By Eric Gershon

Soon after former history professor George Bates opened Bates and Associates, a one-man consulting practice in Germantown, MD, he realized that he would have to extend his services to clients outside higher education.

"My focus on higher education wasn't going to support me," he said in a February 1999 interview. "I knew I had to expand."

Bates was still new to consulting in 1995, however, and didn't know many people in the business who could advise him. To meet other consultants and to educate himself, he joined three professional associations, including the New York-based Institute of Management Consultants (IMC). Now, five years later, he's on the executive board of IMC's Washington, D.C., chapter. Bates says he sought a leadership position because regular participation had helped him to expand his business.

"To put it crassly," he said, "when you're consulting, you're very careful about how you spend your time, because there has to be a payoff." Bates' payoff has been a string of contracts with arts and cultural organizations and religious and charitable foundations, a natural extension, he says, of his work with universities.

For years, Bates and many independent professionals have known that membership in professional associations can lead to new business, primarily through informal networking. More recently, associations have begun to provide members with an increasing variety of benefits, ranging from the essential (affordable health insurance plans) to the useful (referral services) to the trivial (discounts on newsstand magazine subscriptions). Nonetheless, leaders of the very same associations insist that the immediate, practical benefits aren't the reason to join.

"Too many associations put too much emphasis on the tangible," says IMC Chairman Ed Stone, principal of The Dallas Marketing Group in Dallas, TX. "I get a 2% discount on Time Magazine, I get a discount on a car rental. Fine. But I believe that the intangibles are the most important thing."

Chief among the intangible benefits IMC offers, Stone says, is credibility in the marketplace through certification.

In order to become a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) through IMC, members must have at least three years' full-time consulting experience, devote 60% or more of their time to consulting, have a Bachelor's degree or equivalent training, present summaries of previous assignments, and pass both an ethics exam and an interview with senior CMCs. Certification by an established association, IMC leaders assert, distinguishes a dedicated consultant from the thousands of other Americans who identify themselves as "consultants".

"Consulting is such a nebulous term," says Steve Savia, Stone's predecessor as IMC's chairman. "Anyone can go to the local Kinko's and print some business cards and call himself a consultant. That's why we view certification as so important. You demonstrate within the context of your peers that you are an expert and know what you're doing."

All IMC members agree in writing to uphold an ethics code whether they have been certified or not. The code stipulates that members exercise "self-discipline above and beyond the requirements of law," and that they will "safeguard confidential information, render impartial, independent advice, accept only those client engagements they are qualified to perform, agree with the client in advance on the basis for professional charges [and] develop realistic and practical solutions to client problems."

"When a [potential] client is looking at comparable proposals and yours says 'I'm an IMC member and this is our code of ethics,' it can certainly swing him in your favor," says Savia.

Within an association itself, the exchange of ideas and perspectives often has the most immediate effect on a member's work. Stone describes a common predicament of the solo professional: "You leave corporate America, where you're working with five people or 25, where you can walk into your neighbor's office and ask him a question or bounce an idea off him," he says. "And then you go to work for yourself. Whom do you ask then?" Like everyone else, independent consultants need advice; associations help them to get it. "We believe 100% in being in business for yourself," says Saralyn Collins of the International Guild of Professional Consultants (IGPC), "but not by yourself."

"When members come to meetings, they see that they have a unique perspective,'" says IMC spokeswoman Lisa Burdige. "Sometimes you don't realize that you have something to market until you start talking with other people in the business."

Eric Gershon is Assistant Editor of 1099. In general, he dislikes his boss's excessive use of semicolons; he also gets annoyed by promiscuous use of exclamation marks! He considers them unsophisticated! So his boss put this comment in here!! Aren't you glad you're boss-free and don't have to put up with this kind of thing!!!!

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