From Corporate HR Leader To Independent Compensation Consultant – with Scott Trumpolt from Trumpolt Compensation Design Solutions

In this episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Scott Trumpolt, a Certified Global Remuneration Professional (G.R.P.) with over 30 years of experience, talk about Scott’s journey from HR leader to independent consultant, the evolving landscape of pay transparency, and how compensation strategies are changing to drive better employee engagement.

With more than 13 years leading his own consulting firm, Scott specializes in Compensation Management, Total Rewards Strategies, and Sales Compensation. Under his leadership, Trumpolt Compensation Design Solutions (TCDS) has earned an A+ accreditation from the Better Business Bureau of Southeast Florida and the Caribbean, reflecting a strong commitment to quality and client service.

Scott’s career includes 18 years in corporate HR roles across the United States and Germany, followed by extensive consulting work spanning North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. He has partnered with organizations in industries such as Aviation, Healthcare, and Technology, designing tailored compensation structures, incentive programs, and career frameworks that align with diverse business goals and cultures.

Through TCDS, Scott helps organizations of all sizes—from emerging companies to large enterprises—develop effective total rewards strategies that attract, retain, and motivate talent.

He is also the author of The Defragmented Consultant: A Practical Guide to Building a High-Impact Independent Practice, a disciplined, experience-driven guide for professionals transitioning from corporate leadership to independent consulting.

Drawing on decades of global experience, the book outlines a structured roadmap for refining expertise into clear, market-ready value. It introduces the concept of “defragmentation”—organizing and sharpening accumulated professional experience to increase precision, speed, and impact.

Through both his consulting work and writing, Scott helps professionals and organizations move beyond experience alone, focusing instead on strategic clarity, effective positioning, and long-term value creation.

You’ll hear practical strategies for pricing consulting services, packaging consulting offers, and winning corporate contracts. Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How to price your consulting services for both short-term and long-term client value.
• Key tactics for structuring project milestones and communicating pricing transparency.
• Scott’s journey from in-house HR to global compensation consultant and published author.

• Company’s website: www.hrcompensationconsulting.com
• Scott’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/scott-trumpolt-m-a-g-r-p-257a6b317

Scroll down for the audio version and the transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

Interview – From Corporate HR Leader To Independent Compensation Consultant – with Scott Trumpolt

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

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Episode Transcript

Episode 310: From Corporate HR Leader To Independent Compensation Consultant – with Scott Trumpolt

Ben [00:00:27]:
Hello and welcome back to the show. Great to have you along today and I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Scott Trumpolt. Scott is the founder, he is the managing director and principal consultant of his company Trumpolt Compensation Design Solutions. That’s TCDS, which as the name suggests, Scott and the business is an employee compensation planning design consultant that works with companies and organizations to most effectively guide the financial investment that they make in their employees on via market based pay solutions such as pay structures, incentive designs, career job evaluation architectures and others. And he’s got an 18 year background in corporate HR leadership roles across the US and Germany, followed by over a decade of consulting across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Caribbean. I’m really looking forward to getting to this and also to learn about his book. So Scott, thank you very much for joining me today.

Scott Trumpolt [00:01:21]:
Thank you so much for having me on, Ben. I really appreciated the opportunity to address your audience. I feel very grateful. Thank you.

Ben [00:01:29]:
Yeah, thank you. And where are you based today? Where are you calling from?

Scott Trumpolt [00:01:33]:
I am from Florida, just a little bit outside of Fort Lauderdale. So that’s my home base of operations. Although I do have plenty of my clients in the South Florida area. I’ve really been fortunate in that I’ve been able to, as you alluded, to work on projects with clients all over the world, really?

Ben [00:01:49]:
I always like to joke that employment law change is always good for HR consulting work. There’s always something new coming along and normally it’s California that leads the way in that place. But Florida does all right for legislative changes and updates, right?

Scott Trumpolt [00:02:01]:
We’re not as aggressive as some other states. I think the biggest thing in compensation right now is the pay transparency laws, which are not just a US phenomenon, might be handled a little bit differently in European countries, but certainly there is a push by younger generations in the workplace to have greater transparency. So that has led to the adoption in the US at least in some states and it’s a growing number but in some states to post pay ranges. But it’s a double edged sword because on the one hand it’s great in the sense that it brings greater awareness of the fact that employees really need to make sure that their internal house is in order, in terms of pay equity and to make sure that employees and their jobs are being paid appropriately.

