5 Must Have Skills for a Successful Practice-Rebroadcast

Safety Consultant with Sheldon Primus

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This episode is powered by Safety FM.

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Welcome to the Safety Consultant podcast. I'm your host, Sheldon Primus. It's the podcast where I teach you the business of being a safety consultant. Yeah, I switched to music up on you. This is still one of mine that I have. The one you're used to hearing in the beginning is my Bruce Lee. And that is not what I did today. That's okay. Still mine. So I don't have to pay any royalties. Right. And go to dystopia.com, look up primetime timeshell. And there you go. You have all my music. Not all, but you got a bunch I put up there. It's a dyskopia.com, and it's gonna be primetime shell is what I was using as a one of those gnome de plume pending. See? Pulled out my french on you. So today I've got something that is going to be a simple conversation for today. Today we're really going to go through what I call the five must have skills for a successful practice. That's right. You better watch out. So that is what we're going to talk about today. All right. So I'm going to really get into it for you guys so you could get a good understanding what I was thinking about.

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Here's my thought process for this episode. I honestly believe that there's many skills that you're going to need for being a successful safety and health consultant. And you want to make sure you take care of stuff to protect your clients, not customers, clients from injuries, illnesses. And that's going to be their workers. And the workers are your clients as well. And then also, you know, for regulatory agencies, we're also that that trusted person for that task as well. But we're also business people. Right. That's why we're here. We're here because we're learning stuff in order to get the business running good. So here's one specifically for consultants, meaning episode. When I say one episode right here, gonna do it. So five must have competencies or skills. And I think in this term, I might call it just skills. For a successful safety consulting practice, you could take the word safety out of it, and you could just say consulting practice, and then you could take the word consultant out of it and practice for whatever you do. It's still really valuable to have these kind of traits, right? So, number one, and I'm not gonna do this in order, even though I do have something that I really feel they're all important.

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That's why we got them. It's got such a short list. So I don't want to go hog wild with like, too much as far as order because, you know, when you order stuff, that's when it goes, starts getting haywire. So I'm not gonna do the order. But here's number one in my mind that I thought of as I wrote my notes, a skill for creativity. You know, where you got to have that problem solving skills, finding out things that may be hidden into yourself because you're going to walk into an organization and they're going to tell you what they think you want them to tell you, and then you got to figure out what's actual. So that's going to take some creativity on your part. And there's a bunch of other things, you know, finding clients. You're going to have to be creative about that. You're going to have to be creative on the way you promote your yourself, especially with LinkedIn and Facebook and twitter and everything else is going to pop up and what's currently going away and people are transitioning to, you got to figure out all that stuff and how are you going to do your promotions and ads and get the right person to be attracted to your service.

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All that is creativity. So you need that skill. How do you develop that skill is honestly going to be trial and error. It's also going to be where you're probably going to have to ask someone, hey, this is what I want to do. How would you accomplish that? Or if someone really knows you, like a spouse or a partner or something that really knows you well, and you could say, hey, this is what I'm thinking, and what do you think would be the best way to go about this? And together you put your heads together and then you come up with a brainstorming thing and there you go, you got yourself a new promotion, or you got yourself a new product or service because of that activity, the next in line is going to be humility. Yes, I said humility. You gotta be humble. Not humility in the sense of like angelic. Not talking about that we're talking about, but just practical humility. And maybe I might even throw in practical with humility there at the same time. But honestly, I've been wrong about things. And if I didn't go, if I didn't go about it in my brain thinking that though I'm an expert at some things, I'm not an expert at everything.

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And therefore, even if it was a situation where, you know, a student, which I've had some students say, hey, professor, we are not on the same page here. That is not exactly right. And we'll go check it out. And I'm like, lo and behold, dude, I'm wrong. I accept. And honestly, people will respect your more for that, and it is going to add to your credibility. So that is one of the things that we want to add in there. So asking for help is not a bad thing. Have some humility. It does help you. It's an important skill. It'll surprise you how often you're going to need that one. Another one is going to be ingenuity. So that term is going to be something where you may not know, and it could be another segment of creativity. But ingenuity, to me, means that you are kind of making things happen. Like, for instance, there's been several occasions where I just didn't know how to do certain even events, and I had to figure out, you know, how to put this system with this system, and then how to make sure that I could send this feed over to this.

