I’m gonna tell you what’s been going on with Thurman Consulting, but first, let me tell you about the lightbulb. I went over to 99 Designs looking for a company logo that said, in no particular order: fresh, new, ideas, change. I fell in love with this blue lightbulb not only because it looks hella cool, but also because it represents what I want to do with all of my clients: give them “aha” moments. In all my speaking, training, coaching and consulting, I want people who come hear me or ask me for advice to go away feeling empowered. I want them to leave the room knowing more, feeling more and being more themselves than they were before.
Fresh. New. Ideas. Change.
Lightbulb.
Aha.
The New Thurman Consulting
Since quitting my job and launching my business seven months ago, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing organizations and be a part of some really cool projects that align with my personal mission. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with several talented colleagues and seeing them break into the consulting world as well. So it was a win/win when I asked them to come on board to work with Thurman Consulting, and they said yes!
Meet our amazingly talented team.
Our Awesome Services, or Why You Should Totally Hire Us
For the past three years, I’ve mainly offered speaking and training services for organizations working for social change. Now, I’m excited to announce that with my newly expanded team, Thurman Consulting will be offering additional services, many of which my readers have been asking about over the last couple of years.
Here’s a brief rundown of our new and improved menu of services:
Nonprofit Career Coaching
We offer career coaching in 1/2 hour and one hour increments as well as targeted job search coaching including resume review and interview preparation. We also make it easy for you to order your sessions online. As soon as you place your order, we contact you to schedule a session at your convenience.
Speaking & Workshops
We offer speaking services including keynotes, workshops, breakouts and panels. We have a listing of frequently requested topics on leadership, diversity and social media that you can choose from or allow us to customize something for your next conference, workshop or annual meeting.
Social Media Consulting
Requests for this service have gone way up in the past year. Our expert team can tell you exactly how to get started on social media and offer practical advice to assist your organization with strategy as well as implementation. We also offer live blogging and tweeting as well as blog coaching.
Training Services
Thanks to the wealth of expertise within our team, we offer social media training as well as advocacy training that can be customized to your specific organization.
I’m so excited to be working with such a talented team! I hope you will call on us to provide high-quality speaking, training, coaching and consulting services, whether you are a nonprofit professional in need of coaching or an organization in need of training. I invite you to contact us to learn more about how we can help you advance your work.
Last weekend, I was trading emails back and forth with a friend from high school who is looking to start her own consulting firm in a rather obscure academic field. She was writing to ask if I would be willing to advise and mentor her during the process. I said I’d help where I could, but one thing she said kinda bothered me from the outset.
I have the idea to start a consulting firm within the next five years.
Why wait five years? My first piece of advice to her was to start building her consulting practice now, not later. Five years from now, someone else may have cornered the market for that very obscure thing you want to do. Five years from now, you could find yourself in a job that pays well, yet sucks the entrepreneurial life out of you. Five years from now, you could have three more kids and considerably less flexibility to juggle a day job and a side hustle.
Even if you don’t feel like you’re “ready” to announce your big consulting plans to the world, there are still some things you can do right now to move them forward.
Ideally, your first clients should come to you before you even hang your shingle. That’s the only way you know if you have a viable service, anyway. Yes, things will be messy in the beginning, but when you actually get ready to do a full “launch” of your full-time business, you will have already worked out many of the kinks.
But whatever you do, don’t let time be an arbitrary excuse for not rolling up your sleeves today. What does five years represent anyway? It’s just a moment in time that is not now. Don’t be one of those people who say now it’s not the right time. You don’t have enough time. Maybe next time. The timing is off. You’re too young. You’re too old. You missed your time.
Or maybe you don’t have enough information. You can’t afford the seminars or the books that will give you the information. You have too much information. You need better information. The person with the information won’t get back to you.
There will always be an excuse not to do the thing you’ve always wanted to do. It’s so much easier to sit around talking about that Big Awesome Idea we never seem to be able get off the ground. But at some point you need to either jump off the damn cliff or just stop talking about that thing you know you’re never gonna do. We all have good ideas, but they’re pretty much useless if we don’t implement them.