From the employee perspective, what they’re provided is a very broad range. And I think that invites more questions than it does answers. And this leads into the whole idea of employee engagement, how employee engagement from a compensation perspective can be a turnoff in the sense that compensation has historically been in a black box, very much in the shadow.

So if you move it into the light, which I believe is a good thing, you need to be able to have resources for managers to answer the kind of questions that employees are going to have, because again, they’re just posting a range and then the next question from the employee, well, how much am I worth within that range? And so this has really tipped off the idea of compensation literally can be a tool for employee engagement. So it’s an exciting new development for me. It’s something that my clients are dealing with and I’m helping them with in various ways to do that.

Ben [00:04:00]:
You’re absolutely right. It’s probably a thing that’s not really covered much or discussed much is that engagement and the communication side of things. There’s all the number crunching going on behind the scenes. But then, as you say, the manager then has to have that communication and everyone thinks of themselves and compares them to their peers and who else is in my team and I wonder where they are, Are they further up or below on the comp ratios or whatever it may be. And if you don’t back up your managers, then that is a recipe for strife or angst or whatever else it may be.

Scott Trumpolt [00:04:27]:
It’s awkward for the employee and it’s awkward for the manager to talk about pay. And in the few instances that they do have a chance to talk about their pay. For example, most companies in the United States and elsewhere have an annual performance review. And usually if you’ve done a solid job or a great job, you can expect some type of a merit pay increase. Companies have budgets to do the merit increase. And sometimes depending upon the company and the organizational mindset, the work culture, the top performer may get the same thing as an average performer. Then there’s also the issue where some employees might be limited in terms of their pay increase because they’re already paid above their market value for that current job. And what often happens is the manager will say, well, the reason you’ve got just a standard increases, you’re a top performer and you’re paid at the top end of your scale.

And that can leave a bad taste in the mouth of the employee saying, hey, I’m doing a great job. The dynamic needs to change and it needs to change from a career development perspective. Instead of saying those kind of things, wouldn’t it be great if a manager says, we’ve got clear evidence that you’re a top performer and you’re top paid against the market for your job. What’s the next step for you? And this is the piece that’s always missing. And then that can open up a conversation that’s much more free flowing, it’s much more expressive, it’s not nearly as awkward because you’re taking pay out of it for a moment and focusing on career development.

Employees also want to know, how do they fit in with the business need? So if we can link business need to career development, obviously career development is going to need more pay. And so it’s not like we’re trying to hide the pay issue, but we’re trying to redefine it in a way that, hey, here’s where you are today. This is a sign to us that you’re ready for the next step. Now do you need to move into another department to make that next step or can you continue to move up in the organization as either an individual contributor or a people leader? But the key thing out of all this is always scenarios, there’s variables, but the key thing is to change the conversation dynamic so it becomes more of an employee engagement response, that it’s not a shutdown. This is the policy, you’re all set, better luck next year to something that is more dynamic and more forward thinking. And so this is one of the things, as I said at the beginning, that I am working with because these issues are not going away.

Let’s say, for example, that there weren’t these laws in some states to follow. If you’ve taken a look out on the web, there are many people out there, ordinary employees, that are literally telling other employees what they make and their struggles with what they make. So it’s out there anyways. And so there is the additional pressure, not just from these laws, but from the fact that employees, the later generations, are much more open about this and see it as their civic duty or whatever to this is what I do, this is how much I get paid.

Things that when I was coming up would never be discussed. And I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, I’m saying it’s just different. And so we need a different response now that these things are Coming together. There’s multiple sources coming together saying that employees want more pay transparency. It doesn’t mean we’re going to reveal what everybody makes in an organization because there are reasons for that. But it does mean that you’re going to have a better idea about what your job gets paid. Because there are also online resources where employees can at least get a rough idea. I use much more sophisticated, more detailed tools to figure out how to pay, but they can at least get a rough idea with free sources out there. So that’s another piece. All of these are convergent towards pay transparency.

