THE NEWSLETTER AS A SALES TOOL FOR CONSULTING
Dr. Peter M. Hay is Editor of this newsletter, The Chemical Consultant. Dr. Hay concentrated on the newsletter as part of marketing as the essential element for successful consulting. It is one of the ways to market consulting expertise. A good newsletter's reminds the reader that the consultant is available and ready to serve the reader's needs. An effective newsletter has valuable content and is well written. Its quality and timeliness will represent the consultant and his worth. Newsletters are distributed by mail, internet and handing out at trade shows and professional meetings. Distribution is a proactive matter and requires constant attention. Mailing lists may be purchased, but have lower effectiveness than one that you create from your own contacts, which you increase by your networking efforts. A web site of your own can have links that go to the latest edition and to an archive to recover previous issues. A consultant's newsletter is a promotional tool that should communicate the reputation and availability of the sender to help the reader. It, and its distribution lists, should be constantly revised and improved so that readers will want to revisit it.

IS CONSULTING FOR YOU?
Dr. Peter R. Lantos is president of The Target Group, a consulting firm serving industry since 1980, concentrating on plastics areas, as well as in technology, management science, marketing, and planning. First: Do you have an expertise for which someone will pay? Experience in an activity or process or in providing specific knowledge or a service in a narrow area are both good qualifications. Second: What does a consultant need to be able to do? He or she must be ready to perform the multiple functions of a small business: looking for clients; marketing consulting services; planning, following through assignments; maintaining client relationships; keeping the books and writing reports. Third: What personal traits make a successful consultant? For this he sites first, willingness to perform the mundane tasks usually supplied by support staff in a large company, then being a self starter in an unstructured environment, juggling multiple functions with tolerance for risk, having business sense and being a good communicator. Lantos gave some practical suggestions for persons seeking advice on consulting and told of the rewards, risks, highs and lows that accompany the working life of an independent consultant.

USING THE INTERNET AS A MARKETING TOOL
Dr. Martin Goffman specializes in computerized database searching as well as patent research and analysis. He is expert in LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems), in which he organizes seminars. Dr. Goffman believes Internet based marketing is critical to the success of a consulting business in the 21st century. A newly contacted client will likely learn more about you and your business from your web site in the privacy of his own office. Dr. Goffman advised maintaining a good web site. The right web site will generate inquiries, part of which are revenue producing. Large, Fortune 500 companies will send you inquiries but there will be many contacts that you won't want to follow up. You will also get inquiries from people in genuine need of your services and are ready to pay your fees. Your web site should be your silent marketing partner and is fast, cheap, and effective. E-commerce (selling a product) on your site sometimes makes sense. A consulting service such as a generic solution to a general need can turn into a "product". A host for your web site should provide reliability, uptime, and support. Goffman showed what the internet offers in promoting your successful consultancy and what is important in order to develop its potential as a marketing tool.

NETWORKING
Dr. Ernest A. Coleman, Senior Consultant, CPTechnology, Inc. is an expert in manufacturing, technology or education. Whatever your line of work, networking is essential for those consultants who must find clients for themselves. The better consultants also find other consultants for their own clients and prospective clients and may earn a substantial amount of income from finding jobs for others by using their own networks. You need three networks: one to fish directly for clients; one to find other consultants for your own clients; and one that will find clients for you by indirect means. These networks overlap. Even with the internet the strongest networks are still developed by human contact. You can meet key people by serving as director or officer in scientific, professional, and civic organizations. These key people hire or influence the hiring of consultants. Use these contact to find people for all occasions. This gets you noticed as a person who helps in finding answers to others' questions.

CHEMICAL REGULATIONS: A CONSULTANT'S GOLDMINE
Dr. Richard L. Schauer, SCHAUER Associates, specializes in the regulations impacting industrial chemical products in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the European Community. He also deals with electronic document management systems to aid in complying with these regulations. A successful consultant in this field is totally familiar with all of regulations and their changes. These are the essential questions: Who has to comply? Who are the regulators? What happens if you don't comply? How can companies comply? Electronic tools are essential for handling the input of data and the output of reports or forms. Dr. Schauer explained that as a chemical regulatory consultant he advises clients on what needs to be done: prepares submissions; writes Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS); prepares container labels; conducts compliance audits; and much, much more. He described his specialty, safety data sheets. He developed a program for processing data and forms, which he calls THE MSDS WRITER, by which he can modify just one section of an MSDS without disturbing the formatting of everything else. The final form of the MSDS can be stored on a computer system, viewed on a computer screen, printed, or converted to a specialized electronic format such as PDF or HTML.

