two or three things you did once you decided to try independent consulting?
A: I signed up for PICA’s Solo Consulting Bootcamp which was really helpful with all of the logistics. Then I had a bunch of coffee dates with people in my LinkedIn network. Most of them were previous clients or people that I had worked with in some capacity before. It gave me a chance to reintroduce myself as an independent in those relationships.
Q: Tell me a little bit about those coffee dates because many times consultants are nervous about reaching out. How did you tee them up or reach out to people?
A: I don't see myself as a salesperson. It was during the middle of Covid, so I framed it as a general catch up to see how they were doing and to let them know how I was doing. We talked about how they were navigating Covid, how their business was changing, what working from home was like, and what challenges they were facing. I guess that’s why it didn’t feel like sales, because it was a genuine concern for them and how they were adjusting. My part of the story was about me trying to find a new way and how I was navigating all the change.
But again, nothing about it was salesy. It was more me saying, “Hey, I’m trying this out. Here’s what I’m focusing on. Given what you know about working with me and my skills set do you think this would be a good fit for me?” I think they were pretty honest and it also planted the seed of the types of work I was doing.
Q: How many coffee dates do you think you did?
A: Those first three or four months I spent a lot of time doing coffee dates. I’d say I had at least 30, maybe closer to 40 or 50 coffee dates.
Q: That's impressive. Did it feel like a chore or was it fairly easy?
A: It felt a little overwhelming in the beginning because I made a list of all the people I wanted to contact, and that felt like social overload. But every couple of days I would reach out to a handful of people with a canned message that I tweaked and that helped me chip away at my list.
It became easier and I honed in on the people that I wanted to connect with on a regular basis as part of my community.
Q: Do you think any of those initial outreach conversations led to new business?
A: Definitely. I think a couple were direct business and a couple were direct referrals for business. I would always end the conversation by asking, “Who else should I be talking to, given what I'm trying to do?” Sometimes they would think of other independent consultants or other people who did similar types of things. So I went down some rabbit holes with those conversations, but some of them have become really good, ongoing connections for me. A couple of them also led to other consulting firms that I do some subcontracting with.
For example, I found a group that focuses on leadership coaching. I'm not coaching certified and I don't necessarily do that type of work, but they were intrigued with my change management background to help them on some larger projects.
Q: So that's like business development by networking with an adjacent area of expertise, right?
A: Yes, even though that wasn’t my original intent. When I had that initial phone call, it was just because this woman seemed really interesting. She was a successful entrepreneur and I was just asking her how she got started and what she learned during her early business days. As she got to know me, she was like, “Actually, you would be a really great fit for some of these proposals that we have going on that we're debating if we should say yes or no to. Maybe with your help we would say yes.” So it ended up being really great, and I still get regular business from them.
Q: Lately I've been paying a lot of attention to the concept of momentum. I applaud you for your coffee dates, and doing such momentous efforts. That seems to have gotten the ball rolling for you and I think once you get momentum, it's easier to keep things rolling.
A: Yeah, I didn’t have any work at the very beginning and that made it easier to have the coffee dates. Once I started working, I realized maintaining that kind of momentum with my connections and doing billable work was going to be a challenge. I know best practice is to keep a steady trickle of relationships and I can do that passively on LinkedIn. For actual coffee dates, I now schedule those when I finish a project and have some time in between. I've accepted the fact that it’s ok if I don’t stay in constant contact. I'm contacting people now that I met with a year ago, and it feels like really natural to be contacting them again. It's not an overuse of the relationship.
Q: I want to go back to when you were with the firm and you decided that you were going to go independent. Did you start laying the foundation for your own business before you quit, or did you just say, I can't take it, I'm going to make the leap and figure it out.
A: Actually, I didn't originally intend to be independent. I thought I would just get another job somewhere else. It felt like a big leap to go independent when I was working full time. Honestly, I was just getting so fed up with my current circumstances. I felt my engagement plummeting and I ended up taking a two month unpaid leave of absence from my job.
I was networking at that point just looking for a new job. I felt like I needed some dedicated time to figure out what I wanted to do and have more time to job search. But it was in those two months that I realized I couldn’t go back and that I was quitting no matter what.
My two month leave ended at the end of February and I figured that if I couldn’t find a job by then I was just going to go independent for a couple of months, live off of savings, and figure out what I wanted to do. But I quickly realized I could do this for more than a couple of months and actually give it a fair shake. That's when I committed to trying it out for two years. I've actually gotten job offers in between, including a client who offered me a permanent role. It’s been nice to feel wanted, but it also feels nice to stay to say no and realize that I'm still enjoying my experiment.
Q: So what has been the biggest challenge since you've been independent?
A: The biggest challenge has been my own capacity planning. When I worked for a consulting firm I was full time and I mostly did big projects. Now I have a lot of smaller, part-time projects and it’s always hard to know how much time they're really going to take. The timeline of the client is often uncertain. Sometimes clients want to hit the ground running and it's full speed right at the beginning. Then there are others who give you the impression of urgency, but they drag their feet. Planning my own rhythm and figuring out the right work balance is a work in progress. I'm beginning to hone some of my readiness questions for clients, not only about their timeline and what’s driving this work, but also things like if they have a team in place that I'll be working with and other project related details. I think that's an ongoing challenge.
Q: It's a nice challenge to have. There's so much demand that you have to consciously balance what you're taking on. That feels really good and a little scary the first time you do it, but afterwards you realize it's the right thing to do.
A: Yes. I said yes to a project early on that wasn't really in my sweet spot. It was actually when I was going through PICA’s Bootcamp. I was subcontracting for a group, basically as a glorified project manager. I thought it was more in my niche, but when I got into the actual work, I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. Now I'm more confident in the actual work I'm doing and I’m really trying to stay aligned to that, which is still pretty broad. I feel like honing my niche is still an ongoing question for me.
Q: What's next for Abby Coppock Consulting?
A: I don't know. I did a little bit of reflection at my one year mark. I'm working with two groups as a subcontractor that feed me in a couple specific areas where I want to grow, which is great. One area is in the team coaching and leadership coaching space. Continued work with that group I mentioned earlier will help me test out if I want to get coaching certified or move more into that space.
The other group is actually an agency that is building out a consulting firm of independent subcontractors. They're all about equity and inclusion and building that into organizational design. Specializing in that area is intriguing to me. So both these groups are helpful for my experiment to hone what I want to do and if I can do it as an independent.
Q: If people want to learn more about you or your business, how would they do that?
A: Just my LinkedIn page. I've thought about doing a website, and I want to hold off for now. To be determined!
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