Project Description

Marketing takes many forms.

The following case shows how we worked with a client who was at the very beginning of starting her business.

About our client: Barbara Baker is an experienced HR consultant and Director of Aspirations4life (www.aspirations4life.com). She worked nationally in HR at senior management level for over 20 years dealing with the tricky side: resolving grievances, negotiating pay deals and being responsible for employment tribunals. She also led and delivered a new Organisational Design programme into a part of HMRC and advised on the associated business change with senior executives.

A Fresh Start: Barbara was seeking new challenges and so at the beginning of January 2015 she started as an independent with the aim of bringing her skills and knowledge to businesses in Kent and London. She wants to help companies without HR departments as an Interim HR Consultant and also help leaders who need confidential advice and guidance with her Executive Mentoring service.

Barbara’s Challenge: With such a wide bank of HR knowledge and skills but negligible experience of marketing her services Barbara was finding it difficult to show businesses how she can benefit them. Specifically, she was concerned about how to introduce herself and her skills at networking events.

Getting to know you: We interviewed Barbara in depth to dig into her experiences and manner of working so that we could help her build a series of case studies. This helped categorize her skills into a number of distinct areas, establish how she had helped people and, where possible, quantify the direct benefits.

Our research: We investigated the main areas where companies use interim HR consultants and looked at which types of companies use those services. We assessed Barbara’s LinkedIn profile and provided advice to ensure that the profile highlighted the areas identified from the case study analysis. We also provided research on a number of networking organizations which will be helpful for Barbara.

Barbara’s first steps: Putting together the analysis of the case studies and the research enabled Barbara to talk about her services with confidence at the next networking events she attended. This freed her to be genuinely interested in the problems of the business owners around her and use her huge bank of knowledge to give HR help and guidance to other members of the group.

Barbara has since joined other networking groups and is continuing to develop her business. We will post details of her future progress.