Maybe you thought cashew nuts were only for eating. The book Herbal Secrets of the Rainforest tells us that the plant produces a number of "phytochemicals", identified compounds derived from plants. These include ascorbic acid, beta-carotene, calcium, hexanal, iron, ucocyanidin, lucopelargonidine, limonene, niacin, phosphorus, riboflavin, salicylic acid, thiamin and trans-hex-2-enal.
Indigenous use is well documented. The Tikuna tribe in northwest Amazonia considers the fruit juice to be medicinal against influenza. One author reports that the green fruits are used to treat hemoptysis, the fruit juice is used for warts, the Tikunas tribe use the juice of the cashew tree fruit for flu.
Cashew fruit contains calcium, phosphorous, iron and vitamin C (ascorbic acid). The juice has been used as an anti-scorbutic (antiscurvy) due to its high content of vitamin C (up to 20,000 ppm). In cosmetics, it is considered as a rich source of vitamin C, which is the focus of a great deal of research and is indicated as one of the substances capable of capturing free radicals. It also has some conditioning activity due to its proteins and mucilage. Besides making great tasting and highly nutritive snacks and juices, Cashew fruit extracts are also used in body care products. Because of its high amount of vitamin C and mineral salts, cashew fruit is used as coadjutant in the treatment of premature aging of the skin and to remineralize the skin. It is also a good scalp conditioner and tonic, often used in shampoos, lotions and scalp creams. All you formulators, take another look at cashew products.

By the time this issue is in circulation the intense feelings of Americans will have begun to make room for some lighter fare. The terrorist attacks will always be remembered for the tragedy they were. As the Old Greeks knew, though, comedy has equal place with tragedy. One late night satirist on the program Politically Incorrect got his timing wrong and suffered harsh criticism. Other late night humorists held off and are now easing into laughter and finding that audiences are nourished by the return to acceptable criticism of the powerful, as long as it is carefully presented-and gets a laugh.
Another source of criticism of the mighty for a laugh is the weekly newspaper The Onion, a publication founded in 1989 by University of Wisconsin students and relocated to Manhattan in January. It also appears on the internet. It has always been outrageous and offends many people with its use of coarse language and irreverent humor. It publishes its pieces as if they were genuine news stories. The read so smoothly that the reader is pulled along a serious road only to be slammed with a punch line.
One of the more gentle topical stories "quoted" Bush, the father. It describes former president George Bush's apology to President George W. Bush for having financed Osama bin Laden and the Afghan fighters against Soviet forces. "We thought it was a good idea at the time because he was part of a group fighting Communism in Central Asia," the parody quoted the elder Bush as saying. "We called them `freedom fighters' back then. I know it sounds weird. You sort of had to be there." http://www.theonion.com/

A Massachusetts company, Harvard Bioscience, has brought out a laboratory test for tissue irritability of a chemical substance or formulation that could replace the conventional Draize test, which uses rabbits. Such tests are used for screening research candidates for safety and early discovery of a problem allows the elimination before other more expensive tests are done.
The system is a laser-based instrument that can quantify the relative cell damaging potential of a sample using a live and fully functioning cultured bovine lens. The system determines the organ's refraction of the laser light and compares the results before and after application of the sample. The company claims reproducibility down concentrations of parts per million. Harvard Bioscience, formerly Harvard Apparatus, is a manufacturer of various tools and instruments that are aimed at helping in the drug discovery process. The company calls their method ScanTox™ and says it will help reduce overall costs to pharmaceutical companies by early weeding out of any lead compounds that were otherwise would fail further down the pipeline. The development of novel alternative testing procedures for the pharmaceutical industry has taken on a matter of urgency as non-governmental organization and lobby groups step up pressure on the industry to avoid the use of animals.