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Freelancer Boot Camp – David Roberts

Past Speaker Index – DaVinci Institute Home – Event Page

Past Speaker: Freelancer Boot Camp

SPEAKER: David Roberts – Corporate Executive, a Professional Services Firm Founder and Principal, Freelance Consultant, Entrepreneur and Investor
DATE: March 12, 2005
TOPIC: Freelancer Boot Camp – Weekend Crash Course

DESCRIPTION: Throughout your career you’ve worked hard to become known as a recognized expert in you field. The people around you know the quality of work that you do, your ability to meet deadlines, and the style and flair that sets you apart from the rest. But establishing yourself as a recognized expert outside your current circles means that you have to break new ground and work outside of your comfort zone.

Switching careers is never easy, and its particularly difficult when you decide to strike out on your own. Working for someone else, you can specialize in one field and be successful. But when you’re on your own, you need to be good at everything. You need to define the services you’re offering, find your clients, figure out how to price your services, write proposals, negotiate contracts, and sell yourself over and over again. And that where we can help you.

Freelancers come in many shapes and sizes – cartoonists, professional speakers, writers, webdesigners, graphic artists, and videographers, to name a few. Some still call themselves “consultants”, performing services that range from IT technical support to business management or human resource consulting. Others use the title of “coach”. Professional coaches work to create an ongoing partnership with their clients, some specializing in life coaching and others in business coaching.

Being a freelance professional does not require holding advanced degrees or working out of a fancy office. Most work out of their homes. It does require that you have some good marketable skills and the desire and determination to grow those skills into a profitable business operation. Join us on this “information by firehose” day of learning the freelancing world.

SPEAKER: David Roberts’ career has taken many twists and turns as a corporate executive, a professional services firm founder and principal, and as a freelance consultant, entrepreneur and investor.

David worked his way through college in the 1960s as a professional musician, sharing the bill with B.B. King, Janis Joplin, Buddy Miles, Grand Funk, Deep Purple and other famous and nearly famous rock ‘n ‘roll performers. He then spent four years working for the Patent Office and U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, DC. During the height of the Watergate crisis, he won a substantial bet with friends and colleagues that Nixon would leave office before David left DC to enter business school in the fall of 1974.

After earning an MBA from Harvard, David joined a small, strategy consulting boutique in Boston named Bain and Company. For the next fifteen years he worked with senior management teams throughout the US and on six continents, helping them revise their strategies, operations and organizations. In the mid-1980s he lived in Tokyo for four years, while launching Bain’s Asia-Pacific consulting practice. When he left Bain in 1990, it had grown to 1300 professionals and over $250 million in revenue.

For most of the 1990s, David was an independent consultant working with large and small companies on similar business strategy problems. A prime driver of this decision was his strong desire to remain actively involved in the lives of his pre-school aged son and daughter after his divorce.

In 1999, at the height of the internet boom, he joined with other consulting and IT colleagues to form GEN3 Partners, where he was the SVP of Operations, managing 150 professionals in 3 US offices. This business was over $15 million from Accel Partners and Dell Ventures. After the bubble burst, the partners wound the business down to return the remaining capital to the investors, and David returned to freelancing.

In 2002, one of his clients, First Data Corporation in Greenwood Village, asked him to join as SVP for Strategy and Global Business Development. During the next two years he helped FDC build a corporate growth strategy, acquire and launch new businesses and improve their innovation and product development processes. He represented FDC on the Boards of two large joint venture companies, and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

Since leaving FDC at the end of 2004, David is once again a freelance consultant, entrepreneur and investor. He is an active CTEK advisor and works closely with I-CAST (International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technologies) on a number of renewable energy ventures. David is also an active member of the DaVinci Institute and the World Future Society. He lives in Morrison, Colorado with his wife, two teenaged children and three Labrador retrievers.