Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

Memo to Women Consultants: Planning for Retirement

According to a new study by Hewitt Associates, which looked at almost 2 million employees at 72 large organizations, women are less prepared for retirement than men.

Hewitt's study not only found that women need to save more for retirement than men, but it also concluded that the gap between the amount women need to save and the amount they are actually saving is larger than the same gap for men.

The study's authors report a number of reasons why women aren't well prepared for retirement. For example, though women's incomes have jumped in recent years, their earnings are still lower than most men, and that makes saving for retirement more difficult. Women also tend to live longer than men, so they often need a bigger nest egg to secure retirement than men do.

Hewitt's advice for women is to begin investing for retirement earlier, and more vigorously. By starting a retirement fund two years earlier than planned, the resulting fund can be 18 percent larger at retirement, according to Hewitt. And by boosting the percentage of your annual income that you place in a retirement account, even by a small amount, you can make a big difference in the balance at retirement.

The report also suggests that women could choose to stay in the workforce beyond the typical retirement age. But there must be a better way than that.

The report is available at www.hewittassociates.com.

Special Report: 12 Experts on Pricing Your Services

Few topics inspire more curiosity than how to price professional services. Even though you can probably count the number of true pricing experts on one hand, editors at RainToday asked twelve people to weigh in on this question:

What is the one piece of advice you would give a professional service provider to maximize their fees for services?

Their answers are included in a free, 39-page report, “The One Piece of Advice You Need to Get the Fees You Deserve.”

Like any compilation, this report contains some generic stuff. But it also includes some very good advice about creating compelling value as a basis for establishing professional fees. Some of the leading thinkers in the field of professional services are represented in the report.

The report is worth a careful look. Download it here.

The Downside of Client Relationships

Read almost any book on marketing professional services and you'll find an obligatory section on how important it is to build client relationships. That's sound advice but, as with most good things, there are potential drawbacks.

In this month's issue of The Guerrilla Consultant, we talk about the pitfalls of client relationships.

Read the article

The One Minute Entrepreneur

Ken Blanchard changed the language of management with his groundbreaking book, The One Minute Manager®, which is one of the most successful business books of all time. Since then, he’s helped countless organizations across the globe. Blanchard is the bestselling author of more than forty books.

In the latest edition of Management Consulting News, Blanchard talked to us about his latest book, The One Minute Entrepreneur, which lays out a strategy for making any new business venture flourish.

Read the interview with Ken Blanchard.

We’re also featuring articles on how consultants know if they are solving the right problem, and advice for entrepreneurs from Michael Gerber and Guy Kawasaki.

Read this month's issue of Management Consulting News.