I had lunch with a former grants colleague from my days as a nonprofit staffer. She’s still in her grants role and doing well, but in talking about the direction my career has taken — into consulting — she seemed wistful and almost envious of the life I lead. She asked me a lot of questions about what I was doing, who I was working with, and about the ins and outs of how I managed as a consultant. It got me thinking: surely there’s lots of people wondering if consulting could be their next chapter.
In this 2-part blog series, I will lay out some of the pros and cons of consulting as a career path so anyone on staff in a grants role can assess if a move into consulting is right for them. Part One: The Pros.
Some Benefits of being a Grant Consultant
On the one hand, you drive the bus as far as decisions regarding your work, and your work/life balance.
In this installment, I will discuss some of the items that fall in the Pros bucket of becoming a grants consultant. Whether you’re on staff at another nonprofit and wanting freedom to use your talents in other ways, or sub-contracting for a consulting group and considering breaking out on your own, there are major things to factor into that decision, on both sides. Here’s my experience and take on some of the major considerations FOR becoming a Consultant:
You can work when & where you want:
- You decide how many clients to take on, and “open and close the faucet” at will. I was having a lot going on personally at one point, so I didn’t take on any new clients, and let my other contracts run out, so I could concentrate on what else was going on in my life. When I was ready, I started taking on work and adding clients.
- You decide how many hours you want to work in a week or month. You can decide to take Fridays off, write that into your contracts, turn on “Out of Office” on your email, and not answer the phone. You can write “not to exceed” limits into your contracts (or your clients may ask for them), or your contracts can be open-ended as far as hours go. I have found that, with everything else there is to do with a business, that generally 20-25 hours a week of billable hours is considered “full-time.”
- You decide when to take your vacations or time off. Naturally, you want to alert your clients well in advance if you decide to take several days or longer off. And try to schedule this time around big deadlines. I know my schedule since I map out grants calendars for all my clients, and I also know what grants I can work ahead on, so I can carve out a week that way.
You can work for who you want:
- You decide whether you want to work for clients in a particular sector. I started out wanting to write for arts and culture organizations, for instance. I wrote for a lot of education-focused nonprofits at one point. You can decide if you don’t want to take on any faith-based clients, as a for instance.
- You decide what types of grants you want to write: public or private, federal or foundation, or all of the above. You can decide to specialize in one type and be a leading expert in SAMHSA grants, for instance. I am more of a generalist, and have written for federal agencies, foundations, and everything in between. I have ended up writing for mostly local agencies, so I know the funders here pretty well, which is a value to my current client roster.
- You can decide to move across the country and work remotely for all your clients if you’d like. I don’t personally see many of my clients but a few times a year; all our meetings are on Zoom and the work to prepare and submit applications or conduct prospect research is accomplished virtually. Your clients can also be based anywhere in the nation, which makes the pool of likely work you can do much wider.
You set your own business model:
- You decide what you like to do, and either outsource the rest or limit your offerings accordingly. I don’t like to do grant reporting (plus I argue it makes no sense to pay a consultant to do it), so I don’t offer that service. I sub-contract for another consultant who doesn’t like to do prospect research; I love doing it, it’s one of my “specialties,” so he sub-contracts me to do his prospect research.
- You can be a one-man shop, build a consulting firm with salaried employees, or anything in between. Some consultants normally work on their own, but have trusted colleagues they can call on when their workload increases. Many refer clients to others when they themselves are at capacity. I am a one-man band, and have sub-contracted out work only on a very few occasions. I have sub-contracted for others — sometime that has worked out, and sometimes it hasn’t.
You set your own rate:
- There are several strategies for setting your hourly rate. A great article explaining it all is here. A Special Interest Group session at a GPA conference years ago helped me level set the rate I was charging when I started out. We took a poll, and the group was candid about what they charged. I felt more confident about my rate after that discussion, and have gradually raised my rate over time.
- Your rate will also depend on how much experience you bring to the equation. Have you achieved any certifications or degrees specific to the work at hand? These can mean you can demand a higher rate. I have increased my rate incrementally based on when I achieved certain milestones, like my GPC or CFRE designations. Your rate can depend on how fast the turnaround is on a project, or how much assistance you would have to outsource to get the project done.
- Hourly? Per project? Retainer? The answer is, it depends. How well do you know the client and how they work? Is it a closed-ended project that you’d be working on, or a year-long contract? Are you able to estimate how long a project will take, and can you build in contingency time? Different answers to these questions mean different kinds of fee structure. For long-term clients, I prefer working on an hourly basis, and I have found retainer to be more of an administrative headache. For one-off clients (who need a single closed-ended project completed, so I’m in and out), I am able to estimate pretty well how many hours it will take me and a charge a per project rate.
These are some of the factors in favor of going into consulting (there are others, depending on who you talk to). Read my next installment before you make any rash decisions though! In Part 2, I will examine some of the Cons to going into Consulting.
