Simply put, consulting is the practice of helping individuals or organizations improve their performance. Consultants typically offer their clients advice based on analysis of existing organizational problems and targeted areas for improvement.
Individuals and organizations make use of professional learning organizations and consultants in order to gain insightful decision-making advice and specialized expertise. As a consulting firm, it’s important that you possess adequate industry and market knowledge to serve your clients. For example, if your consulting firm specializes in cybersecurity, you must keep up with new technology, recent breaches, and how your client’s specific market is impacted. Similarly, if your consulting firm specializes in eLearning, it’s important to understand the current online learning platform marketplace, newer learning content trends, and how to best educate different groups of learners.
Scale a successful professional learning business with eLearning
In order to provide the highest level of service to clients, consulting firms are in a prime position to take advantage of online learning. There are a number of ways to go about doing so.
Create valuable—and shareable—content related to your subject matter expertise
Creating useful content for clients is your number one goal. Good content will help your current clients produce outcomes within their organizations or professional careers. For example, if you offer an engaging course on process improvement, your clients instantly become more valuable to their teams and organizations.
Use technology to create and scale learning to audiences worldwide
Course content creation can help drive new clients to your consulting firm. Reach out to companies—or specific departments within companies—that could benefit from your consulting firm’s subject matter expertise. Organizations will want to provide their employees with your learning content in order to produce better outcomes.
Use the content to leverage and expand existing client relationships
Keep existing clients interested in your services by creating the learning materials they ask about. For example, if you are an eLearning consultant firm, you might have a handful of clients asking for advice around quiz content. You can then choose to offer these courses complementary, or monetize by charging per course and/or by offering follow-up consulting at a price.
No client is the same and no solution is the same, but odds are your clients have asked for—or require—similar, basic educational materials. As a consulting firm, you can provide your clients with learning content to fulfill a purpose, facilitate client learning, teach clients how to resolve common problems and continuously improve their organizational effectiveness.
