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 Dave Seaton, founder and principal consultant at Seaton CX, and I am a Customer Experience (CX) consultant. My passion is helping customer experience leaders accelerate their impact. As I talk to CX leaders, I hear two common problems. First, many of them are wearing multiple hats, which means they keep getting dragged into operational problems in the contact center or in customer service and they don't have the time to focus on the more strategic customer experience work. Their second problem is getting stakeholders onboard. In customer experience, you often have responsibility a mile long, but your authority is only an inch deep. I hear things like, "Well, the VP of Operations didn't prioritize training, so our customer experience didn't improve." When I hear a statement like that, I know there’s an alignment problem. So I help leaders influence their stakeholders and align around common purpose so everyone understands the value of improving the customer experience. We help the VP of Operations be successful as well as the company and ultimately the company's customers.

Q: How long have you been in this line of work?

A: I've been independent for four months but have worked in customer experience and customer service for over a decade. 

Q: Tell us a little bit about your career journey. Were you with a large firm prior to stepping out on your own?

A: I was with a B2B healthcare software company for 15 years. I worked in multiple verticals including product development, product management, process improvement, and customer support. The last three years, I led a strategy and transformation team focused on improving the customer experience.

Q: What prompted you to even think about going independent?

A:  A couple of things. The first was I wanted to do more of the work that I loved, which was customer experience, strategy, and transformation, and less of the corporate overhead that comes with working in a large corporation. After 15 years with one company, I wanted to “see the world” and experience other industries. And I wanted to do it on my own terms and have control over my own destiny - my schedule, my time off, benefits, and everything else that goes with being self-employed.

Q: So now you're four months into being a solopreneur. Is it living up to your expectations in terms of the flexibility and controlling your own destiny?

A: It absolutely is, but I also find that I am a very demanding boss. I tend to work myself pretty hard, but the flexibility is wonderful. I've been able to be there for my family during some unpredictable events over the summer without having to ask anyone’s permission to take time off. It's really been fantastic.

Q: How did you get your first client? That's usually one of the biggest fears that holds people back from making the leap to independent consulting. 

A: My first client was a referral from another consultant I met on social media during the pandemic. It really surprised me because it wasn't a referral from someone I had worked with before. During the height of the pandemic, when Clubhouse was popular, I was joining Clubhouse rooms talking about customer experience with other professionals and met some people that were of like mind about customer experience. That conversation followed over onto LinkedIn, where I was engaging with this person's content and this person liked my content. Then one day I got a message on LinkedIn that said, "Hey. I've got a potential client for you. I'm really busy. Would you be interested?"  One thing led to another, and I had my first client.

Q: You must have done something through all of those interactions via Clubhouse and LinkedIn to build credibility and trust because nobody's going to hire or refer a consultant without those two things. What did you do?

A: For the last several years, even before I decided to go independent, I've been focused on building my “personal brand” in my industry. I joined the Customer Experience Professionals Association and began speaking at conferences. I submitted my team's work for an industry award, and we won the North American Customer Centricity Award in 2020 for Customer Insight and Feedback! All that momentum, external validation, and recognition was the fuel for my decision to become an independent consultant. But it's also been part of what's helped me be successful – demonstrating credibility, building relationships, and ultimately getting my first client.

Q: So really you started the ramp-up to independent consulting much earlier than just four months ago. How long would you say you’ve been building up your ramp or runway?

A: Probably about three years. I didn’t know my destination in the beginning, but I put myself out there and based on the response I learned and grew and did it again. Personal branding is a big thing on LinkedIn and in the world right now, but you build it slowly over a long period of time. It's not one post that goes viral and all of a sudden you're a household name. It's post after post, and blog after blog, and speech after speech. Whatever your particular focus is, it's doing that consistently over a long period of time and you build recognition as a voice of authority in your industry.

Q: Since you’ve only been independent for a few months, what's one of the things you want to improve? What are you working on now for your business?

A: Outreach, business development, sales - whatever we want to call it - that's my weak area. Having been a corporate executive who used to get a lot of cold calls, I'm really, really sensitive about not being “that guy.” I've never done a cold call. All my networking, outreach, business development has been organically through relationships, both online and in-person now that things are starting to open up a little bit. Last week I gave the closing keynote at a customer experience conference. I met other customer experience leaders and hopefully additional conversations will come out of that. You never know, but that's what I'm working on, just being intentional about putting myself out there and building relationships - that organic approach to business development rather than cold calling and spamming people.

Q: You’re also doing some volunteering to expand your network, right? Tell us why and how you’ve gone about doing that.

A: I've been a member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association for several years. In this little world of customer experience, the community is very important. CXPA is a wonderful organization where I’ve had some of the brightest minds in CX as mentors for the last several years. I'm now giving back and mentoring other people. Because I had a little time between clients, I volunteered to be on a project team to develop knowledge content that will benefit customer experience professionals for years to come. Part of the reason I'm doing that is giving back to this organization that I feel has done so much for the profession and for me personally. The other part is the networking opportunity to collaborate with the other volunteers. Just like my friend on social media that referred me to my first client, maybe I will make a connection on the volunteer team that will lead to a referral or an introduction that will help grow my business. So it's both those things. It's both giving back to this group that's helped me so much and also continuing to network and make connections.

Q: I think you're a natural born networker, which brings me to my last question. If people want to learn more about you or connect with you to expand their networks, how would they go about doing that?

A: Connecting with me on LinkedIn is the best place. Mention you’re a part of PICA and I’ll happily connect. You can also send a message to me on my website. 

Q:  Is there anything else you'd like to add or tell the PICA community?

A: If you're considering independent consulting, I would say go for it. You get one shot at life. For me, going independent is about taking up the pen to write my own life story and not letting someone else fill in that book for me.


~ ~ ~ Related Resources from PICA ~ ~ ~

How to do outreach to build your pipeline:

How to refine your personal brand:

How to leverage LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy: