Bit of a niche post here – one for people interested in my recent experience of building a consultancy ‘business’ to earn a bit of extra income. As you might be aware (because I never shut up about it), my consultancy is a spin-off from my blog posts which revolves around running workshops for early career academics. I’m now on a train on the way to run my 19th and 20th instantiations of these workshops, so thought it would be a good time to talk about some of my reflections on the practical aspects of getting money for something other than my day job.
In terms of what can one do ‘on the side’, the world is your oyster. I’ve seen academics create a business for general research consultancy, more specific grant-writing consultancy, career mentorship and leadership both inside and outside of academia, and other more bespoke spin-offs related to individual research expertise/methodologies. I’m largely alone in the world of delivering this sort of training (which is a shame!), but many academics find creative ways to earn a bit of extra money. And why not? UK academic salaries are pretty meagre relative to our counterparts over the seas, and many academics at my career stage have barely scraped enough money for a deposit on a house. Even the fanciest of full professors are a long way from what one might imagine as ‘rich’.
Why do I run these workshops? It was a bit of a journey. I was asked to speak at a workshop about ECR issues at Kent back in 2018, and found the experience very fulfilling and an interesting contrast to the rather more structured enterprise of giving a research talk. So, I had some slides, a sense that I’d like to do more of this kind of stuff, and a sense from general feedback about this blog (read by far more people than my research outputs) that there was a market for this kind of stuff. I also have helped out on a few ‘how to get promoted’ panels at my university, where I brushed up against this content. But the formal development of a real workshop ‘of my own’ was driven by the very practical financial consideration of enduring salary deductions my university imposed on staff who were participating in the UCU marking and assessment boycott. This time in my life was a weird one – limited income, ostensibly some more time/capacity, but perhaps most saliently a strong sense of guilt around feeling like I was failing my duty to students (in my kinder moments I will acknowledge that the failure is that of the sector, not me, but I imagine even the toughest proponents of this action suffered from similar guilt). It felt like the right time to see if there was space in my career to really engage with this narrative around ECR mentorship that I felt pretty strongly about on a local scale.
I had a vague sense that I had more than an hour’s worth of content on this topic. I also had a vague sense that academics in their first year as a lecturer were woefully unsupported in terms of the hows and whys of various aspects of their job – we fumble through the first few years. So I tried to create a slide deck with about 2hrs worth of content trying to speak to people who were in, or about to embark on, the start of a UK lecturing career. I will skip the ethnographic journey, but suffice to say this initial ‘catch-all’ workshop has since evolved into distinct 3.5hr workshops for PhD students/postdocs and for lecturers in their first few years in post.
First, I had to determine what the rules are at my university for getting paid from other places (I have a full time contract). Handily, I have some colleagues who do consultancy work based on their research expertise (I have yet to find someone who wants to pay me to teach them about the perception of how heavy lifted objects feel), who could point me in the right direction. My university has a mechanism to act as a shop front for academics who want to engage in consultancy, taking a slice of the fee and paying directly into ones pay packet as extra salary. Almost all universities have such a scheme to encourage impact. But (slightly unusually), my university allows academics to engage in a limited amount of consultancy (10 days FTE) without engaging these mechanisms. So that was fine – no internal drama – just a form to fill out every year to declare the work I had done.
Initially, I decided it would be sensible to set up a limited company to facilitate payments from universities. Ultimately, other than forcing me to give this new enterprise a name (ECRtraining), this step was a waste of time/energy/money. Universities often pay external consultants as humans, and there’s a ton of weird and wonderful ways that this happens (I am on the payroll at several universities now, which is a fun tax headache). There are tax benefits for expenses claims (e.g., travel costs, or if I needed to buy a computer for this work), but as these aren’t relevant for me I hadn’t used my ltd company once in a dozen workshops over a year, so closed it down. I suspect this narrative might be particular to the work I do and the expenses I may claim, but if you are hoping to sell your wares to a university audience as consultancy, you probably don’t need to engage with any of these logistics.
First big challenge is figuring out how much I should charge for a workshop. It’s all well and good doing things for free, but charging a fee for a service really does focus the mind on making sure that the content is good (or at least it should – I’ve endured enough awful training from external consultants to know this certainly isn’t always the case). I asked around some of the people at my institution who were involved in staff training to ask their advice – they suggested £1000 for a full day or £500 for a half day, and anything over an hour could be billed as a half day. Since that initial conversation, I’ve seen a ton of variance in these numbers. Another suggestion I received was putting the ball in their court, and asking how much they wanted to pay me. I tried this once, and got a range which allowed me to settle on £400 for a half day workshop, + travel/accommodation costs if in person, which let me balance out the ‘its worth the travel drama’ narrative with the ‘vast imposter syndrome who am I to give anyone career advice’ narrative.
I have some reflections on this early pricing strategy. First, stating the workshop is a half day is too vague to mean anything. My first ‘job’ lasted for a ~2.5hrs and they clearly (not unreasonably) expected a longer session and paid me less than my requested fee as a result. Now I make it very clear that I run a 3.5hr workshop in person, and a 3hr workshop online. Second, £400 which is taxed at 40% (because I already earn pretty good money as an associate professor) wasn’t really worth the time lost on a long train (or plane!) journey. I considered a tiered pricing structure based on how inconvenient I would find the journey, but was told by a good friend that this was a daft idea and that I should just charge everyone the same price that I would charge the most inconveniently-located university. I was then told during a workshop by a senior professor who was in attendance that I should at least double what I was charging. I chuckled at that notion, but did raise my price to £600. Then eventually £800 for in person (£400 online). Interestingly, raising the price didn’t affect the uptake, nor have places been bothered about engaging in price negotiations (I always leave this as an option). Places either have funds to train people, or they don’t. If they don’t, and it will cause me minimal drama, I will do the workshop for free, because ultimately I enjoy doing them and still find the idea of being paid for stuff I enjoy a bit icky. Your pricing journey will of course be different, based on the richness of your market, the ‘rarity’ of what you are selling, and your ostensive credibility in delivering that content (if you are reading this blog, you could run the same kind of workshop I do, and this intuition leads to budget holders occasionally asking ‘why can’t one of our own people do this for free internally?’. But we all know the answer to that one…). My blog is the only credibility I have in this area, but so far its been enough.
Which leads nicely onto branding and advertising. For my first workshop, I was directly approached by a head of department who held a budget and was keen for me to run this without having to see permission from above. My second workshop, however, was an ECR who had a sense that a workshop would be a good idea for their department, but needed to convince the central budget holders – they helped me develop a compelling pitch in the form of an abstract (used to advertise) and longer-form narrative around why it would be good to get me to provide this training. I also made a website (basically just a page on my blog), which is quite rudimentary but does the job (maybe? I suspect that I could do this aspect a lot better – generally consultants have a pretty impressive online presence). I had a enough of a social media presence that advertising on Twitter and/or word of mouth was fine (although since I’m not a paid-up verified member of X, my social media voice has been markedly quietened without my consent). I’ve directly approached departments and doctoral training centres local to me, which have yielded a few workshop requests. But no cohesive advertising strategies – I would clearly need to up my game in that regard if I wanted this part of my life to become a larger part of my financial world.
A few other random thoughts that I couldn’t be bothered to structure properly.
- Travel is still hard. Time away from the family is hard. Balancing the time-sensitive aspects of my day job while running workshops is hard. I need to take some greater control over arranging these workshops to happen in days that work better for me and my family if this is to be a sustainable part of my life. Obviously a bit of a challenge to reconcile with the ‘you are being paid’ balance of power, but I’m trying to work to reframe this narrative as ‘I am providing a service’. I’d love to ramp up the online aspect of this training, as it is easy for me and I find it gets really good engagement in the chat. But online training is still very divisive, with some people really hating the idea.
- The idea of making people listen to me talk for HOURS is kind of ghastly, but rather less ghastly than making people engage in stupid activities/idea generation nonsense in breakout rooms that they have to feed back to the group. I’ve settled on the idea that facilitated Q&A is what breaks things up a bit from the audience for listening to relentless Gavin. Usually I’m hosted by someone who I know well enough to feel confident that they will chirp up if I ask for someone else’s opinion on a topic. But it’s never hard to get questions or vocal experiences out of a group of academics. I’ve never once finished before my scheduled end time.
