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MILLION DOLLAR CONSULTING
• A postage meter and minimum 15-pound scale. Your correspondence needs a meter for professionalism, and this combination will also save you a lot of time in the post office having your packages weighed. The meters can even include your logo or message in the indicia. (Estimated cost: a wide variety of leases and purchase plans are available. Pitney Bowes pretty much has a monopoly, although you can acquire other brands if you search. I pay a $500 quarterly lease. The scales can be set to automatically trigger the meters.) Other equipment, such as projectors and document binders, is a matter of individual preference and frequency of need. A basic, professional office—apart from rent and utilities—such as the one described here, will probably require $5,000 to $10,000 in initial investment, depending on your tastes, computer capability, and so on. It’s a small price to pay to be perceived as a professional firm. Additional equipment can include a paper shredder, television, audiocassette player, minicassette recorder, CD and DVD capability, wireless headset, label maker, and so on. I’ve found that you can’t go wrong by erring on the side of too much investment in your firm’s image. A corporate brochure that folds three ways and fits nicely in a number 10 envelope is like a neon sign proclaiming, “We are small-time because this is what I can afford and what I am happy to have represent my firm.” A multicolored brochure of 16 pages with testimonials, examples of work performed, summary of corporate philosophy, and other matters that represent your approaches might not be read cover to cover by the prospect, but the material is there if it’s needed, and it certainly says, “I care about my image and how you perceive me, so a lot of thought has gone into this representation of my firm. Money was not the object.” (And it’s paid for with one sale.) Note: Don’t order thousands of copies of anything, no matter what the economies of scale. Even though you saved $500, 2,000 extra brochures in the closet or garage that are rapidly becoming outdated (or have an error) is much too high a price to pay for volume discounts. I talked earlier about “all-star gaffes.” No one is as knowledgeable about what you’ve done in the past or what your potential is for the future as you are. Others can only look about them and receive images. For better or worse, those images are the keys to the early acceptance of your participation in their enterprise. The good news is that the image is manageable and can convey exactly what you want it to. That image should represent what you can do for your clients in the future, not what you’ve accomplished in the past.