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This server or this software system, whatever it was at the time. And I had to really just MacGyver it. For those of you who haven't seen Doctor Strange, the Marvel movie, he had an appearance in the latest Spider man movie. And the making of this podcast is 2022, June 26. So it was last year, I think last summer. The summer before was the big blockbuster for that one. Might even be some before that, tell you the truth. So he comes in, and Spider man messes a whole bunch of stuff up. Hold on. Spoiler alert. I should just start out with spoiler alert. So doctor Strange says to the Spider man crew, you know, hey, just MacGyver. MacGyver it. Of course, he didn't say MacGyver it in the show. He said, just MacGyver the. So that's what I'm saying here in this little step, this step here for ingenuity, it's gonna take some things for you to just kind of sit back, look at it, say, all right, this is my ultimate objective. I have this service, I have this product, I have this friend, I have this place that I could go. How can I now make this thing happen, this service happen?

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How can I make this class happen? And you might have something where you could just fix a few things, if you will, so you could get it to work. We're calling that ingenuity. The number four is good old fashioned stubbornness. Yeah, honestly, it really is good old fashioned stubbornness. You're gonna need that skill. The reason why is they're gonna want to give up all the time, multiple times a month. And then some days, there'll be multiple times in that day. But you can't. You're gonna, even if you need to pivot and step away and come back, whatever it takes. But don't give up on the consultancy. Just go ahead. And if you need to back burner it and say, right now it's not the time, I got to do something else, and you're going to transition from the consultancy into something else, or somebody just throws some money your way and you're just like, hey, I can't turn away from this kind of cash, so I'm going to put the consultancy into mothballs for a little, and then we're going to go back to it. But I am going back to it. So you're going to stick to it.

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That's if you go for it. You gotta take care of yourself and your family first. If that's the case, that's the case. But, you know, don't give up on the dream. You're gonna back burner it for a little while. You're gonna think about it, make it better for when you relaunch, when you get back out, then now, you already have some skills and experience. Now, if this happens and you do need to backburn or something with your career and your consultancy, keep it open, don't close it down. Pay for all the fees or whatever you need to, to keep it an active business, even though you're not going to be actively working the business, because you want to make sure the timeframe from when your established date keeps going. So my established date is 2008. And if I left my company or came back to it, as long as I kept paying the fees or whatever it is, to keep the business going, every now and then, you could have done some extra work on the weekends or holidays or vacation or whatever, just to keep your name out there, but don't close and shutter the business.

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Just kind of, you know, just keep it running on the low key in the back end. If you could afford that last one that we're going to talk about, and this one is one that I honestly feel that is really, really important. I'm not ordering stuff like I told you, it's not in, like, rank order in any way, but this one is important. And the reason why I think it is is because we all need it, and that is guilt free downtime. Gotta have that guilt free downtime. If you do not allow yourself to do that, you're gonna get burnt out. And if you don't have that skill to shut off off the, shut it off everything that you're thinking about and everything else and be in a moment with your family or whoever, then it's going to end up messing your business up anyway. So might as well give yourself some guilt free downtime. That's what the doctor is ordering right now. So that's it. That's my five most must have skills for your practice. Number one, creativity. Number two, humility. Number three, ingenuity. Number four, a little bit of stubbornness. Number five, some guilt free downtime.

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That's a skill you're going to need to start working on. So thank you everybody for just being part of everything here. And if you need to get a hold of me, go to sheldonprimus.com. You can get me for just about everything right there. Sheldonprimus.com. If I'm doing an event, you're going to see it on primuswebinar.com. And if there's no event, then you have all my safety and health courses that I have available for you to take. So that's going to be on primuswebinar.com. So if there's an event, that's going to be where I'll point you to. If not, then you can get the courses. So I really appreciate everybody. This is just a wonderful time that you guys had for me. And I just honestly thank you all for all the time that we had together. So you know what I always say? Go get em.

[00:13:32.310] - Speaker 1

This episode has been powered by Safety FM. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast or broadcast are those of the host and its guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within the past hour are only examples. They should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based on very limited and dated open source information. Assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast or broadcast may be reproduced, stored within a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast or broadcast. Sheldon.

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