Ben [00:08:25]:
And AI as well, that they can go and type a question into a chat GPT or something and tell me all the data on pay scales and things like that. It’ll come back with some pretty accurate stuff.

Scott Trumpolt [00:08:35]:
There’s no avoiding it. Again, it’s coming out of the black box of compensation as it has been now. Again, it’s not going to be completely transparent. But the reason they should do it is not just because, oh, there’s this law and I must comply with it. And human resources, you make sure that we’re in compliance because that’s only a first step. All that does is reinforce that HR is just there to do compliance. They’re not a true strategic partner. But if HR can get more involved in providing guidance to managers on how to handle these kind of conversations which are ultimately going to happen, they become more strategic partner to the business and that is an opportunity that they should welcome.

Ben [00:09:22]:
We’ve covered pay transparency a little bit, but you’ve provided many different compensation, benefit, remuneration services to organizations. What are you seeing? Are the main issues cropping up these days? Where are you called upon to help and to what sort of organizations as well? Are they small companies, big companies, certain industries? What are the main compounds issues that are popping up?

Scott Trumpolt [00:09:42]:
As far as the industries, it’s really all over the place. I usually have seven or eight active clients at a time. One of them is a charter schools, one of them is a cruise line. One of them is an aviation manufacturer. Another one is a software development firm. And they vary in terms of sizes. I have another client that is working very hard to become one of the top 100 companies to work for. There’s a certification accreditation process.

And those are the companies, by the way, that often have the highest employee engagement scores. But if they do have an area that’s low in employee engagement, it may be in the compensation area simply because that is less transparent than some of the other programs that companies have. For example, employers definitely want you to know how to tie into financial investments that they make match a certain part of your pay. So they want you to know about your financial investment options. They want you to know about your health insurance, what’s covered. All that’s very out in the open and very transparent. Might be a little buried in detail sometimes, but as far as compensation know, that’s not the case. So transparency is overriding all of the different compensation areas.

However, from a trend perspective, I see more and more companies that are trying to beef up their variable pay, which has been the case for some time, for example, getting the right sales commission structure for their salespeople, and again, making it more transparent in a way. So when I build sales plans, variable pay plans, I’m really into letting the employees know, especially salespeople, which are very transparent. If you do this level of performance, you are going to get this level of pay. And you might wonder, where does this level of pay come? When I say to you, if you hit your target, I’m going to pay you $8,000, where does that $8,000 come from? That’s the piece that’s missing. And what I want to be able to turn around to them and show them right up front, not at the end, but before they’ve sold a single product or service. If I do 100% performance, I get $8,000. And by the way, $8,000 is the market 50th percentile, meaning that’s the fully competitive level. But if you hit 120% of your target, meaning you’re a really good performer, you’re going to get $12,000. And that $12,000 is at the 75th percentile and so forth. That’s the kind of transparency that I’m talking about.

And when I say that transparency is overriding all the different plans, there’s an example for you of variable pay. So again, that’s what I want to push on my clients as much as possible, given the fact that we also need to always. As a consultant, the first thing I need to do is understand the workplace culture and the business model. What does this company value? What does it want its employees to represent? And that factors into what a plan design looks like. But as I said, on top of all that, once that’s understood, transparency is so important. So literally what I’m doing now is for everything I put together, whether it’s variable pay or base pay or a sales commission or any other kind of a program, how can I make this more transparent? Still protecting the company’s confidentiality, but making it more transparent, which hopefully will lead to more employee engagement.

I think every human resources person, and I’m only part of one aspect, there’s benefits, there’s training, there’s recruiting. I think we all need to look at how we’re doing things and figuring out how we can make it more transparent because that is going to be driving employee engagement up, which drives up business level business performance. And that’s why the business, not human resources, but that’s why the business should be interested in it.

Ben [00:13:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s all connected and they should be aligned. Can I ask you describe seven or eight active clients at any one time? There are a couple of different ways of approaching a new business as a consultant. One is to go down a niche area which has its advantages, obviously it has its disadvantages. And then there’s the be a generalist which again, for anything that’s good and bad or advantages and disadvantages. What was your thinking around that niching and generalist approach?

