The One Thing I'd Recommend Before Starting A Consultancy Practice In 2024

What is the critical thing you need to have before you make the leap to launching your own consultancy practice?

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Are You Ready To Start A Consultancy Practice?

Once the financial clock begins ticking, the pressure is on.

I suspect many people start a consultancy practice before they are ready.

This is a problem for one simple reason.

The moment you leave your past occupation to become a consultant, the financial clock is ticking. This means you need to generate enough revenue to replace your lost income before you overshoot your financial runway.

The closer you get to the end of that runway, the more stressful things are going to become - and the more desperate you’re going to get. And that’s not going to lead to positive outcomes.

When you have a definitive end date, the clock is always ticking against you.

But what if you changed the financial runway to a reputation runway?

And what if you didn’t become a consultant until you had built enough momentum to immediately take flight?

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Build Demand Before You Build A Practice

☝️ That’s the golden rule of becoming a consultant.

Build the demand for your services before you make the jump to become a consultant.

In the community space, we often say you should build the demand for the community before you launch it. A large group of people should be eager to connect before you launch the community. Otherwise, you risk launching a ghost town (which sadly happens quite often).

If I were starting out as a consultant today, I’d build up demand for my services first before launching a practice.

If you ensure there is a group of prospective clients eager to hire you before you become a consultant, your odds of taking flight before overshooting the runway are a lot, lot, higher.

This essentially means you need to do three things:

1. Research. You need to know what prospective clients urgently need but can’t get from existing consultants (who have a head start on you). Never skip doing your research calls.

2. Develop the right skills. You need to be really good at that thing existing consultants aren’t offering. Take courses, read books, and equip yourself with skills others don’t have.

3. Promotion. You need a lot of people to know how good you are at that thing and why it matters. You need a platform which already has an audience before you make the jump.

Let’s focus on the platform a little more…

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Begin Building A Platform To Find Niche and Grow Audience A Year Before You Become A Consultant

Give yourself a safe place to test ideas until you find your niche

Sometimes you don’t get a choice about when you’re going to become a consultant. You might be terminated from your job and decide to become a consultant. That happens often and is unfortunate.

Most of the time though, you do have a say about when you decide to make the transition. In this case, I’d strongly suggest you create a platform to attract an audience about a year before you make the jump.

Your plan to become a consultant should begin about a year before you make the transition.

That platform might be a content platform such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack (aha!), Instagram etc…Or it might be hosting events or regular activities for a growing group of people.

You have to find the client acquisition method where you feel you can stand out and which best suits your skill set and personality.

In the year before becoming a consultant, you want to arm yourself with the right skills, a unique perspective which resonates with the audience you’re targeting, and the right tactics to make you stand out in the medium you’re using.

You want to set yourself up in a position where you’ve used this time to test different ideas and find what makes sense to you. Thus when you’re ready to become a consultant, the only thing missing is the application of effort.

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Find The Unique Problem You Solve

Test different ideas until you find something that resonates

Once you have your platform, begin testing different ideas and see what resonates. It helps to begin with good research about what exists at the moment and where people are turning to advice.

Then you need to find your edge. You need to keep going deeper into the things which are resonating with your target audience. The phrase ‘target audience’ is critical there.

A common problem is creating content which is beloved by a group of supportive peers but completely ignored by the senior people at organisations you want to work with.

You should begin by setting up calls with prospective clients and asking them about the major problems they’re struggling with and then creating content about those problems.

The key thing is to experiment and find what does or doesn’t resonate. This should be a side project which you commit several hours a week to. Your goal is to find the right niche for you.

Remember you should focus on big, expensive, problems. You should be writing about how to solve those problems. Don’t focus on small potatoes.

In my industry, for example, I often see budding consultants write articles like ‘How to create a content calendar’. The problem with this is it’s not something which keeps clients up at night (and, let’s be honest, you simply drop items of content in a calendar 🤷🏻‍♂️).

You have to figure out what keeps your audience up at night because those are the kinds of challenges they will hire you to make go away.

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Build Your Skillset To Solve The Problem

The best content and consultancy will emerge from improving your skillset

Deliberately acquire unique skills which other consultants don’t have and are related to the problem you want to solve.

There’s no shortage of skills that might be useful. Things like facilitation, project management, data analytics, programming, design, user experience, management consulting etc might be useful in many contexts.

You will find that developing unique skills is the key which unlocks the ability to create unique content and truly position yourself in your industry. If you can build the skills while still employed, that’s great. If not, it’s one of the first things I’d suggest once you leave your role and begin the transition.

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Metrics To Aim For Before You Take Flight As A Consultant

A plane needs to reach a certain take-off speed before taking off.

I’d suggest you need to set yourself certain targets before becoming a consultant. These targets should relate to audience size, relationships, and skills.

There’s a lot of subjectivity within this but I’d suggest:

1. An audience of 1k+ email subscribers or 15k+ social media followers.

2. Developed relationships with 20 key prospective clients.

3. Completed a course which gives unlocks a unique approach to solving the problem.

4. Agreed at least one contract with a prospective client.

These metrics might be somewhat arbitrary, but they would ensure when you make the change you’re well positioned to immediately take flight rather than spend your limited financial runway trying to find your right niche or approach.

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Thanks for reading

Richard Millington