[.uk] The Consultant's Quick Start Guide: An Action Plan for ... (ISBN 0787956678)

Waste of Time and Money:
This book is awful...a complete waste of time for anyone with half a brain...if you only have half a brain, feel free to buy it. It's overly simplistic, obvious, insultingly simple and unlikely to help a budding consultant make a dime. If you want REAL advise, pick up any of Alan Weiss's books.

Relatively worthless:
Although Biech makes a number of good points in her text here, the vast majority of it can be chocked up to common sense. The workbook fill-in forms are nice if you're the sort of person that is so unorganized that you need your hand held at every step, but in all honesty if you fall into that category you probably shouldn't be thinking about a consulting career in the first place. Unfortunately I feel like their primary purpose is just to take up space, and make the book feel longer and more useful than it really is. If you boil this "quick start guide" down to the few pages that are actually worthwhile, you wouldn't even have enough pages to fill a pamphlet. Look elsewhere.

Simple - Bordering Simplistic:
Too simple, bordering simplistic. I would have hoped for some deeper advice addressed to people who are assumed to be more sophisticated and lettered than the average person.

I can't believe I paid for this "book":
This is my first review of any Amazon purchase. This book is pre-basic. If you have no working knowledge of how even fundamental business is operated (such as opening up a checking account for business expenses), then you have no basis skill set to become a consultant...at least, not one that anyone will take seriously. This book could be wrapped up into one small magazine article in the back section of Glamour magazine.

Great Book for New Consultants:
Elaine Biech's book is a terrific step-by-step manual for new consultants. This is actually more of a workbook than a book. You can read the entire thing in about three hours. This book is filled with checklists, forms, and questionnaires for starting a consulting business. The topics range from "Why Consulting?" and "Planning Your Consulting Future", to "Finding Clients", "Marketing", and "Surviving the First Year". Well-written and very thorough, this is an excellent book for those who are thinking about making the leap from full-time employee to independent consultant. I highly recommend it. Mitch Paioff, Author, Getting Started as an Independent Computer Consultant Getting Started as an Independent Computer Consultant