Because when you do make the jump? Well, it’s like Sarah Susanka said in her fantastic book, The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters
“Once you make the unequivocal internal commitment to do something – when you absolutely know this is the time and the place to act – the world around you will shift in all sorts of apparently miraculous ways to make it happen.”
The commitment comes first. But please, do it now, not five years from now.
One of my mentors gave me this advice a few years back, “Never believe your own hype.” At the time, I didn’t have any hype, so I just tucked that little tidbit away for future use. Now, after achieving some level of professional reputation through my blog, I understand exactly what she was getting at and it has a lot to do with personal branding. Some people may have never met you before and have no personal knowledge of your work experience, yet hype you up online as a result of your personal branding efforts. That’s because there can be a huge difference in the work that you do versus the way that people perceive the work that you do.
I recently interviewed actor/music producer Sam Jones III for an upcoming issue of Personal Branding Magazine and he shared a good way to think about building your personal brand as a two-part process :
- Focus on being good at what you do.
- Focus on being famous for it.
For five years, I only focused on the first thing: 100% on getting really good at fundraising and capacity building as part of the work I was doing in my various nonprofit jobs. I even got a Master’s degree in nonprofit management to increase my knowledge along the way. So when I decided to move on to the second piece about getting famous for my work by starting a blog, I had no idea that it would impact my life so greatly. I think I might be in what Jonathan Fields calls “personal branding hell”:
“Building a strong personal brand—being known as the go-to person in a specific niche—has it’s ups. Everyone turns to you for information, for ideas, for thought leadership, for advice, for strategy, for connections, for presentations, for favors, for opportunities, for jobs, for partnerships, for salvation.”
But it also has its downs.
“Because, there are only so many hours you can bill for, so many planes you can get on, so many individual conversations you can have before you…and your life…implode. Especially if you’ve also got a family you actually want to see, friends you love to be around, other activities, passions and hobbies you love to engage in and a commitment to taking care of your body and your mind.”
Hundreds of people now know more about me and my life and work than I can ever possibly know about each of them. I meet people at events that come up to me as if they’ve known me forever, as if we’re long-lost friends. As an introvert (or just a weirdo?), this sometimes freaks me out. And I still get uncomfortable when people come up to me and tell me they’re a big fan of my blog. I hope that what I write in this space helps some people, inspires others to action and informs the rest. It’s just deeply humbling for me to come face to face with the reality that I’ve done that for someone.
I’m also realizing that some people have really high expectations of me just because of how visible I am and I have to constantly manage that. There is the real Rosetta and then the image that people have of Rosetta. So I try really hard to be as open and authentic as possible online so that there’s no disconnect offline.
And I try not to believe my own hype. Yes, I want you to hire me. But I’m still growing and learning in my own leadership journey. People may think I’m a “guru” or an “expert” on a lot of things, but I still make mistakes. I still fail, just like you. It’s a delicate balance.
So, yes, personal branding has a downside. I gotta keep it real with you, especially those who want to get to the same level of visibility. While personal branding is absolutely one of the most important career tools for young professionals, you have to be able to take the good with the bad. In the past six months, I’ve also learned a few other things about consulting and my experiences with personal branding.
The more popular you are, the more critics you’ll get. Recently, a commenter blasted my blog on the Chronicle of Philanthropy, pretty much saying I wasn’t qualified to write for them. And then a commenter here called me a homophobe because I used the word “queer” in a blog post. All I can say is I’m glad I have thick skin. And I’m glad that so many people are reading!
The work will come, but you have to be the one to decide what kind of consultant you want to be. People ask me to do all kinds of work – fundraising, social media, speaking, strategic planning, coaching – the work is definitely out there for nonprofit consultants. But I really wanted to practice leadership in my consulting work instead of just helping people do stuff and get paid for it. One example: after quitting my job as a development director, I was determined not to do fundraising for a while. It just wasn’t rocking my world anymore, so I declined all of those client requests. It felt weird, like what kind of consultant turns down work? But I realized that if you try to do everything and chase all the money that’s out there, you’ll just be burnt out, frustrated and not good at the work you’ve been hired to do in the first place. Which brings me to my next epiphany.
