Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Clutteris the enemy, and not just in your clothes closet. Throughout your consultingpractice, clutter and distractions are dampening your consulting firm’ssuccess.
Afew years ago, a neuroscientist and a professor at Princeton University jointlyreleased an article with a title cleverly designed to discourage you fromreading their work:
Interactions of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms in Human Visual Cortex
The net of their scholarly research was this:
People have limited ability to process visual stimuli. Distracting, visual cues reduce people’s ability to focus, process and understand what they’re seeing.
In other words:
Visual clutter reduces your ability to focus and it diminishes your mental sharpness.
Let’sapply their findings to your consulting firm. Where is clutter reducing theeffectiveness of your consulting firm?
5 Success-Stealing Distractions at Your Consulting Firm
Since the professors were specifically studying visual stimuli, we’ll start there.
YourPhysical Office
Is your workspace—or at least your desk—clean, uncluttered and conducive to productive consulting work days? Or, are various objects, papers and doodads in your field of view, where they can suck brain power away from your more important tasks?
[Author’s note to author’s wife: chocolates and chocolate wrappers do not count as visual distractions and should be considered invisible for the purposes of this exercise.]
Action Step: Clean up your desk, and the area of your office that’s in view while you’re working.
YourComputer Desktop
As a consulting firm leader, you’re practically married to your computer.
Is your computer desktop neat, clean and devoid of distracting files and icons?
Do you have visual alarms constantly popping up to inform you that someone has emailed you, or that someone on your team has sent a message? Those visual distractions are bad news.
Action Step: Clean up your computer desktop; turn off alarms and pop-ups.
Your Presentations
The downsides of distractions apply to your consulting firm’s clients too.
Do you clutter each page of your client/prospect presentations with too much information, making it difficult for clients to focus on your main point?
Does your consulting firm’s presentation template include distracting visuals?
Action Step: Simplify your presentations. Aim for squeaky clean, linear presentations, with one idea and visual cue presented at a time.
Your InformationManagement/Filing Systems
Do you and your consulting firm save and store everything? Do your files float around multiple systems like dandelion seeds scattered by a stiff breeze?
If your active folders are clogged with historical clients, remnants of marketing materials, and outdated presentation versions, then it’s hard to find what you’re looking for.
Worse, you lose mental focus while you’re searching for the file you need because you’re distracted by old, irrelevant information.
Action Step: Archive your files and materials mercilessly, and ensure your electronic filing systems highlight only the active, necessary files.
Your Offering
Shift your attention from visual clutter to distractions in other areas, and you’ll notice further improvement opportunities for your consulting firm.
Front and center is your offering. Who, precisely, is your target client and what narrowly-defined problem do you solve?
Every additional industry or problem you mention when you talk to a prospect is clutter that reduces his ability to process what you do.
Beyond that, when you throw everything including the kitchen sink, into your solution, you decrease it’s persuasive power.
Action Step: Tighten your Fishing Line and your offerings to make them more powerful and effective.
Where else can you reducedistracting clutter to run a more successful consulting practice?
Text and images are © 2019 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.