Scott Trumpolt [00:14:18]:
I had spent my whole career after I got my master’s degree in HR, I had been in another field briefly. And when I got my master’s in HR, I was given an opportunity to switch into this human resources department and try and do a little bit of all the different HR functions. They tested me out and they wanted me to see where my aptitude was. And they quickly found my aptitude was in compensation. But I was very raw and I had a lot to learn. And I spent the next three, almost four years learning from two gentlemen who really knew compensation. And so I started to not only get better at that skill set, but I got to enjoy it more and more. For a lot of people it would be like watching paint dry, but I found it fascinating to see how pay could really change the dynamic of employee performance if it’s done properly and when it’s done not properly. So I learned what not to do and what to do.

And over time I just – except for one deviation where I became a director of human resources for a small startup for about three and a half years – it’s all been about compensation because there is so much to learn and I’m still learning. So when I decided 14 years ago to become as an independent consultant, the main reason why I did it was that I found as the higher and higher I was going up in my function, I was doing more administrative work, more people leadership and getting away from designing compensation solutions, which was what I loved to do. And I had worked with consultants when I was a regular employee, sometimes on big projects. And I saw what they did right and what I thought that they did wrong. And I felt like there was a strong market out there for an individual contributor with low overhead who could offer the same type of solutions, but more personalized and customized at the individual level.

And that’s why I have the clients that I do today. It’s because it’s one stop. They’re just going to be dealing with me. I stand behind everything that I do and I think that makes a big difference. And that’s kept me gainfully employed. But the reason why I went down this path was not necessarily to make more money, but it was to be able to get closer to the only way that I could continue to improve. I felt like I was getting a little stagnant. As a matter of fact, the first thing I did when I became an independent consultant was I took a bunch of exams to get certified in the kind of work that I had been doing for years.

I hadn’t been certified. It was not necessarily a requirement. I learned through experience. That helped me to get back into the swing of getting my skills up to speed and to do things faster and faster, but not sacrifice on quality. To me, it was all about following your passion, whatever that is. However, well you’re getting paid. And I was getting paid well. If you’re not getting that, you’re not getting a fully satisfied work experience and past a certain age.

I think we owe that to ourselves. Yeah, we owe it at any age. But when we’re younger, we’re learning. We’re not as adamant about that. But when you get to be a certain age, you’re like, I’ve got all this knowledge. I want to use it as much as I can. I don’t want it to be 20% of my job. I want it to be 85% of my job and 15% to do the rest.

Ben [00:17:52]:
That’s a great answer. I think people are really going to enjoy that. When it came to going out on your own, how did you price and structure your services? Because especially in compensation and benefits, remuneration, they tend to be big projects, right? We need to go down benchmarking paths or we need executive remuneration. Long term, short term incentives. They can be big projects. Do you build and price them as standalone projects with maybe milestone payments or do you just do hourly rates, daily rates? How did you structure that when you started and then what do you do now?

Scott Trumpolt [00:18:23]:
I started from something that I could grab onto and that was market data. So what I did is I market priced myself as a high level compensation analyst. And then from there I looked at things like, well, I have to pay my own benefits, my taxes, things like that that I have to factor in. So I would plug that into that fee, but then I would start to discount that fee based upon the type of project that I would be involved in.

Some of my clients want jobs that require low brain power. In other words, I have tools at my disposal. They want me to market price some jobs. And so that might be an ongoing retainer relationship where every month they send me jobs. Hey, can you rewrite this job description? Is this job a professional job or is it this kind of a job? How much should I pay this job? And so I would cut my rates down. Then if it was a job that was a project based and would require some real intellectual commitment and things like that, I would price that a little bit differently.

And yes, like you said, a project that may take three months might be broken into multiple payments and I would want to have really good transparency with my client. There would be check in points like, okay, you pay this small amount for me to get started and then we’re going to have a check in after a month and I’m going to deliver this. So that might be set up more as a project. So it is varied, it has continued to vary. There are some clients that have been with me for 10 years. They still find use for me even if it’s on a small scale.