There’s a big difference between short-term and long-term clients. I had already been consulting for two years before I hung my full-time consultant shingle in January. But since I was working full-time, my consulting work was on a short-term basis – helping organizations craft leadership programs, speaking at various events around the country, and teaching workshops on leadership, diversity and social media. These engagements never lasted more than a few days. When I quit my job to consult full-time though, I did it with the security of having six-month contracts with two great organizations. Combined, I worked about 20 hours a week for them and though it provided a steady stream of income, the hands-on management work is just not for me. My favorite activities are the ones I’m best at: writing and teaching. So that’s why I’m now figuring out how to focus my business around that work instead of having long-term clients.
When you suck at time management, having administrative support is really important. It was easy to manage my time when I worked a full-time nonprofit job. The hours were defined. No one expected me to work late into the night (although sometimes I did because I wanted to). Now, there are no defined office hours and I work around the clock. And presumably I have “all the time in the world” to meet with people who want to “pick my brain” or ask me for career advice. I could spend all day meeting with people and helping people, but then I’d never get any writing or client work done. Or sleep. So hiring my assistant Chelsea was great in that in allows me to have a buffer for requests on my time as well as support for a lot of the little details that go into the work I do.
There is no way you will ever answer all of your email. Ever. I get several dozen emails every day asking me to do something – do work for a client, speak at an event, do an informational interview, give career advice, write a guest post or article, share information, blog about someone’s program, help someone find funding, help someone find a job, meet for coffee or lunch – the list is endless, especially when most of these requests are coming from people you don’t know. You have to pick and choose how responsive you can be and still do the work that you set out to do in your business. And still have some semblance of a life. I hate acting like I’m some bigshot CEO that’s too busy to respond to all of their email, but it literally would take over my life if I answered them all. Even though I’ve given myself permission to let a lot of non-urgent messages fall into cyberspace, I still sometimes find myself up at 2am responding to a reader with advice for where to look for a nonprofit job in DC.
This is my life now. It’s amazing and I’m not complaining. But I do want you to understand what’s happening behind the scenes and be a part of my journey.
Ever since I became a full-time nonprofit consultant, I’ve had a hard time putting myself in that category. And it’s not hard to see why. The title “consultant” can definitely have its negative connotations, especially in Washington, DC where everybody and their mama is a consultant. It doesn’t mean anything without context, but even with explanation behind it, people can look at you sideways at networking events. At conferences, I even notice the body language shift that sometimes happens when an executive director encounters one of us “consultants,” as if our aim is to pick their pockets. Oh my, would you look at the time…
Instead, I still think of myself as a nonprofit leader. I mean, it’s not like my work has changed that drastically. I pretty much do the same things I was doing as a full-time nonprofit employee, except now I just don’t have to punch a clock anymore when I do it. So for me, nonprofit consulting is my nonprofit leadership, in many different ways.
Thought Leadership
Blogging is, and always has been, my way of sharing my perspective (and the perspective of my peers) on nonprofit leadership with the entire sector. That’s why I first titled my blog “Perspectives from the Pipeline.” It was all about adding some diversity of thought from a young black woman on the come-up to a field that had been dominated by the wisdom of older white males. I wanted to share not only my expertise, but the questions I was also trying to find answers to in my work. And because consultants don’t work at any particular nonprofit, we can often be more truthful in our analysis of the field. Some great examples of thought leadership from nonprofit consultants comes in the form of blogs like Kris Putnam-Walkerly and Beth Kanter. Many leaders use the opinions and commentary of nonprofit consultants and bloggers to inform their work, so it is indeed a great contribution when we post our thoughts to the web for all to benefit from.
