The #1 Money-Making Tool (free) of a 15-year Consultant

When upgrading my iphone recently I started skimming through the notes on my phone, and I noticed something that had never occurred to me before, so I wanted to share it.

I have been consultant for over 15 years, working with hundreds of companies, government agencies, non-profit organizations, professionals and musicians. Since I specialize in various aspects of IT (software development, databases, Business Intelligence, Annalytics, CRM), I have watched the massive evolution of technology in that time, and I have purchased, used, and thrown away hundreds of tools, gadgets, and even full-blown methodologies.

But as I looked through only about a year's worth of notes on my phone, it occurred to me there is one tool that I have used consistently for all of those years, and it is responsible for almost every penny I have made.

That tool is the "Checklist". The notes in my iphone are full of checklists, or the beginnings of future checklists. And that does not include the checklists I have in Evernote, Word, Excel and MindManager. As a consultant, writer, developer and marketer, almost everything I do starts with a checklist. And it seems to me that those checklists are what differentiate me from most of the people I work with who just bounce from one idea or problem to another.

Here are just a few ways that checklists have made me money:

1) Audits - when meeting with a new client, my favorite starting point is to go through a checklist and look for the biggest gaps and pinpoint the best places to start working.

2) Menus of services - when working with clients, I have checklists I can go through with them to explain the optional services and benefits I can provide so that I can create a price quote based on what they want.

3) Problem-solving - by building checklists around the common areas that I see problems, I am able to learn from the past mistakes that I and others have made in order to quickly narrow down a problem and begin the search for a solution.

4) Project Plans - By adding prioritization, time estimated and dependencies, I quickly turn a checklist into a full blown implementation plan.

5) Product development - software products can best be built by listing and prioritizing a checklist of features, and then after the first release, merging in a list of bugs that need to be fixed. This checklist becomes your product roadmap.

6) Books and articles - most of the time, my writing begins with a list ideas I feel like are most important to cover.

7) Outsourcing, delegating, automating - before I can hand off work to others or to a software tool, I create a detailed checklist of what needs to be done and the steps for how it should be done.

I know I am just scratching the surface here, so how do the rest of you use checklists?

--Tom