Topic: Sign Up With Industry Intermediaries

As you’re setting up your firm, you may want to sign up with various intermediaries in your industry that have the business model of connecting clients to independent consultants. In Episode 50 of Unleashed, I give 45 tips on how to work well with staffing firms.

So if you do plan to sign up with staffing firms, I suggest you check out that episode to get a lot more detail on how to work with them. With some firms, it’s going to help you get noticed by them. If, rather than just signing up on their website, you have somebody who’s already done several projects for that firm, make a personal introduction.

The firm may ask you to go through the sign-up process on their website, but if you get that personal introduction you’re perhaps more likely to get noticed by the folks that do the staffing there, and they’re more likely to give you an interview or give you some time and consider you for project opportunities.

In all the cases that I’m aware of, the staffing firms don’t require you to be exclusive just with them. They don’t typically charge to sign up with their community or with their network. So it’s sort of a no-brainer to go ahead and do it.

However, you do probably want to focus on one or two, or at the most, three of these intermediaries, rather than spreading your attention across more than that because you do want to invest in building relationships with the folks at those firms so they get to know you, attend their events and respond quickly to their queries.

If it’s a firm that has a platform where you need to actually post proposals to projects, then you want to be saying, “Okay, I’m gonna actually be investing time in that, in that firm’s platform.”

Otherwise, you’re not going to build up enough critical mass projects with that intermediary to get noticed by them. So, again, more tips in Episode 50 of Unleashed, and as you’re starting out, you want to sign up with the staffing firms that make sense for your practice.