Network Weaving
Leadership Learning Community’s Claire Reinelt talks about the future of leadership development as being tied to networks, and I think she’s absolutely right:
Leadership is not primarily a capacity or quality that an individual possesses; it is a relational process that occurs in groups, communities and networks.
The best solutions will no longer come from the top, but from the bottom, the sides and the edges of nonprofit networks. And consultants can be bridge builders to help make that happen. Most consultants have wide networks crossing subsectors in nonprofits and philanthropy that can open doors for clients and communities with the click of a mouse. I often send emails introducing one person to another, pass along job openings from organizations in my circle and post links on Twitter to let people know about networking and professional development opportunities. Because I can see the big picture of the nonprofit sector (both locally and nationally), I’m always finding ways to connect people with people, and organizations with organizations – hoping something bigger and better will come out of the collaboration.
Testing New Ground
Because most nonprofit consultants are independent, we can take risks on ourselves that might be harder to take with a firm or in working with a specific organization. For instance, I’ve been rigorously testing my own business model with highly customized offerings like e-courses, workshops and seminars that appeal to my client base, yet are fairly new to the field in general. Consultants can test new ideas and programs because there is a lower consequence to failure. Then, we can turn around and share the models with clients, communities and other consultants. For instance, when I started using BlogTalkRadio for live discussions in 2008, many nonprofits asked me for advice on how it worked, etc. I shared my learnings with them, and many organizations like the Johnson Center ended up using the tool for their own work.
Are you a nonprofit consultant? Do you see your work as nonprofit leadership? Why or why not?
Image credit: GroggyFroggy
My new assistant rocks. But before I start gushing, let’s rewind a little bit. Back in April, I set out on a virtual quest to find a virtual assistant to help me take my consulting practice to the next level. I received over 30 applications from some really talented people in my network, and Chelsea Hick was one of them. I hired her in late April and since then, we’ve been working really hard to streamline many aspects of my business and roll out some exciting new offerings, like my new e-courses and workshops. Chelsea has been instrumental in keeping my calendar from self-destructing, coordinating my travel, responding to business leads, acting as a liaison with event organizers for my speaking engagements, as well as helping me troubleshoot GoToWebinars, one of the services I’m using for my new trainings. She will also be managing the new schedule for All Nonprofits Considered (my weekly radio show on BlogTalkRadio) and assisting with the editing process of my forthcoming book.
Please join me in welcoming my very first staff person, Chelsea Hick, Administrative Assistant for Thurman Consulting! You can contact her for speaking engagement inquiries, meeting/informational interview requests, radio show ideas, article reprint requests and anytime I don’t get back to you within a week at: info (at) rosettathurman (dot) com.
One of the things I always strive for in managing staff is not only to figure out how they can help me, but how I can help them, too. I’m hoping to help Chelsea as she builds her nonprofit/museum management network, so please consider connecting with her on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chelseahick.
More about Chelsea:
Chelsea Hick is a new nonprofit professional living under a lucky star, promoting the visitor experience in museums and cultural institutions. She is a Connecticut Yankee through and through, and owing to her own defining museum experiences and a longstanding love for the arts and humanities, she is eager to spread the love by working at the intersection of community, art and technology within these institutions.
Her commitment to making an impact in this field is fueled by experiences which run the gamut of museum operations and nonprofit management, ranging from Facilities & Special Events at the Historic Thomas Center, to Visitor Services at the New Britain Museum of American Art and Human Resources at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art. Following an inspiring adventure to Paris to study film and museum culture in the contemporary era, armed with a valuable international perspective, she is dead-set to continue her professional quest abroad in the near future.
A recent graduate of the University of Florida with a B.A. in English and Nonprofit Leadership, Chelsea is currently working on staff with Visitor Services at the New Britain Museum of American Art and learning the nonprofit sector from the inside out working with Thurman Consulting. Next up, she will begin a M.A. in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. She is on the move in all directions, but utterly enjoys occasional acts of solitude; namely rambling drives to her favorite New England places with her 35mm Minolta in tow, book hunting and scouting new museums.
Cozality on 
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