The suggestions that I’m going to share with you are often obvious, yet I’ve found that many consultants simply are leaving ‘money on the table’ in terms of generating their own revenue or providing excellent services that really help their clients achieve their goals, desires, or fix their challenges.

Before we start the goods, I have a challenge for you! The challenge today is to pick what type of services match your interest, skills, and experience. The good thing is that your list can be ever-expanding based on your experience, connections, and interest!

 These are ordered by my highest to lowest revenue generators:

• Full office ergonomics assessments (with report) with/without follow-ups
  • These types of assessments can be quite profitable especially when you have experience in conducting them and writing reports.
  • You might offer discounts if you anticipate a high number of assessments at a particular workplace; it would be a more efficient use of your time and resources (saving mileage, etc).
  • Follow-ups can be really useful whenever you recommend new pieces of equipment (like a chair or keyboard tray) and you want to make sure that they are set-up optimally to fit that specific person. Can be in-person or over a video call, whatever suits your customer’s budget and wants.
• Workers’ Compensation Support
  • These are more of a ‘one-off’ full office ergonomic assessment, usually in response to a very specific workers’ compensation claim and usually needed quickly with a fast turn-around on the report.
• Return-to-Work support (for non-compensable injuries)
  • Similar to a Workers’ Compensation Claim, but for non-compensable issues (maybe from something an employee did on the weekend).
  • Sometimes Workers’ Compensation Boards have ‘set’ prices for ergonomic assessments, so there could be some differences between compensable (WCB claim) and non-compensable cases.
  • Some workplaces may want a full ergonomic assessment completed while they are waiting on a decision whether the injury is compensable.
• Clinic based client support (warmer audience)
  • There’s a couple of ways this could work:
    • Option 1: Someone in-house is trained to do ergonomics assessments
    • Option 2: An outside consultant develops a relationship with a clinic.
  • Either way there is a lot of potential here to address the underlying workstation setup concerns why someone ended up in a clinic in the first! Note: you may offer your clients a discounted ergonomic assessment rate as part of your offerings as you didn’t need to spend money or time finding them.
• Train-the-trainer
  • This is where you train a company’s in-house representative to start doing office ergonomic assessments themselves.
  • Often times this is as straightforward as just a more in-depth office ergonomic presentation with a lot of examples of how to apply it.
• Presentation (aka lunch and learn) with short check-ups to all staff
  • This is where you combine a typical ergonomics presentation (where you teach staff how to adjust their own workstations) with very short check-ups with each participant after the presentation. It’s to make sure the way that they adjusted their workstations is OK.
  • Definitely more of a ‘budget friendly’ service. To make this a viable option to you make it clear that no thorough ergonomic assessments and/or reports will be conducted and check-ups are limited to between 2 and 5 minutes per participant.
  • In a way, you’re surveying staff to see if any workstations or staff need extra attention from you. There’s a lot of potential for future work and assessments.
• Presentation (aka lunch and learn)
  • This is the standard ergonomics presentation that are most likely delivered to a large group of staff at lunch time.
  • This type of service is what I like to call ‘a check in the box’ for employers looking for quick and less expensive ergonomic solutions.
  • Lays the groundwork for more work for you in the future!
• Prioritizing high-risk ergonomic areas within organizations using discomfort complaints
  • Based on employee responses to a discomfort survey you can rank the responses based on their priority of need.
  • There can be a lot of administrative time to compile the results if you do it by hand. If you can do this electronically it can save you time and make it more profitable.
  • This can be the ‘first step’ of an ongoing relationship with a customer and based on the responses you can either plan full office ergonomic assessments, presentations, and/or presentations with follow-ups.
• Internally for colleagues
  • This is last on the list because of instead of ‘charging’ a client for your services, you’ll be instead adding this to your normal job duties!
  • My word of guidance is to schedule enough time in your work week for travel, assessment, and report writing, or ergonomics can get lost in your ‘to-do’ list!

There you have it!

I hope that these points sparked and inspired you along your ergonomics journey. 

Make sure to download the reference sheet right here.