Case Study - Selling Wisdom!

“Referrals and contacts are my main source of assignments, but Skillfair provides a useful top up and access to new contacts”

John Thurlbeck has been running his own consultancy, Wear Consulting based in Sunderland, since 2003. With a mixed commercial and and local authority career behind him, he was starting to feel constrained by the management structures and politics involved in changing practices at a senior level.

The final push towards self-employment came in the shape of a friend and business associate offering him 6 months guaranteed work providing management and leadership training to a variety of public and private sector organisations. As well as providing a welcome level of financial security this contract gave John the opportunity to meet and work with senior individuals from all over the UK and this provided some of his earliest truly independent assignments.

John’s assignments now include a mixture of coaching, training and consultancy across a diverse mix of local authority departments, including Education, Training and Children's Services. John says, ‘There’s a constant flow of new policies and advice coming out of central government that many managers simply don’t have time to read and understand’. John takes time to keep up to date with new policies and distils this into a form that managers can put into practice. In his words, ‘What I sell is a combination of knowledge, skill and experience – you could call it ”Wisdom”!’

John is also very keen to make sure that he doesn’t retreat into an ivory tower – offering advice that sounds great but is impossible to put into practice. He does this by taking occasional interim assignments working with departments that need to change their practices to remind himself of the reality of working ‘at the coal-face’ of management.

Talking to John it’s easy to understand why managers find him a helpful and friendly source of advice, but listening to his description of the many assignments he’s done and how most of them come via referrals I did start to wonder why John is so enthusiastic about Skillfair.

Like most consultants John has had to get used to the uncertainty of life and the fact that a consultant’s diary is rarely filled in more than a few months ahead. He signed up Skillfair at a time when it looked as though assignments had dried up completely. He also wanted to investigate opportunities outside his normal remit Although his contact base in the Youth Sector is solid he was concerned that limiting himself to this area could prove a mistake.

John was delighted with the range of projects available on Skillfair, ‘It opened a whole new vista of opportunities for me’ and even happier to be contacted about a possible interim assignment less than a week after joining. As luck would have it, by then he’d taken another assignment and couldn’t help but he continues to receive regular contacts via Skillfair. In fact, as he doesn’t have a web site, John’s Skillfair profile is his only ‘web presence’.

John has yet to take an assignment through Skillfair as he’s been too busy but has made some valuable new contacts and regards these and the regular tender and project alerts that appear in his email as a form of insurance against future gaps in his workload.

“I haven’t needed Skillfair yet - but it’s great to know that you’re busy generating opportunities for me while I get on with delivery and running my business”