Running an educational consulting business is about control. If, like most consulting businesses, yours is (at least to start) a one-man or one-woman show, you’re responsible for making all the decisions—from deciding where to put your desk and what kind of filing cabinet to buy to how to design your website and what topics you’re going to present on.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to do everything.
“Huh?” you say. “I thought you just said, “you’re responsible for making all the decisions.” I did. But when I say that, I don’t mean that you have to do all the work.
Some of the decisions you need to make involve whether to do something yourself or to pay someone else to do it. If something’s not in your wheelhouse and your time would be better spent working on other tasks, by all means, find a way to have someone who’s better qualified do that task.
So, the key is to stay in control over the decision-making process while making good decisions about what to do yourself and what to outsource. One concept that I learned a while back that has been a great help to me is called “Loose-Tight Thinking,” and I think you’ll find it to be a helpful concept for you, as well.
Loose-Tight Thinking
Here’s how loose-tight thinking works. When confronted with a challenge, ask yourself this question: “Do I need to be tight about this, or is this something I can be loose with?” By “tight,” I mean that something has to be done a certain way to get the result you want. By “loose,” I mean that the thing can be done any number of ways, as long as it achieves the intended result.
I know that might be a bit confusing, so let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re a language arts consultant whose specialty is reading instruction, so you post a number of workshop topics on your website that you’d like to present on. This is your wheelhouse. These are the topics you enjoy presenting, and the ones you feel you do the best job with.
But let’s say an administrator calls you and says, “We’re doing well with our current reading program, but we’re struggling with our writing instruction. As a language arts person, it seems like you might be a good fit to help us, even though the topics listed on your site are all about reading. Could you do a workshop for us on writing?”
This is a dilemma faced by many consultants. Do you take the work, even though it’s not in your wheelhouse? Or do you stick to your primary area of expertise and turn down the work?
If you apply loose-tight thinking to this problem, it can be helpful in establishing boundaries.
For example, let’s say that you don’t feel completely comfortable about speaking as an expert on writing instruction in general, but you think you could do a good job of talking about using different kinds of writing (genres) as models to teach reading strategies specific to those genres. Or, to go one step farther out from your core expertise, you might feel like you could do a decent job presenting on teaching writing using models from different genres of reading, since you’re an expert on what it takes to read those genres well.
What’s the ultimate answer? You have to decide, but it can help to ask, “What do I need to be tight about when it comes to my presenting?” Sticking to doing just reading presentations because that’s your sweet spot will probably ensure that you do your best work, and this could lead to more gigs in the future (though it could cut down on how much work you get right out of the gate). Deciding that you can do a decent job on topics just a little outside of your core strength will help you get more work, faster, but those jobs might not be quite as fun or satisfying for you.
The Question of Control as it Applies to Your Website
The look and functionality of your website is another area of your business where loose-tight thinking might be helpful.
There are some decisions about your website that you can be loose about. For example, in choosing a WordPress theme or Squarespace template to use, you might have a conversation with a web designer and tell her what your goals for your site are and what it needs to be able to do and let her bring you a few ideas.
Loosening up on the reins here can pay off because you could burn days of time going through all the template options out there yourself when your time could better be spent elsewhere, whereas a web designer who works with templates all the time should be able to narrow your choices down quickly to a handful from which you can choose. Decision made, time saved.
But there’s one area concerning your website where I’m going to counsel you to stay tightly in control, and that’s the ability to make content changes by yourself whenever you need to do so.
I learned this lesson the hard way. For one of my websites, I decided to have a web programming company design the site for me. This was when I was new to websites and didn’t know any better. And they did a great job of creating a site that was pretty and had all the functionality I asked them to build into it.
I didn’t realize what I’d gotten myself into until the first time I needed to change some copy and an image on the site. I found out that, due to the custom coding of the site, there were some things that only the programmers could change and that I would have to submit the changes to them, then sit around and wait for them to get the time to do it (and pay them more money to do it, too). What a pain!
You don’t have time to wait. When something changes in your business—you want to add a new workshop description to your site, you want to add a new product to your product page, you want to add a new photo or video of a workshop you’ve done—you need to be able to do that quickly by yourself.
So, here’s my recommendation to you: don’t hire a web programmer to do your site. You can hire a web designer and work with him to choose a template, add your content, and take your site live. But be sure to tell him explicitly, “I don’t want any custom coding done. Once the site is launched, I need to be able to make changes to anything on the site quickly and easily by myself.” You might even want to get that in writing before paying him to do the design work.
The other option (if you want to get really tight about this) is to learn how to design a site using WordPress or Squarespace. There are many books and online tutorials out there that can teach you how to design a site using these programs. You don’t have to learn any coding. Sure, this is the slower path, but once you know how to use one of these programs, you can re-design your site at any time, or you could even start a new site whenever you want and do it by yourself from scratch.
