As someone who’s self-employed with no line management, one
of my challenges is trying to figure out just how good I really am – client testimonials
are great feedback (and always appreciated), but I recognise they’re also very
subjective. For example, not everyone likes marmite – and I’m aware that not
everyone appreciates my approach at times (as evidenced by the rare occasions
when my bendy people[1]
have been thrown back at me during training courses I’ve delivered…)
And this desire to reflect truly on my ability isn’t just
for vanity’s sake – as a freelancer I need to know how I can best pitch myself
to clients, and I also need to know where I should focus the investments I’m
able to make in myself, to further enhance the service I can offer to said
clients.
That’s why I’m always keen to find ways to benchmark myself
against my peers and others. Earlier this year, this saw me publicly share the
results of my having my approach to reporting my impact compared against the
internationally agreed principles of social accounting[2]
– pleased report that compared with other consultants, and enterprises of a
similar size to me, I seem to be well ahead of most others out there doing work
around impact reporting.
It’s also why I try and offer my services through third
parties and funded programmes – having an impartial project manager or broker
between myself and a client can offer a more objective view of my services and
performance. This is because they’ll have similar pieces of work to that I’ve
undertaken to compare me against. One such programme is Big Potential[3]
– offering awards to social enterprises to allow them to ‘buy in’ specialist
support from the likes of me, in their ambitions for growth and in exploring
the relevance of social investment as part of those aspirations.
Unusually for such funded programmes, Big Potential annually
publish a ‘performance table’[4]
of all us consultants who it engages with, in supporting social enterprises.
While this is a relatively simplistic table of measures (the number of our
clients we’ve support to apply for awards from the programme vs. the number of
those clients they’ve agreed should be supported by their chosen provider), it’s
nonetheless a useful reference in offering another of the types of benchmarks
that I’m looking for.
And the latest table reveals a few interesting themes when I
looked at the figures – I seem to be the only active freelance consultant on
the approved provider list (the others being larger firms), and there’s no
correlation between how many clients a provider supports the applications of,
and the likelihood of them being awarded support for them:
Oh – and running the numbers to create some simple averages,
it seems that I’ve supported more than the typical average number of clients to
apply to this programme, and they’ve had a greater than average success rate
when I have!
So – as well as (most of) my clients saying nice things
about how much they enjoy my working with them, there’s also a growing body of statistical
data that shows I’ve better than the average consultant.
My mum will be pleased.