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!

A: I'm Cecilia Ballí. Throughout my professional life, I’ve simultaneously developed two paths as a journalist and as a cultural anthropologist. My consultancy brings the two together in the service of clients. Broadly speaking, my consultancy is a research and communications firm, but we're in a specific niche of ethnographic research and storytelling. We work at the intersection of human sciences and communications to help clients better understand people, consumers, or audiences, and move them to action.

Q: You can do this for any cultural group, I would imagine, but you have an interest in a particular segment, right?

A: I've done a lot of my research on the Latino and Mexican American communities, so a third arm of my consultancy focuses on Latino and U.S.-Mexico border insights.

Q: Does your work overlap at all with diversity, equity, and inclusion?

A: Not at present, but I've been thinking about how to speak to the needs in that field. As anthropologists, we are trained to understand how people's social and cultural identities are shaped and how they experience their race, ethnicity, and gender in their daily life and in institutional contexts. That's exactly what we are trained to do, so there's a direct relevance between cultural analysis and the more specific organizational needs of nonprofits, foundations, or corporate America.

Q: How long have you been independent, and why did you decide to take this career path?

A: I’ve been independent for three years. I was first following a traditional academic track as a tenure-track anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, but that didn't give me enough flexibility to travel and do the reporting I needed for my magazine stories. So I left academia to be able to write more. But after a few years of that, I found that I missed doing research and thinking like an anthropologist. I also needed to find a more sustainable way to make a living; freelance writing is low-paid contract work, even in the best publications. In late 2018, I decided to form this consultancy, which sustains me financially while allowing me to do the two things I love, ethnographic or qualitative research and storytelling. At the same time, it leaves me some flexibility to carve out time for my journalistic reporting and writing.

Q: With so much going on, how did you actually decide the “right” time to go independent? What were your first steps?

A: While trying writing full-time, I was doing some editing for academics and writers to help pay the bills, and soon realized that my financial needs were greater and I needed to make a better living. So I started looking around for possibilities, and a public affairs and communications consultant in Houston offered me a job. I had never thought about consulting—I wasn't even sure what consultants did. So while contemplating the offer, I talked to a few friends who were independent consultants or part of a firm, and one of them gave me what I thought was really good advice. He said, "You should do it, but try to do consulting around what you love doing. Start your own consultancy doing what you're best at, what you're trained to do. It may take longer to build work and a client base. But if you can do it, in the long run, you'll be happier doing work that you really enjoy." I had been in the field as a professional for almost 20 years, and I had developed a lot of networks throughout Texas and beyond. So I was in a place where there were people in interesting organizations that I could reach out to and share about my new venture.

It took a little while. I spent about a good year exploring that and coming up with a concept for what the consultancy would be. It's scary to make that leap and say, "I'm going to make this work." But some of us have that personality where we're willing to jump, even if we have no assurances. Now I'm really glad I did.

Q: What's the one thing that you know now that you wish you had known three years ago?

A: I wish I'd had more insight into what the client rhythm is like. For example, how long it takes to cultivate a relationship and build that trust until an opportunity comes up where you know how to solve or help with an issue they're struggling with. It's different with every client, also depending on your industry. But it does take time to build that momentum. If you're in a very specialized field like me—I'm not providing common services to clients that they already know they need and want. It's more like, I get to know people, they begin to understand my work, and eventually, we come up with an idea for a project and try to make it happen. Or someone reaches out to me to support them with research or storytelling needs in their own project. So, just that whole process of coming up with leads, reaching out to people, keeping the dialogue going, not losing touch even if they don't write back for five months or for a year. But then someday, someone calls or makes a referral based on that relationship. I also wish I’d known how to balance smaller projects at the same time that I'm trying to make some bigger projects happen.

Q: What's been your biggest challenge? What have you had to figure out?

A: There's such a steep learning curve in becoming an independent consultant. You're learning absolutely everything on your own—from how to write a proposal, to how to structure your business for accounting and tax purposes. A big challenge for me was figuring out what my work was worth, and then being confident enough to quote people on a project. Some of the work, especially on the research side, is labor-intensive, which means that the project may not be economical. Others, of course, can be smaller in scope. But understanding what that work is worth, and presenting that with the confidence that the value clients get from qualitative research is long-term.

Q: Can you briefly summarize one of these projects you did for a client and how it helped them?

A: On the research side, I actually started my consultancy with a big, high-profile project that lasted a year and a half and involved three researchers. We did a large-scale study of Latino voters and non-voters in Texas, the first study of its kind. It included Democrats, Republicans, people without a party affiliation, and people who didn't vote at all. The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of why voter turnout is lower among Latinos than other ethnic groups, and among those who vote, understand how they relate to government, parties, and political candidates. That was for a client that mobilizes voters. But so many other organizations and people running for office that learned about our work have asked us to present our findings to them, and we generated enough media attention to begin to challenge existing narratives about Latino voters.

Q: What's next for you and your consulting business?

A: Just more of this development phase that I'm going through, finding new types of projects and clients, and figuring out where the weight of my work is eventually going to settle. Is there going to be more need and interest in the research, the storytelling, or both? Reaching out to people across Texas, but also beyond. I'm talking to some organizations in other states right now, which is really exciting to me. Some of my work has been very regionally rooted, but the unique combination of skills I've developed, the way of thinking, is something that is valuable and applicable in many settings, whether it's a nonprofit, a corporation, or a government agency.

Q: Are you doing what you love?

A: I am, even though not all of the aspects of consulting are great fun. The accounting is still a little bit of a drag for me! But I'm an idea person, I'm someone who likes to take new puzzles and try to help figure them out. I like coming up with compelling arguments to sway people's thinking, but also with compelling stories that can touch people viscerally, emotionally. It feels really good to do those things for a client. When I see a project come to full fruition, it's very rewarding.

Q: How can people find out more about you or get in touch with you?

A: They can go to our website, which is www.cultureconcepts.com, and connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/ceciliaballi. My writer’s website is www.ceciliaballi.com.

~ ~ ~ Related Resources from PICA ~ ~ ~

Get confident about your pricing: