Chapter 12
Consulting for Seniors: Having It Your Way
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Thomas R. Beattie* Independent Consultant, 2648 Angell Avenue, San Diego, California 92122-2103 *E-mail:
[email protected] Consulting can provide professional satisfaction and some personal income for senior/retired chemists. The author reviews, based on his own consulting experiences, the many factors that lead to a successful consulting business using accumulated personal knowledge and experience. Consulting may not work for everyone. Although it is difficult to do full-time, there are many avenues to explore in looking for part-time consulting. If you try it, it can be invigorating and stimulating. If you try it and it is not working well for you, get rid of it quickly and find other things to enjoy.
Introduction An individual’s ideas about “consulting”, like ideas about “motherhood” or “government”, are very much dependent on that person’s background, outlook and experiences. Based on his own consulting experiences, the author has found consulting may represent an opportunity worth developing. Now, almost anybody can be a consultant. I have met young ones (fresh out of school without a job and therefore a “consultant”), a recently-let-go computational chemist who decides to work part time and equal his former income, and, among others, an unemployed chemist who anticipates keeping a roster of ~20 companies for consulting. Indeed, for $50 one can buy 500 business cards and become a consultant. Being a SUCCESSFUL consultant requires some attributes which make it an ideal choice for senior chemists to consider. Resourcefulness and wanting to make things happen; having had a long-term, varied, successful career; being excited by a professional challenge rather than money; flexibility and adaptability; and being professionally current are all attributes leading to success as a consultant. © 2014 American Chemical Society
Cheng et al.; Careers, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
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Avenues To Explore For example, a chemist in retirement from a career in a single big pharma company probably has multiple areas of expertise: synthesis, program development, working at the interface of chemistry and biology, data management, computational chemistry and patent crafting are some. Also, that person probably has people management and functional management skills and perhaps even project management and commercialization and marketing skills. More the norm these days perhaps, a chemist with a working career in several different companies can use the varied experiences from how different companies handle issues and problems to advantage in consulting. All of these skills are useful in big pharma, biotech and academia, although the operating styles and needs of each are very different. The trick, of course, is to find a niche which is in need of the skills you possess. Big pharma, in a period of rapid change for at least the last decade, may not be a current fertile hunting ground for consultant spots. Most often they are rich in talented chemists and basically have been in static or retrenchment mode. Clearly they have lots of experts, perhaps too many in the corporate view. Biotech is diverse in its needs because the diversity of biotechs in number of people and size of financial assets is so large. Ranging in size from one to thousands of people and assets from almost no money to billions, they offer a huge opportunity for chemists to connect in helpful and meaningful ways. A company of a handful (or fewer) certainly does not contain all the knowledge and skills needed to find and move along a drug candidate or a medical device. Since there are so many, it is difficult to know who is in need of the skill set you possess. Academia offers different kinds of opportunities. The chance to fulfill a wish to teach, the opportunity to provide support within a research group, and the mentoring of developing young scientists are all likely functions for participation of senior chemists. Thinking further afield, I can suggest looking into law firms, which may need technical assistance with patent applications and protection or with expert witnessing. With the rise of philanthropy in support of research, angel investors, philanthropic foundations and venture capitalist groups each may have need of experienced senior chemists. While the range of possible opportunities is large, the problem of connecting with the right situation is large as well. However, once the connection is made and consulting is underway, the rewards can be satisfying. In my own situation, I have had consulting assignments in most of the areas mentioned above, and one aspect very satisfying to me has been the diversity of the things I was asked to do.
Some Differences Consulting is different from full-time employment in that it is usually not full time. That encompasses many differences. Compensation is a major one. Your compensation is not set – you negotiate it and it usually doesn’t come regularly every second Friday. It may be based on per hour or per task or it may be zero, if you agree. If you are receiving social security benefits, your consultant income 136 Cheng et al.; Careers, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
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may affect your monthly benefit payment, depending on your age. Payment may not be timely. No taxes are usually withheld, possibly making it necessary for you to file quarterly estimated tax payments. A great benefit: since it qualifies as “earned income” you may have the opportunity to use some/all of your compensation for making Roth IRA contributions. If you are a joint income tax filer, your joint partner can be included in your Roth contribution calculations, thus possibly doubling what you invest together. While the above paragraph focuses on compensation, it probably should not be the major motivation in deciding to consult. It is difficult to match a full-time position annual salary, and to do so you will probably need to work just as hard and long as if you were full-time employed. If that is your goal, you might just as well work full-time. The consulting I have in mind (“Having it your way”) allows for flexibility and adaptability – you are doing it on your terms. It incorporates fitting the consulting tasks to your current/retired life style. You control the timing - do you want long or short term assignments, how intensely do you want to work, do you want part or full days of work, do you want to block out time for travel and periods of not consulting? If you consult locally, it may be possible to do it at times so as to avoid rush hour traffic. Also, depending on the work type, work can often be done at home, thus avoiding travel completely. In contrast, assignments out of town may afford the opportunity to include personal time before or after consulting visits. You save on airfare, which the client is paying, and sometimes you get to visit some interesting and delightful places.
How To Start? No surprise here – networking and personal referrals. Networking is how I and most others get consulting assignments. I chose to keep things simple, so I don’t advertise. If I receive an inquiry from someone to whom my name has been given about providing help, I have already been at least partially validated through the professional referral. That is critically important. If you do want to reach out for business, there are many avenues to explore. Your local ACS section and other professional groups have programs that you can attend and gain visibility. The ACS website, www.acs.org, has guidance to get you started. Remember, making the connection is difficult and requires diligence, patience and a bit of luck.
Some Pros and Cons Don’t get me wrong, I like money too. But I find the best reason for seniors to consult is the professional challenge: the opportunity to make an impact, the respect you acquire when you make a suggestion no one else thought of, and 137 Cheng et al.; Careers, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
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the chance to prevent someone from going down a pathway you know to be unproductive. You will be meeting new faces and can be buoyed by their intensity and enthusiasm. I especially enjoy the opportunity to have an impact on younger scientists and to watch them grow. Working with younger scientists is a good way to keep yourself feeling young. There are some downsides, of course. You should be providing an unbiased opinion and sometimes your clients won’t appreciate what you are telling them. That situation can be tough to take and not easily reconcilable. Also, things change and sometimes urgency pops up in unanticipated ways. A deadline gets moved up, requiring more immediate work time and effort than you anticipated. Project themes and goals may change in ways inconvenient for you. A hurried call asking you to drop everything and come now sometimes happens too. “I need the answer now” happens in consulting just as in full-time employment. And, in working with multiple clients, somehow they often all seem to need the final product of your effort at the same time.
Some Examples In my 14 years of consulting I have worked on a wide variety of projects. Some were very specific and of limited duration: helping a small company vice president (with a biological background) hire a new director of chemistry in which my recruiting, resume reading, and interviewing skills were important; visiting several different small companies and passing judgment on which compounds looked most promising to pursue and which compounds might be problematic to follow up; evaluating an issued patent and providing guidance to attorneys on exactly what the patent meant in the time frame of 20 years ago. Some were much longer term: helping in a very successful chemistry tools company to spin off a chemistry department into a sister company. In this case the initial contract was for “up to 40 hr. weekly for up to 6 months duration”, which at the time sounded very much to me like full-time employment. However, I found the people, the challenge of getting it right, the chance to create a new organization, etc. so invigorating that I transitioned into stages of helping the architects design new lab space, preparing the labs for move-in, staffing the new lab space with newly hired chemists, managing the operation of the labs, participating in business development to find new customers, etc. that the “up to 6 months” morphed into almost 2½ years of almost full-time work. And I let it happen that way because I was enjoying it so much! And then there were also jobs of intermediate duration: participating in weekly chemistry meetings and biweekly project team meetings at a small anti-cancer company over a period of ~1 year; a 3 month tour-de-force of working on surveying the patent literature in a company which already had launched a product and was evaluating related research areas to see which looked promising for entry; a nine month stint in a company in which I did all kinds of chemistry things that the primarily analytical chemistry staff was not equipped to do. For a 138
Cheng et al.; Careers, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on December 25, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): September 4, 2014 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2014-1169.ch012
major pharma company I worked off and on with 3 separate divisions doing third party due diligence inquiries with academics and small companies. And there were other assignments too. Hopefully, the examples above have made my point. You can use your skills and knowledge base to jump in where needed and have an enjoyable experience while providing much-needed help. One sort of opportunity I haven’t chosen to accept: there are many individual entrepreneurs and very small (1-5 people) companies where the operating funds are just not yet available. Opportunities abound to join and work for the promise if things go as we hope, then we will have the money to pay. I did that once, and did not find it satisfying.
Business Issues If you consult, you are a businessperson running a small company. Your locale may require a business license. You need to decide whether to operate as a sole proprietorship or incorporate as a company. Do you plan to have a home office? Are you planning to advertise your availability to consult? You will pay taxes on your business income. For social security purposes you are an employer and an employee, so you pay double – generally twice the rate you paid as a full-time employee in someone else’s company. You may wish to have insurance coverage. You may need legal help with some of these issues. I want to stress again that for most chemists consulting should not be looked upon as an alternative to full-time employment. As I have found, it’s an up and down thing – sometimes you are busy and other times you are not. Further, my interests have evolved over time as to how much I chose to do with consulting. For me, that is the fun of it – I am having it my way. In summary, consulting may/may not work for you. It is difficult to do fulltime, but there are many avenues to explore in looking for part-time consulting. If you try it, it can be invigorating and stimulating. If you try it and it is not working well for you, get rid of it quickly and find other things to enjoy.
139 Cheng et al.; Careers, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
