So, as an experienced and successful
PR professional, you’ve just about had it being an employee, and would like to
upgrade to the enviable status of ‘Employer’ – your own boss. You think that you have all it takes to succeed as an
independent ‘PR consultant’. You have some ideas on how things can be done
better. Your mind is bubbling with so many innovations that
you would so graciously like to ‘donate’ to the PR fraternity, but cannot (or
would not) try out in your current employment. You figure it’s about time you
started working at making your own individual mark in the industry.
All of these are perfectly legitimate
enough motivations for you to want to take the plunge into setting up and
running your own PR consultancy.
As a veteran of more than a decade in
the business, I am really looking forward to welcoming you to the club. But
first, I just thought to share a short check-list of factors you might do well
to seriously consider and tick-off before you take make that move.
# 1: The Right Perspective
You need to start out with the right
perspective about your new role. As the proprietor of your own PR consultancy
firm, you will be a Professional, Entrepreneur and Businessman rolled into one. These are three ‘caps’ you will be
required to wear almost at all times.
First, you are a professional: you are expected to possess the requisite level of
professional qualifications, skills and experience. You should have met all the
laid-down requirements, statutory or otherwise, before even thinking of setting
up shop. You should also commit to a continuous search for new knowledge,
thinking and practices in the profession, so as to remain relevant.
Second, you are an entrepreneur: someone birthing a
start-up enterprise. You will do well to prepare yourself adequately for the
challenges that come with the territory. You just might find that
administrative issues like registering the business and securing the necessary
approvals, setting up the office, hiring staff and procuring the necessary
equipment and facilities will require an unexpectedly disproportionate amount
of your time and attention. Not to mention resources.
Finally, you are a businessman. One mistake common to
otherwise brilliant professionals who venture into setting up private professional
practice is that they forget (or do not realize) that the practice is also a
‘business’, and must be run as such. It must be able to pay its bills, and consistently
deliver some respectable level of financial returns to its proprietor(s).
So you see, the moment you set up a
consultancy, you immediately become more than just a PR professional. You
become several other things you probably would never have imagined.
# 2: The Requisite Skills and Competencies
As a consultant, you are supposed to
be the expert. Your clients will rely
on you for proper counsel, and to do professional justice to their briefs. You
must ensure that you are ready with the minimum requisite levels of training,
certifications, skills and experience. Otherwise you will be nothing more than
a quack, and your professional survival cannot be assured.
# 3: A Vision:
This factor is often underrated, but
arguably one of the most important. And I use ‘vision’ here in a broad sense to
include: your objectives, your goals, where you hope to be and what you hope to
do with the practice five, ten, years down the line.
The vision that you have set for
practice, and committed to pursuing, will help you craft the right strategy to
pursue your dreams, and invariably influence the choices that you make. All of
these go a long way in shaping the trajectory of the business.
# 4: The Right Attitude
It’s perfectly alright to fantasize
about how becoming the MD/CEO of your own PR firm will mean the end to all your
financial worries, and guarantee you absolute control of your time – to use as
you please.
However, in reality, it does not
necessarily work that way. It calls for an incredible amount of sacrifice,
patience and doggedness. Can you imagine having to make the difficult choice to
pay the salaries of your staff while your own children are out of school
because their school fees have not been paid? Or always being the very last
person to get paid his salary (that is if you are even smart enough to place
yourself on a salary)? Trust me, that’s not fiction. That’s entrepreneurship!
How about arriving on time for a
scheduled appointment with a prospective client, only to be forced to wait for
five hours? And then having to repeat that same routine again and again? And
ending up not getting the business anyway!
# 5: Finance/Working Capital:
True, the entry barriers for the PR
consultancy business in this environment may be very low. Your set-up costs may
not be high, but you will need a relatively cheap and reliable source of
financing for your operations, when you get into full steam. The reason is that
most clients are unlikely to pay you up-front. You might invariably find
yourself working for clients who have very punishing payment policies. I was informed
recently that one high-profile multinational company operating in Nigeria has a
payment policy of 60 working days, post-invoicing! To think that slavery was
abolished so long ago!
On the other hand, most of your
suppliers will expect to be paid immediately. This mis-match between
age-payables and age-receivables, invariably results in severe cash flow
crises, which is one of the greatest headaches that agency managers face in
this environment. To make matters worse, bank finance is not easy to come by,
and where available, is so expensive, it could erode all your gains.
Too many consultancies have been
forced to close shop, simply because they could not collect from their debtors
as fast as they were paying out to their creditors. And they had no means of
bridging the gap.
# 6: Business Acumen
As I mentioned earlier, your practice
is also a business, and so you must learn to think and act like a businessman.
Some level of financial and business management knowledge is imperative. You
must keep an eye on the numbers. And you cannot do that effectively unless you
understand and are able to interpret financial reports.
You should be able to make plans for
growing the business and managing such growth in an effective and sustainable
manner. Which means having a ‘helicopter’ view that covers every aspect of the
business – human resources, marketing, operations, finance, and so on.
True, some of these functions, can be
outsourced, but chances are that you might not be able to afford that in the
early stages of your business, and so will need to do a lot of it yourself.
# 7: Marketing/Networking Skills:
