There would be very few environmental consulting companies that could operate with a nationwide footprint if it weren’t for freelance environmental consultants. If those companies did exist, they would be enormous and every expensive. It’s almost impossible to staff the entire country with offices and consultants. Having a network of resources you can call helps small companies to punch above their weight. It drives down costs for clients and it helps individuals who want to exit the corporate grind to spool up their own companies.
Freelance Environmental Consultants provide talent on tap to grow your consulting business.
When you’re first starting out in business you need to decide between doing a project and getting the next project. It’s a difficult balancing act and it generally means really long hours put into moving your business forward. Offloading some of the work to good report writers or field people allows an entrepreneur to be flexible with time and sell more projects without adding more people to the payroll. The freelance environmental consultants get what they are looking for from the relationship which is more work, but on their own terms.
Networking with other Freelance Environmental Consultants increases business development as friends trade difficult projects with you.
Everyone has their specialty. For our part, we can do Phase 1 ESAs and Phase II ESAs all day long but we really don’t want to do Phase II ESAs outside a reasonable radius around our headquarters. We all know, Phase II ESAs are more difficult and require attention to detail over time. Things can go wrong. Weather problems or contractor problems happen. If we had to fly to our Phase II ESA projects we would not only have increased travel costs but we’d run the risk of blowing the budget if a snowstorm or rain storm wrecked the schedule. Believe me, it’s happened to us before. So our policy is to offload our Phase II ESA projects on our friends as a “thank you” for being there for us for site visits for Phase I ESAs.
We believe our partners do a better job than we can at distance. If things go wrong they can recover better than we can. It’s not even worth project managing them at distance. Our model is not much different than how FTD flowers delivers flower arrangements across the country.
Freelance Environmental Consultants keep us from flying. That means more billable hours and fatter margins.
Let’s think about the costs associated with flying to a Phase I ESA project. Flight, Food, Parking, Hotel, Rental Car or Taxi. What you’re probably not thinking about is the time it takes to get to the airport, fly to the location and fly home. Aside from being a grind and a LOT to ask of any employee you might have, if you’ve ever done it, you know it’s really hard to write a Phase I ESA report while in the airport or on a plane. We flew extensively for our first 4 years of business. All our employees were A-List preferred. It was difficult. Now, we hire freelancers across the country. They charge substantially less than the direct costs of flying and we have all our time back to be in the office, cranking out reports.
Freelance Environmental Consultants; Talent Where You Need It
Cultivating relationships and getting to know the right people across the country is difficult. We spent years putting together a list of people who were qualified to do environmental site assessments for us. We cull the list all the time when we have bad experiences with our contractors. We’d like to help small environmental consulting companies to punch above their weight so we created our ArcGIS map for the industry to use to procure the talent you need, where you need it.
Just click on the link and get a username and password to the map.
