If yourconsulting firm’s plate is overflowing with client work, you’re probablyhustling long hours and stressing over deliverables, capacity and quality.

On the otherhand, if your consulting firm’s workload has dipped, you’re fretting over thenew business pipeline and combatting fears about cash flow, expenses, and theeffects of a recession.

Either way,running a small consulting firm offers a veritable cornucopia of opportunitiesto feel pressured, anxious, and worried.

Fun? Not somuch.

Yet, when you derive delight from leading your consulting firm, you’ll also enjoy three benefits:

Attracting More Clients

Remember, one of the Six Pillars of Consulting Success is Like, and prospects like consultants who are enjoying themselves.

Everyone would rather work with a happy camper than a sourpuss.

Retaining More Clients

Even though you’re awesome at your craft, if your attitude, demeanor or lifestyle dims your client’s day with a cloud of negativity, they’ll find reasons to stop engaging you.

Conversely, clients who genuinely enjoy interacting with you will searchfor opportunities to keep you around.

Living Longer (and Healthier)

Medical research indicates that happy people live longer, healthierlives. Your work hours consume an enormous share of your awake time—especiallyif you include the evening and weekend hours spent thinking about work.

Therefore, to capture the health benefits of a joyful existence, runningyour consulting firm needs to generate a bounty of cheerful moments.

How to Make Your Consulting Joyful (Again)

Joy and fun are deeply personal concepts. What triggers your giggles may leave another consulting firm leader cold.

Consequently, I can’t prescribe precise activities for you and your consulting firm.

However, I’ll tell you a few of my methods for maintaining merriment amidst the mayhem, and perhaps they’ll spark some ideas for you.

Make Silliness Your Job and Enjoy Your Shortcomings

I’ll combinethese two techniques with one illustration. Literally.

On the grand scale of artistic skills, I convincingly bounce around the bottom ranks. Heck, I can barely draw a bath.

Yet, these stick figures litter my articles and books. Why? Because they make me laugh. Whether or not you and other readers like a particular drawing, sketching it made me chuckle.

Plus, themere fact that it can take me ten attempts to draw a circle round enough toserve as head, constantly amuses me.

Hoot, Honk and Guffaw

On any given day, my schedule includes at least half-a-dozen advisory calls with consulting firm leaders. And every one of those clients will tell you I laugh throughout our conversation.

I emulate one of the partners at the consulting firm where I earned my spurs. He seemed to chortle no matter what a client told him. “You hate our work? Ha, ha, ha, that’s certainly a bad way for us to retain you as a client. Ho, ho, ho.”

At first, Ithought his behavior was bizarre and inappropriate. It’s not.

He wasdiffusing the tension, striving to keep his relationship with his consultingclient positive, and enjoying his day, virtually regardless of thecircumstances.

That’s savvy consulting.

Play Games

During team presentations to consulting clients, I usually insist we play the “word game.” (Each presenter is required to incorporate unusual terms they’ve been assigned—e.g. spaghetti and Serengeti, without making it obvious to the client.)

Similarly, pepperingmy articles with puns and obscure references entertains me while I’m engaged inthe hard work of crafting IP.

There are myriad ways you could inject merriment into your long, long consulting days. Whistling, skipping, dancing, singing, pranks… the list goes on and on.

How do you make consulting joyful for yourself and/or your consulting firm?

Text and images are © 2019 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.