Category: Business/Investing Publisher: Authors On Line Ltd
ISBN-10: 0755204387
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 252
Copyright: Oct 2008
ISBN-13: 9780755204380
- What Consultants Should Do
- What Clients Should Know
Enjoy reading Kwan's honest and interesting account based on his 20+ years as a business management consultant. See how clients would respond and appreciate their weaknesses. There are ample tips for consultants and clients.
Can you succeed as a consultant?
How should clients behave for a WIN-WIN outcome?
What else must you know before you consult?
You will find answers to these important questions and many more in this unique book.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 First Contacts with Clients
Chapter 2 First Meetings and Impressions
Chapter 3 Second Meetings and Beyond
Chapter 4 Types of Prospects and Clients
Chapter 5 Getting Information and Case Studies
Chapter 6 A Few Tips for Clients and Prospects
Chapter 7 Yes! Some Tips for Consultants
Chapter 8 Do Consultants Get Rewarded? plus Your Bonus
Chapter 9 Conclusions on Clients – Caveat Consultants!
Excerpt
Previews:
‘At last, a practical eye opening useful book for both consultants and their clients from a real results driven consultant. Read it!’
Peter Rawson, Managing Director – ARRK Product Development Group Limited
‘Essential reading for Consultants, Clients and business travellers – enjoy Kwan's no nonsense approach to his many years of wide ranging experiences.’
Philip D Garnar, Director – The Lamberhurst Corporation
‘Kwan Loo has provided a practical guide for consultants and the businesses that might use them. It contains nuggets of truth to keep both happy. An honest account with a human face, the life examples given will resonate with business managers, their employees and the brave agents of change trying to help them. It is essential reading for those with an open mind.'
Darren Kelly, Managing Director – Drucegrove Limited
‘The increasing number of independent consultants in many areas of professional services means that understanding how to be successful, and whether you want to be one, has ever greater importance. This book attempts to answer these core questions in detail, and I wish it success.’
Andrew Smith, Chairman – Independent Consultants Group, UK
Professional Reviews
Review in Financial World (March 2009)
No one is ever quite sure what it is that management consultants actually do. They themselves struggle to explain it. This book is an attempt to do so by focusing on the relationship between consultant and client: an important and much neglected subject, and one that makes this book worthy of attention.
However, this book is self-published and the production quality is poor, making it sometimes physically difficult to read. The editing is also poor and the organisation and presentation of the material borders on the chaotic. There are too few chapters and they are too long; subheadings do not follow any logical progression. Even the title is confusing.
This is a real pity, because there is a lot of good material here, which a good edit could have brought out. It is surprising that no commercial publisher was found to take it on. However, in a rather disjointed way, Y. Kwan Loo succeeds in mapping the intricacies of client-consultant relationships. He offers shrewd observations on client motivation. “Many first meetings entail listening to people pour their hearts out,” he observes – a kind of catharsis. Not all of these conversations turn into productive client relationships. In some cases it seems that the prospective client is just lonely and needs someone to talk to.
Refreshingly, Loo does not offer any roadmaps or step-by-step programmes to consultancy success. There is not a single diagram or flowchart. Instead, there are observations, almost all grounded in personal experience, on how consultancy relationships develop.
The fact that the book is so personal makes it more valuable rather than less.
This is almost a very good book. An interesting and valuable series of reflections upon the practice of management consultancy are unfortunately let down by poor presentation and editing of the material. This is not an easy book to digest but, with that caveat, is recommended reading for two groups of people in particular: those who are thinking of making management consultancy a profession, and those who are thinking of hiring a management consultant. For the latter group in particular, there will never be a better chance to find out what consultants really think.
•Author: Morgan Witzel
•Position: Honorary senior fellow
•Company: University of Exeter
Practical tips for aspiring consultants
Y Kwan Loo's book is full of practical tips for aspiring consultants based on first-hand experience of working with clients in a variety of sectors, countries and contexts. I recommend it to students on my "Discover the Consultant Within You" workshops so that they can get a flavour for what this (not so glamorous) profession is really like. I hope the book is sufficiently successful to encourage the author to publish it professionally.
Trevor Boutall 26.4.2009 (see www.amazon.co.uk)
Discover Secrets From a Lifetime Management Consultant, 12 Feb 2009
A 'How to achieve business success' notebook for any practising or aspiring consultant.
This book is unlike others on consulting. It covers real life experience - the relationships consultants have with prospective and actual clients.
Rather than giving you dry techniques, method or even a linear story of how to be a consultant it is full of practical fragments.
Kwan Loo has opened his notebook covering decades of experience as a self employed management consultant and explains :
- The ways of selling yourself that work and don't work.
- What clients have said and done.
- Strengths and weaknesses mentioned by clients.
etc. etc.
You probably won't agree with all that Kwan says - but that's not the point. Do you want to trip over things that you could avoid or learn from someone else's experience ?
