Great Consultants Are Forged In The Dip

Learning the key lessons from going from a few hundred to a few thousand.

Getting started is easy.

It’s easy to get your first client or first few hundred subscribers/followers.

But it’s going from 1 to 10 clients, and 100 subscribers to 10,000 that really matters.

This is a race against time. If you don’t figure out how to build a sustainable means of attracting clients within your time runway, you fail.

The Dip

Seth Godin wrote a fantastic book about this years ago.

I’ve adapted the primary chart below.

When you launch your consultancy practice and you also need to select your client acquisition medium.

At first, you have an initial burst of success - typically up to an audience of a few hundred people. This isn’t difficult. These are usually the people who already know and like you.

But then everything slows down. The people who were most likely to follow you already do. Your rate of growth might slow to a crawl at this stage.

This is the dip.

What you did to attract your initial audience won’t get you through it. Luckily, there is a better approach.

The Di…