Other clients, it’s do this project and then I’m gone. And then maybe two or three years later they bring me back in. It’s all over the place. And I’m mindful of the fact that a larger firm, which there are, is going to charge them more because they have multiple people working on the project. They have a lot more overhead so they bake that into the cost. So I don’t just say, oh, okay, this is my market value according to this market data and I believe in it. I also share it with my clients so they can see the transparency of my thinking. And then I put in these different factors.

There might be a client that has a small project and I will charge less because I see that they have the potential to have more work in the future. So I’m not about making the one time big hit. Some consultants are and that’s fine. That works for them. They want that one big client and they want to work on that one client all year round. I would rather break things out. I mean the biggest reward for a job well done is to get more work. So I don’t look at things on a one time basis. I look at the potential of the client and that gets factored in as well.

Ben [00:21:16]:
So from a sales and marketing perspective, they talk about the value of a shopping cart in the e-commerce world, how much does a person online spend and put it into their shopping cart and that’s a dollar value, whereas you’re talking more long term, which is lifetime value. And that’s highly recommended approach to take, isn’t it, for any consultant to do work, get more work, maybe offer different services and either continue doing that on a retainer basis or recurring projects, whatever it may be. When you began and then also for nowadays, how did you get your first clients and then how do you get them nowadays?

Scott Trumpolt [00:21:46]:
I’ve been an independent consultant for 14 years and when I started I was actually amazed. I kind of knew this, but like I said, I didn’t have a lot of planning. I have to admit it’s a little scary looking back on it, but a lot of it was word of mouth. I had worked with people for 18 years and they had gone on to other jobs. So my first clients were people, hey, you’re doing your own thing, Great. Can you help me out with a project? I just let it be known that I was out there and so these were already built in potential clients. But the big thing that happened was when I would work for one of those people that I knew, I would get introduced to some new people that I had never met on that project and those new people would eventually go to another company. They remembered me.

So the bottom line is that for the first 11-12 years, almost all of my clients were word of mouth and it kept me very busy. The last couple of years, some of those clients have retired. But again, like I said, I got new clients. I was hired by someone who knew me. But then once I got in there, I started working with new people and they became a source of clients. But I noticed things were slowing up a little bit. So I started to invest more of my time in redesigning my website, which was an absolute clunky mess. While it could still entice people, I had to make sure that I had different bells and whistles there to direct business towards me.

And so I started getting some business from my website, which for years I didn’t. I only had a website just for vanity reasons. So I started to change that and also started going on podcasts to get my name out there to attract some cold clients. So I’m still relying more on my business with existing clients and clients of clients. But the past couple of years I’ve been trying to get more cold clients. So that’s been the biggest change in the past few years.

Ben [00:23:46]:
Yeah. So a few things there, especially for listeners. Yes, you fixed up your website and that helped bring in some new business. But I love the fact that you didn’t just focus on that from the beginning and that’s all you did. A lot of new consultants will do that. And I’m a big fan of having one or two main methods of getting the word out about your business. Whether that’s referrals, word of mouth, maybe writing stuff, LinkedIn, whatever it may be, but having one or two things and then you’re gradually adding a new source which is introducing more cold leads and cold introductions in. So that’s smart.

Whether it be podcasts and things like that. The first thing you said there about when you began it was from word of mouth, which is what I experienced or what I see is 90% of new consultancies. That’s where it begins. That’s where it started with me. From the mechanics of it. When you say get the word out there, what does that mean? How does someone who’s starting out get the word out there?

Scott Trumpolt [00:24:30]:
I hate to tie it to one thing, but LinkedIn was very helpful because I could add contacts that were out on LinkedIn and just kind of let them know what my situation was. My last stop was at a very, very large company. So it had quite an internal network. And so the word got around that he’s out there. So there was that kind of word of mouth. But I found LinkedIn to be great. I already had these contacts from just working in the corporate world, so I was just able to reach out to them and say, hey, if you ever need any help, I’m available. And they already knew my work.

It just was a matter of the company being open to it. I’m not going to win them all. Sometimes the thing that seems to be the lowest hanging fruit is not. I remember one time there was a young lady that was on a project I was working at. She was a lower level project team member. And I only say that not to demean her or diminish her. She was not a decision maker. Sure, I barely remember her because she had such a small role and kind of in the background.

