You Will Never Rise Alone As A Consultant
You can't isolate yourself and expect to thrive as a consultant. You need to build a community which wants to help you.
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You Need People Who Want To Help You
I don’t like the term ‘solo consultant’.
It implies you’re a lone wolf.
The thing about lone wolves is they don’t tend to last long.
If you want to thrive as a consultant, you need to be deeply embedded within a network of people who want to help you.
Many years ago, I was chatting to an Instagram influencer on a flight and asked ‘what do you know that most people don’t about getting traction on the platform?’
She told me the most significant secret was pods. Most top influencers are in pods sharing, liking, and commenting on each other’s activity. This helps the content rise in popularity and encourages the algorithms to share it in others' feeds.
Pods are an extreme (and ethically dubious) form of something far simpler: people who want to help each other.
The people who most often share my content, refer prospects my way and connect me with great opportunities aren’t the senior people or top-tier influencers you might expect. They’re simply the people with whom I have the best relationships. They’re typically the people I’ve met in person, spent time with, and often people I’ve helped in the past.
Many consultants struggle to gain much traction on their work because they lack a community that wants to help them succeed.
The Missing Ingredient
In a coaching call a few months ago, my client showed me what she was doing to attract clients.
On the surface, she was doing a better job than anyone I’d ever seen.
She had a specific target market (down to the named individuals she wanted to reach), a fantastic website, good video content, and plenty of social proof, but she wasn’t getting the traction she wanted.
It took a lot of digging to realise that she had utterly neglected the relationship side. She was an outsider. Very few people knew of her, and she had almost no personal contacts. Few people wanted to help her succeed by sharing her content or sending people her way. More problematically, she saw herself as a lone wolf who didn’t want to play the game.
It’s time to rethink what ‘playing the game’ means.
The Power Of Connections and Relationships
Back in 2015, while working with a client in San Francisco, I stayed an extra couple of days to attend a small gathering of industry professionals (20 to 25 people).
If you know the costs of changing transatlantic flights at the last minute and the cost of hotel rooms in SF, you will know that’s not an insignificant investment.
I don’t recall the event itself, but I remember standing outside thinking, ‘Well, this probably wasn’t a good investment.’ While waiting for a taxi, I struck up a conversation with Phoebe, who worked at Salesforce at the time.
She knew me from my blog and an event we had hosted a year earlier. We had a nice chat and about a week later, I dropped her a line with a cheeky request—did she know who at Salesforce might be willing to discuss sponsoring an upcoming event? Phoebe kindly made the introduction (Aside, Salesforce invested around $80k+ sponsoring our activities over the next few years).
A year or two later, Phoebe moved to Facebook and invited us to pitch for a project with her. We won the project (a mid-five-figure project) and stayed in touch after that. A couple of years later, when I knew Phoebe was looking for a new role, I put her in touch with Okta—a client of ours—and she got the role. A year later, she hired us to do an additional project at Okta.
When she left Okta, we hired Phoebe to come and work for us and help grow our business.
I love this story because it shows the power of mutually beneficial relationships which begin with the person:
Knowing who you are and having some past respect for your work. All the content and activities we had undertaken put us in a position for someone to want to talk to us. This is entirely different from a cold contact when everyone raises their guard.
Mutually beneficial support. It’s a lot easier for people to help you if you also help them. The people in your network are going to be rising up the career ladder - the stronger the relationships you have with them, the better. We helped each other grow over many years. The more relationships you have like this, the more successful you will be.
You have to invest in the relationship. Spending an extra $2k or so to change flights and stay in SFO for a couple more nights seemed expensive back then, but it was a tremendous decision in hindsight. But there were plenty more times when I was jet-lagged to hell and taking $50 - $70 Ubers (each way) to meet Phoebe in Silicon Valley whenever I was in town. It would have been so easy to cancel and reschedule them. This cuts both ways, too—Phoebe made an extra effort to meet with me whenever we were in London.
This is one relationship that has really helped FeverBee over the years, but what happens when we have dozens of these relationships?
Phoebe might be the best example of this, but she’s far from the only one. Over the years, I can think of many other people with whom we’ve developed close relationships and constantly help one another—often quite proactively.
Sometimes, that’s with career opportunities, resources, and just bouncing ideas around. Other times, it’s going out for drinks and meals and picking up the tab.
Cold Contacts Don’t Work, Strengthen Your Current Connections
The worst thing you can do here is read the above and think:
Right, I need to build some relationships. I’m going to start messaging five people per day!
