Three Big Roman Public Health Consulting Wins in 2024

Hand holding a sparkler, to celebrate new years or other special occassion.

Happy December! It’s hard to believe, but it’s time for the last RPH blog for 2024.

As I’m reflecting and planning for 2025, I’ve made note of three big wins for my business in the past year:

(1) Launching Retainer Contracts

Up to this point, I have been working exclusively with project-based pricing for my hands-on instructional design projects. In other words, my client contracts charged a fixed price for a specific list of deliverables (e.g., needs analysis report, course design document, etc.)

This year, I introduced retainer contracts as another option for client projects. Here, clients pay a fixed rate up front every month to RPH for a certain amount of work to be carried out. This work can be related to a recurring deliverable or a fixed number of hours protected on our consulting schedule.

Clients have been very happy with the new option as retainers offer a variety of benefits including project flexibility, financial predictability, priority access to our time/expertise, and opportunities for long-term relationships and support.

You can visit our November blog post for details on project vs. retainer-based services and which may be right for you!

(2) Hiring More Subcontractors

This year, I took on two larger instructional design projects, which enabled me to hire several public health consulting colleagues as my subcontractors! This was fun and beneficial in a variety of ways:

  • My clients had access to a broader range of expertise and RPH was able to execute a larger scope project for them.

  • I had wonderful teammates to work with. As someone who typically takes on solo projects, it was great to have my consulting colleagues on board to bounce ideas and offer a second set of eyes, and I learned a lot from watching them work in their areas of expertise.

  • I feel really good knowing that RPH is providing income and work opportunities to fellow consultants.

(3) Hiring a Project Coordinator

In the summer of 2024, I hired RPH’s first project coordinator. I was overwhelmed with the amount of interest and high-quality candidates (I received 150 applications in the first 48 hours!)

Thankfully, I found a wonderful coordinator to join the RPH team. In addition to the joy of having a teammate to offer insight and support, she’s taken over leadership to streamline our operations, especially for on and offboarding clients.

When you are a solo consultant, it can be challenging to find time to work on the back end and business systems because you are so busy with business development and client work. So, having a coordinator who can dedicate time to optimizing RPH operations and systems has been a great benefit!

 

I’d Love To Hear From You!

  • What’s a big win that you had in 2024?