This book is written for the person who has gained workplace experience and is thinking about striking out on his or her own as a consultant or a service-based entrepreneur. The reader is taken through the steps of deciding on whether they have the tools to start a new business and what they need to do before making the leap. The author focuses on the major steps of a start-up consulting practice, including business formation decisions, verbalizing the business offerings, determining market viability, and much more. Additionally, he dives into less-often discussed topics such as office space, business insurance, business ethics, and the impact on the family unit. Each chapter provides homework that outlines the steps the reader needs to complete to gain confidence they have the tools to succeed. This book also emphasizes the lifestyle implications of any solo proprietor service business.

Most people develop specific skills through education, training and experience. A lot of those people have a desire to market those skills to those who need them. Starting a consulting practice is often a gratifying and fulfilling means of taking those sought after skills to market. Starting a consulting practice allows an individual to work for individuals and companies that are likely to value the skills and experience offered. Theoretically, the individual is in control of the work hours and the types of jobs that are accepted. As one might suspect, as consultants gain clients and grow their companies, the control of the consulting company's time and resources must be managed carefully. To start a consulting company in a way that has the greatest chance to succeed over the long term requires attention to building the practice one project at a time. Each project should be subjected to a process that will have the best chance of yielding a successful outcome. The purpose of this book is to take the reader through each step of building a consulting practice by understanding how to acquire and execute a consulting project. By creating successful projects, a consultant can build a reputation, acquire more projects and create a successful consulting practice.

This volume continues to build on the relationship between the Research in Management Consulting series and the intervener-researchers at the Socio-Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR) in Ecully, France, extending that partnership to our recent work with the French Foundation for Management Education (FNEGE), a foundation dedicated to closing the gap between the teaching and practice of management in France. As part of the Foundation's multifaceted activities-which range from seminars and an advanced training initiative for French doctoral students to joint programs with international organizations an associations-FNEGE partnered with ISEOR to sponsor a series of workshops on developing high quality intervention-research. This volume is one of the results from that endeavor. Although intervention-research helps to uncover valuable insight into organizational dynamics and performance, the challenge of capturing and disseminating that insight to both academics and practitioners is entrenched in the rigor-relevance debate. While we are witnessing increased calls for "actionable knowledge," this ideal, unfortunately, remains a rather elusive concept as critics contend either that rigorous academic research falls well-short of relevance to the practitioner world or research that proves to be valuable to practitioners falls short of the rigor expected in academic life. This volume is intended to help bridge that divide. Drawing on the FNEGE-ISEOR intervention-research workshop, the volume contains 18 chapters that explore the intervention-research process, from initial conceptualization, to implementation, to publication. The volume is published in French and English