Getting Started as a BI Consultant - A Simple Method

If you’ve got the necessary skills and are looking to make a living in Business Intelligence, one option could be to go freelance and start your own consulting business. In this article, I’m going to talk about one way you might go about this.

I’m going to be discussing things like the skills you’ll need, your target market and the services you could offer.

But, first of all, I think it’s essential to talk about who this method is aimed at and who it isn’t. Because it isn’t for everyone.

Who is this method for?

It goes without saying that you should only attempt to set yourself up as a BI consultant if you already have the requisite skills. Because, if you don’t, it could be very embarrassing for you indeed. Just because you know a few formulas and how to build charts in Excel, this doesn’t mean you’re ready to take on the kinds of projects you’ll be required to undertake.

So, what are the skills you need? I’ve actually already made a video about this that goes into more detail than I will here but let’s do a basic run-through.

The BI Skills You Need To Become A Consultant

First off you’ll need to understand how BI tools work and be an advanced user of at least one of them. The most popular being Power BI and Tableau but you've also got others like Looker (formerly data) Studio, Sisense and QlikView.

Then you’ll need to be at least an intermediate-level user of Excel to do things like cleaning data and joining data from different sheets.

Next, you’ll need to know SQL to be able to not only query databases for analysis but also build databases, create tables, populate tables etc.

You’ll also want to be capable of creating data pipelines using some kind of ETL tool. So extracting data from one place and loading it into another. There’s a growing number of different tools that will help you do this and some work better with specific BI tools.

Finally, you’ll need to be familiar with different API-based data sources like Google Analytics and various digital marketing platforms. What I mean by “familiar with” is knowing the important metrics and dimensions of each source and how they are combined to produce the analyses that might be required by the client. So when a client, who isn’t familiar with them, asks you to include a particular chart in their reporting, you’ll know exactly how to build it.

Obviously, you can’t know every single potential data source that a particular client may have but you will be expected to know the most used ones.

And that’s pretty much it. For what I’m discussing in this video, you won’t need to know other tools like Python.

So those are the hard skills you’ll need but that’s just the half of it. There are also soft skills and a specific mindset and character that you’ll also need to have in order to be successful.

The Soft Skills You Need To Succeed

Firstly, you need to understand that you’ll be starting your own business and becoming your own boss. The buck stops with you. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. It’s as simple as that.

You need to be entrepreneurial by nature. To love the challenge of building something from the ground up. To make all of the important decisions. Because you’ll be doing it, for the most part, alone. So, if you’re not good at being on your own and motivating yourself to work and to drive yourself forward, this definitely isn’t for you.

Not only are you alone but it’s also 24 7. With no paid holidays. If a client spots an urgent problem with a report on a Sunday afternoon, you’ll need to fix it asap.

Another essential soft skill you’ll need is good communication. In 2 areas specifically.

Firstly, you’ll need to know how to sell and promote yourself and your services. Communicate the benefits your services will give to your clients and persuade them to hire you. If you can’t do that, you’ve got a problem.

Secondly, you’ll need to be able to communicate potentially complicated information to clients who don’t, what you might call, “speak data”. Most of your potential clients won’t know what an ETL, a KPI or a data warehouse is. So you’ll need to find ways to explain the work you’re doing in more accessible terms.

Ok, so that was a quick, non-exhaustive list of the relevant hard and soft skills you’ll need. Now let’s turn our attention to your potential target market. Which type of clients should you be aiming for? Well, let’s be realistic and think about this logically. You’ll need to start small.

Target Market

The larger the company, the more likely they are to already have the necessary in-house skills to analyse data and implement BI. And, even if they don’t, they’re more likely to hire a more established agency with a proven track record than someone with little to no consulting experience.

You may even have an amazing project portfolio but, unless you’ve got references from other clients and real-world project experience similar to what they’re looking for, you’ve got no chance.

So, who should you aim for? Well, my advice to you is to start looking for clients local to you. Specifically, small businesses. These businesses can be in any industry at all because all businesses generate data. But, my advice to you would be to start by picking an industry that interests you or that you might have some deeper understanding of. That way, you’re at least starting off on the right foot.

It could be any industry from restaurants to dental practices to retail shops to architects. They will all more than likely have data in Excel, have a website, perhaps run Google or Facebook ads. You get the idea, they have different data that they could probably use a hand in making sense of. 

Another reason for starting locally is that you’ll be able to actually meet your potential clients rather than pitching and conducting meetings via Zoom or Skype. This will make it much easier to build trust and, from their point of view, they’ll be able to better assess you as a person as well.