- If have to you cancel a normal research seminar due to illness or delayed trains then it’s embarrassing but ultimately not a big deal. If you cancel a paid gig, it feels a lot different. As I’ve recently found out, my workshop works quite well hybrid with me as a big face on a screen, but generally I try to make sure I arrive the night before a morning workshop to minimize the possibility of interruptions (which, of course, feeds into the narrative of the point above). I suspect a hardened consultant spends as little time and mental energy as possible worrying about such issues.
- To get paid, you usually need to create an invoice, which requires a number from a purchase order (it’s fun to be on the reverse of this process, like I’m a bit of equipment being purchased). But sometimes it is completely different. All universities have different mechanisms/forms/requirements. I’ve enjoyed pushing back against ones which seem unreasonable (e.g., requesting copies of bank statements) and institutions who claim they prefer me to book travel and accommodation and claim it back (I bet you prefer it, but I certainly don’t). As a paid consultant, I have felt more empowered in taking a stand about getting things done the way I want them to than I ever have as an academic. It’s pretty rare that I have to show my passport/right to work documentation – national insurance number and bank details seem to suffice. There’s a ton of templates online for invoice creation.
- Capturing feedback through surveys is a pretty key part to getting some external validation and figuring out if the balance of stuff is right. I also now tend to ask before workshops if there are any issues which they’d particularly like me to focus on, and will usually add a slide or two before giving a new workshop. Of course, I’m not nearly so disciplined about removing content, which means I tend to overrun…
- Doing workshops is fun. But still very much a side thing. I can’t imagine reducing my university contract with the notion of supplementing my income back up to 1.0FTE (the pressure to generate the business, for one, would be horrifying). But other models do make money more efficiently do exist in this sector. I’ve been told the key to making real money is creating a resource that you create once and many people pay for. I will eventually create some video resources to go alongside the paid workshops, which will presumably make me feel justified in charging more money, or a ‘per person’ fee alongside some kind of extended mentorship (a certain grant writing consultant evidently makes enough money doing this to work as a consultant full time from their living room. But for now I quite like my academic job so won’t be pursuing this narrative too aggressively at the moment. Perhaps some other event will force my hand into really investing in this part of my life. How many sentences am I allowed in a single set of parenthesis?).
- It’s been suggested that I can diversify my income stream by doing workshops for individuals, rather than institutions, through ad hoc workshops managed though Eventbrite pages. This seems viable, because my workshops are very scalable and work well with large numbers. But I do have (ethical/moral/practical) concerns about making individuals pay for this workshop, rather than a university which has a duty to train and support staff and students, and will easily recoup the money I charge by incorporating my training into their REF narratives. Maybe. This is what I tell myself anyway. Dunno how I would be able to settle on a price for running workshops around individual sign up. Perhaps some kind of ‘pay what you want’ approach, although I suspect my ego would not be able to take it. I’d have no trouble charging individuals who wanted longer-term career counselling (or something of that ilk), and I enjoy that aspect of mentorship a lot, so might try to figure out a model that works in that regard).
- I’ve also done various versions of the workshop at my home institution for free, which I see as a suitable payback for my university’s flexibility in allowing me to pursue this slice of my career narrative. Interestingly, I’ve also been paid by a different department in my own university to run a workshop (during the marking boycott), despite assuming that there wouldn’t be a mechanism for such payments to be made. If mine has such a mechanism, yours probably will too, which is worth bearing in mind when you say ‘yes’ to extra internal work…
- This whole enterprise has really made me reflect on what I am. If more people have read your blog than your research papers, should I still be considering myself as a researcher? Thankfully I’m rarely forced to articulate what I am in this way, so these thoughts stay locked away in my head. New REF rules and the growing popularity of the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers means that it’s a good time to be involved in research culture and ECR training. The degree to which these narratives are used to further my own career (promotion applications etc) and my department/university’s research culture narratives (REF statements, DTC provisions) are an interesting point of future overlap (and tension?) between my two worlds.
Obviously this is very much a ‘your mileage may vary’ kind of post, so I’d love to hear how about other experiences of setting up and running consultancy – please use the comment section!
Making it as an early career academic 