Well, she remembered me. And when she went to a new company, she recommended me to the people that were making a decision and that led to like a three or four year engagement. Now I had to prove myself. I had to meet with these people and explain my value proposition and what I could do for them. But nevertheless, that would have never happened if that individual hadn’t just say, hey, I do know someone. That’s the wonderful thing that happens sometimes. You can push and push and be certain that you know you’re the right candidate for this job offering and they shouldn’t go with any other consultant. And it just doesn’t work.

And you have to respect that. If you’ve been in the business for 14 years as an independent consultant, you’ll have your share of victories and that helps to minimize the losses. And you just move on.

Ben [00:26:25]:
Absolutely. Just one more thing. On the LinkedIn thing you said you contact for people who think, I don’t want to do the cold calling, cold messaging, it feels too salesy, slimy or whatever. What kind of message should they send to say, look, I’m hanging up my shingle, here I am?

Scott Trumpolt [00:26:39]:
Well, if you’re an independent consultant, the business and the person become one. You are selling yourself. You have to sell yourself. This is a reality. And one of the things that I talked about in my book is that’s a role that you’re going to have to take on. You are not only going to be providing your services, you have to sell yourself. And for those of us that are introverted by nature, such as myself, not always an easy thing, but you have to push past it and remember that you have a service to provide. You’re looking to market that service.

So these are the kind of things that you’re going to need to do. And it gets easier over time. You have to guard against arrogance and coming off too strongly. But people will understand. The business is not going to come completely to you. You have to do outreach. And if you’re not comfortable doing that, then you shouldn’t become an independent consultant. That’s just my feeling is the person and the job get even more and more closely linked.

Of course, be professional, but you need to do that to be successful.

Ben [00:27:43]:
So let me ask you about the book, The Defragmented Consultant. So that’s a method to transition from the corporate world to independent consultant that draws upon your past and redefines it for future success. So fabulous. Tell us about the book.

Scott Trumpolt [00:27:59]:
It’s available on all the formats. I’ve actually been surprised. I thought that most people would get the electronic copy or the paperback, but actually some hardcovers have sold too. So I was kind of surprised about that. And the book was written. I alluded to earlier that I guess it’s because I thought I had the goods to be successful on my own. But I didn’t do a lot of planning. It was actually scary.

I kind of just jumped into it. I think if I had planned too much, I would have put up roadblocks, being that I am more introverted in certain aspects. So I just went into it. I was overseas, so I was coming back to the US and it just felt like it’s time for a fresh start. But having said that, it really took me about 12 years to write this book because I wanted to let it gestate. I wanted to see if what I thought originally still rang true after 5 years, after 10 years, what modifications did I need to make? And so I wanted to write a book that included different triggering points in my life that led me to this ultimate path that people could identify with. That was one aspect of the book. The other was to provide a roadmap.

Sometimes I see independent consultant books and they’re very technical, like we were talking about earlier. You need to build up your website. You need to make sure. I wanted to talk about more of the soft skills. I did not want it to be a book about compensation. I want it to be something out there, and particularly for people that were in their 40s or 50s that had built up a track record in the corporate world and felt that they had gone as far as they could. Maybe not in terms of their status within the organization, but when I say level, I mean the level where they could really get a little bit of self actualization going that they kind of are getting stymied, things are flattening out and give them a nudge into this area that has been so beneficial to me, not just professionally, but personally and also talking about some of the mundane things, the mundane challenges that come along with working at home, like putting on weight because you’re so sedentary, working from home all the time and getting yourself on a program to keep that weight down and things. So all the different things that you’re going to encounter.

So this is just a flavoring of the book and I hope people check it out.

Ben [00:30:24]:
So, Scott, you’ve been in business for a long time, 14 years, and you’ve written a fabulous book. So thank you for writing in the first place. What is your overarching advice for both a new consultant who’s trying to work out what to do as they start off in this brave new world of consulting? And then also for the existing consultant who thinks I’m kind of halfway there, I know I could be having a full fuller book and making it a bit easier to run my business, be happier. And as you talked about being more fulfilled and more self actualized. So what’s your advice to those two groups?