Small business owners will also more than likely understand the challenges of building a business from scratch which would automatically create affinity. So don’t be afraid to play that card. Rather than pretend that you’re further down the line than you actually are, explain that you’re just starting out and looking to build a portfolio of trusted clients.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that you are there to help your clients improve business performance. You need to understand that every client is different and has their own data and challenges. Your job is to understand how and where your skillset can help them overcome those challenges they face and to answer questions that will help them take data-driven decisions.

Overcoming Client Objections

So, targeting small businesses sounds simple enough but, in fact, they’re actually more of a challenge when it comes to pitching your services and persuading them to hire you. You’re going to come up against a lot more client objections than you would with larger businesses that are more familiar with the role Business Intelligence plays.

Here are 3 of the most common objections you’ll hear from potential clients and how to counter those objections.

We don’t have any data.

Well, as we just talked about a minute ago, this is not true. The vast majority of businesses store some data in Excel and have a website. Then a lot of them have social media accounts and some will run ads. Your counter to this objection is to explain that all of this data, when analysed properly, can contain important insights to help them make better-informed, data-driven decisions. Which in turn will improve business performance.

It’s not worth the investment.

With small businesses, you’re dealing with smaller budgets which means that it can be harder to justify an outlay on something when you can’t see any meaningful return on investment. This is understandable and you do need to be empathetic to this way of thinking. But your counter to this objection needs to explain that Business Intelligence is there to improve a business's performance which can lead to either increasing revenue or making savings. In my experience, the best return on investment you can give to your client is saving them time. Time that they would perhaps normally spend on wrangling data in Excel files to try to analyse it. If you can offer them a way of automating these regular, time-consuming tasks and actually improve their reporting with interactive shareable dashboards, then the conversation will change. Because that is a tangible return on investment that they can easily understand.

We just look at the built-in reports.

At least with this objection, the client is already doing some kind of business analysis so there’s less of a need to convince them of the benefits of business intelligence. They’re usually referring to the reports you get with platforms like Google Analytics. The counter to this objection is really twofold. Firstly, these reports are built as a one-size-fits-all solution. In the example of Google Analytics, every website is different and not all of the provided reports are relevant. Having a simplified, tailor-made report will give them a better focus and therefore better insights. Secondly, if they’re driving traffic to their website from other sources, it can be beneficial to see how well this is being done and what the quality of the traffic is. To do this, you might need to blend different data sources to get the full picture. Something that the built-in reports don’t necessarily do. In other words, you’re proposing a solution that joins the dots between the different activities of their business.

So those are the 3 main objections you’ll come up against most and how to explain to the client the benefits of the services you can provide. But what exactly are those services?

BI Services To Offer

What I would recommend is to offer both pre-packaged and ad-hoc services. But, generally, your first approach should be to propose solutions to the client's pain points. And, remember, a lot of the time the client won’t even know these problems exist or they do but they may just think that spending a few hours a week wrestling with excel sheets is normal and par for the course. In this example, you could provide a tailor-made solution that automates these tasks, provides interactive reports and saves them time that they could then spend doing something else. In fact, sometimes, these excel files are actually exported from a database that could be connected to directly using a BI tool, saving them even more time.

These kinds of projects, however, being ad-hoc in nature, are more involved, require more time and therefore will be more expensive. Which, in turn, will be harder to sell to the client. You really will need to demonstrate the benefits they’ll be getting.

What might be easier in terms of hooking clients to begin with is some kind of pre-packaged (yet customisable) solution to their reporting needs. But these will be reports based on existing, pre-mapped data sources like Google Analytics and ads where the metrics and dimensions are always the same.

So this is where you’d need to have some kind of portfolio of different reports you could offer that combine different data sources together in the same dashboard. The idea is that you’re trying to get the client to imagine their data in these reports and the insights that they could gain.

Because these kinds of reports are mostly set up already and will just need customising to the individual client’s needs, there is less work involved so you can therefore charge less. This means that the client will be more likely to consider it.

For you, as a BI consultant though, this isn’t where you’re going to earn the real money. There’s only so much you can charge for these kinds of reports so you’d need quite a lot of clients to be able to make a good living. No, you can think of these services as a way of getting your foot in the door and building up a relationship with the client. Once they know you can deliver what you promised and can see the value of your expertise, then you can propose more advanced, tailored services. It’s these services that are the ones that will make you your living.

Whatever approach you choose, your primary objective is to provide value to the client. To try and understand where your expertise as a data analyst and BI consultant can most help them and their business perform better. By doing this and delivering on your promises, you can eventually build up a portfolio of trusted clients. The bigger the portfolio and the more successful projects under your belt, the bigger the clients you can potentially aim for.

How To Price Your BI Services?

At this point, you might be wondering what you can charge for your services and how to cost client projects. This subject deserves an article all to itself so check it out here.