(80b) Starting a Consulting Business: Lessons Learned from 18 Years of Being Self-Unemployed

The “traditional employment model” is shifting: retiring “Baby Boomers” are departing the Hydrocarbon Processing Industry (HPI) in droves, taking decades, even centuries, of hard-earned knowledge and expertise with them. On the other end of the spectrum, short-sighted management policies, promulgated over the preceding twenty-plus years, have left a large age and experience gap that separates the in-coming “Millennials” from the Boomers. That is, there has been grossly insufficient recruitment, training & mentoring and retention to adequately replace retirees and to train and mentor the next generation. This situation presents a unique opportunity for the engineer turned entrepreneur to start a consulting business.

While the opportunity for becoming an independent consultant and having a successful business exists in the marketplace, the journey to success is fraught with numerous traps, distractions and pitfalls for the unprepared and unaware. For the curious, as well as the serious explorer, this presentation is a tale of the trials, tribulations, successes and observations of an 18-year independent consultant veteran and will address the skills, strategies and dedication needed to be successfully “self-unemployed”.