Category: Getting Started

Back in January 2022, I received a LinkedIn InMail message:

I messaged my boss and asked if he had ever heard of this company. He hadn’t, so we were a little suspicious. It turns out that a bunch of people at the leadership level in our company had received the same message. Whoever this was, was definitely interested in our leadership team’s perspective on our industry. Being a couple of months into a leadership position, I was very curious to see what it would be like. I figured, my worst case scenario would be that I waste an hour on a call. For context, the company I’m at now was my first “real job” out of university and I had only been there 3 years at this point.

I started Googling to find out more about the company and that’s when I came across the expert networks subreddit and the Expert Opportunities website.

I got it cleared with the leadership team at work and accepted the consultation request. The Associate who messaged me on LinkedIn sent me a link to create a profile as an advisor, where I wrote up some answers to a few screening questions for the call, and submitted my availability.

4 days later, I had a 1 hour call scheduled with the client. The advisory company I worked with sent me a Google Calendar invite with a link to a meeting hosted through their website. This network doesn’t use Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams.

Before the call I was definitely feeling anxious. What if they realize I don’t really know anything? What if I can’t answer any of their questions? What if this call makes me realize how little I know about my own industry?

I had chatted a bit with Mitchel on Reddit about how these kinds of calls generally go. The advice he gave me was that “You have the hands on experience and they don’t. Be descriptive and thoughtful – clients love examples and ‘rules of thumb’. Don’t BS and don’t be afraid to say you don’t know the answer to all of their questions. They know your background and picked you because they are interested in hearing what you have to say. They will talk to other experts to get other perspectives too.” His advice really helped calm my nerves before the call.

The call went pretty smoothly. Everything I had read lead me to believe that the conversation would be pretty general, and it really was. Most of the questions focused around what kind of companies would be customers of a certain product, what is the revenue of company X, how big is the opportunity in industry Y, that sort of thing. Our company had recently published a white paper on the topic of the call, so a lot of these details were fresh in my mind.

4 days after that I had the payment deposited directly to my bank account. The network I worked with was based in the US, and I’m based in Canada, so it was a nice surprise to see how easy it was to submit banking information and get paid.

As part of the compliance agreement you sign with the expert network, you agree not to discuss specific details of who the clients are or what the conversation was about, but I still came away with a lot of new insights to test at work. I did more research about the companies that were mentioned in the call and was able to pitch some new ideas to my team at work. The compliance agreement also states that you can’t give away any Material Non-Public Information (MNPI), so you don’t need to worry about being pressured into giving away any sensitive information.

Since then, I get a request for consulting calls on other topics maybe every other month, but none of them have been a great match. I haven’t booked a call since then. A lot of people on the expert networks subreddit will tell you that it really depends on the industry and how much activity is happening around investments or mergers and acquisitions in the space. Many people describe it as a real “feast or famine” side gig. Even so, I always review the screening questions for these requests in the hopes of finding other companies or products in my industry that I can research.

I would say, as long as your employment agreement is ok with you participating in expert network consulting, you should definitely do it. It will help you summarize the industry insights you already have, and it may give you ideas for other industry research you could do in the future.

About the author

Mark Franklin is the Manager of Curation at DrugBank, a global provider of structured drug data solutions & products that accelerate drug research and improve healthcare.

DrugBank augments human intelligence to improve the world’s health. We offer a suite of products that enable companies to improve healthcare delivery through precision medicine or clinical software application and uncover insights through data science in drug discovery. Out publicly accessible resource, DrugBank Online, has been cited in over 13,000 academic publications and is used by millions of researchers and health professionals globally.
DrugBank’s new AI powered platform allows low and no code users to access smarter insights, AI-driven intelligence, and the power to streamline drug discovery research.

The views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the views of any entities I may represent.