Scott Trumpolt [00:30:55]:
You really need to feel a passion for what you do that is going to carry you through. Because if you’re passionate about what you do, it’s going to allow you to focus on other aspects when the clients aren’t coming in. You’re going to be able to work on improving your marketing, you’re going to be improving upon your fee structure, the services that you provide, thinking about different ways for existing clients that you can increase your business and give them additional tools. So this is really the key, as I said about the 10 year mark or really the 12 year mark, I started to feel flat. I still had clients and everything, but I felt like I needed to reinvent myself a little bit and not rely strictly on word of mouth business. And two, I had never done a podcast before, I had never written a book before, anything like that. So challenging myself, I had written articles, but challenging myself to do these other aspects which were important that could hopefully lead to a new type of future as a consultant. That advice carried me through the whole process and I think it’s the same with someone that’s been in the business.

Things get a little bit of flat. You need to step back and see what can you do personally to reinvigorate that, because I’m a firm believer is to not I’ll sulk a little bit for a little while, but to get out of that, I want to get out of that as soon as possible. So I want to have a plan of action. So when you start developing that new plan of action, even in the developing of it, before you’ve executing it, it your mind is not occupied with those kind of thoughts. At least that’s what has worked for me.

Ben [00:32:39]:
Nice, I appreciate that. Second last question, because I forgot to ask, what does the defragmented bit mean in the book title?

Scott Trumpolt [00:32:45]:
The Defragmented Consultant is not just a title which hopefully catches the eye. People are wondering about that. But think about a computer and how you defragment your files. It’s kind of related to that. In fact, the cover of the book shows a brain going through a defragmented process. It’s the same idea when you defrag your files, it makes your computer run more efficiently. And so I’m simply applying that to the human perspective. I’m taking all of my past experiences and pulling out of there only that which is essential and redesigning it to make it work.

When I don’t have a support system like I did in the corporate world, it’s just me. So I need to operate in a different way that I can work faster so I can have more clients, but still maintain the quality. So it’s having an awareness and picking out those things and those methods that you learned over the years. It requires also that in the corporate world you continue to grow. You didn’t stagnate, you grew up to the last point that you were there. You were constantly growing because that’s necessary as an independent consultant. But the defragmented consultant is just this idea of refining what you already know to work faster and more effective so that you can make more money. And beyond making more money, taking on the kind of counts that you want to work on that are going to be stimulating to you.

And not just doing the very basics. Because my type of work, I either get it because they don’t have the expertise in house, they do have the expertise in house, but those people are so busy that they can’t get to it. Or the third way is that they just want an outside objective opinion. But it’s really the first two that fall into most. I want to be able to take on as many clients as I can, but I can’t unless I defragment my past and more efficient. Because you don’t have a support system anymore.

And that scares a lot of people and I understand that. And it scared me for a while. I went through growing pains the first couple of years, but having survived that, I’m hoping that this book will say, hey, you’re going to experience growing pains and this book helps you deal with those growing pains.

Ben [00:35:07]:
So if people want to learn more about you, Scott, or about your consulting business, Trumpolt Compensation Design Solutions or about the book, The Defragmented Consultant. What should they do next?

Scott Trumpolt [00:35:19]:
Well, my website is www.hrcompensationconsulting.com. That is a great place that has all sorts of things in. It has some articles that I’ve written about pay transparency, it has some media. It has a link to my book that you can click on. It will take you right to the Amazon site. Again, the book is available in all different formats: e-copy, hard copy, paperback. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, you could read it for free. So the website is the one stop shopping. That’s really great. And also my LinkedIn profile is a great place to reach out to me.

Ben [00:36:02]:
We’ll have the link to both and we’ll have your LinkedIn profile link as well in the show notes. But Scott, I really appreciate you sharing your time and your insights and wisdom and telling us about the book as well. So thank you very much and I wish you all the best of the future.

Scott Trumpolt [00:36:13]:
Thank you so much.

Topics covered: pricing consulting services, how to win corporate contracts, attract consulting clients, HR consultants, workplace consultants……

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