The problem with this is you will be cold-contacting people. People will naturally be suspicious of your intentions. They don’t know you or what you’re about. They will be waiting for you to ask them for something. And that’s when they will shut down.
You can’t cold-contact your way into solid relationships.
The best approach is to strengthen your relationships with people you are already connected with—people who have subscribed to your mailing list and have heard of you, people who are already positively predisposed towards you.
A primary goal of your content and marketing efforts is to make people aware of you and respect your work. It’s a thousand times easier to have a regular, natural discussion with people when they’ve heard of you and consumed some of your work.
The goal of your content isn’t to get people to hire you but to bring more people into your orbit so you can build stronger relationships.
Don’t Try To Sell — Just Try To Help
Just trust me, if you try to sell - however subtly - people will sniff it out in no time and shut down. They will also try to avoid you in the future. They won’t be predisposed to helping you. They won’t ever want to share your content or support any projects you’re doing.
The best way to build a relationship is to be positive, helpful, and fun.
Participate constructively in their discussions and respond to their comments.
Compliment their achievements.
Like and share their content.
Make a personal connection in their DMs.
Stay in touch and share practical examples, resources, or other useful content, etc…
Introduce them to others they should meet.
Many of these steps will be the same as marketing to past clients.
Simply by doing this, you will gradually start building your network of people. But always begin with people you know already.
Show Up At Events
Show up at events, too—even tiny events with a handful of people.
I recently realised that my best connections haven’t come from major conferences but from small meetups of industry pros. These are places where people often have different mentalities and are more keen to chat. They’re frequently held in pubs (bars!) or spare rooms at company offices. The mindset and mentality is different.
Whenever I travel somewhere, I see if a relevant meetup is taking place. Even if you don’t know anybody there, you should attend events. If you’re an introvert, force yourself to chat with at least one person.
See: Event equity: Stop Aimlessly Attending Events
Even if you only meet one person at an event, that’s a win. Do that five times, and you’ll have five buddies to hang out with at an event. Soon, you will meet their buddies, too. You might create a WhatsApp group or even host your own meetups in time. People might invite their buddies to that etc…
Build A Community Which Wants To Help You
Over time, your network grows, and the number of people you help and want to help increases. You begin rising together.
You will notice more people begin engaging with and sharing your content because they like you and want to help you.
In the early days of this newsletter, I looked for others writing about the same topic and found
and . Over the past year, I’ve jumped on several calls with them to exchange ideas and catch up. Looking at my stats, many of my early referrals came from these folks, and many still do.Likewise, I got to know
from commenting on his newsletter. We ended up having a couple of calls. He’s sent plenty of subscribers my way and I’ve even created a course for his incredible Technical Freelance Academy (which you should join because it’s insane value).Don’t Keep Score
The thing about this mindset, however, is you have to give far more than you take.
You have to spend much more time helping others in the community if you want anything to flow back to you.
You don’t keep score in these relationships. There will never be a perfect balance. You just have to know and trust that the stronger and better the members of your community are doing, the better you will all be doing.
Give people a break if they don’t immediately come through for you.
I reconnected with a former client at a conference I attended a few months ago. A week or two later, she asked me for advice on a job she was interviewing for. I spent almost an hour preparing a detailed analysis. And then, nothing. I didn’t even get a thank you or an update. Then, just last week, a prospect came to me via a referral from her.
The lesson is that things are never linear. Give people a break, and just keep being a useful, valuable member of a growing community. Give, give, and give. Eventually, things will come back to you.
You have to care about helping others and seeing them succeed honestly.
Make It A Consistent Habit
The final thought is you have to put in the work.
You have to make an effort to reach out to people, comment on and engage with what they’re creating, build that network, and take the social risk (‘What if no one shows up?’).
Schedule this if you like. Spend 30 to 60 minutes a day simply being an active community member. Give, give, and give without immediate benefit for yourself: comment and share posts. Provide practical examples and resources. Set up social activities and gatherings, etc…
Reach out to people on your mailing list and see if they want to have a call sometime.
You might find this one of the best parts of your day—it’s the missing ingredient that unlocks everything else.
Being a solo or independent consultant shouldn’t mean you’re a loner.
Use A CRM And Set Reminders
Finally, use a CRM (Hubspot, Pipedrive etc…). Don’t treat this as a sales process; simply a process to continually build and keep track of who is in your network. Any time you go to an event and meet someone new, you can add them with a reminder to follow up soon.
Trust me, many will fade if you don’t actively keep track of relationships. It’s essential to maintain them. When you contact someone, don’t simply ask for a call to ‘touch base’; have something of value or interest to them.
Summary
Let’s quickly recap.
Build a supportive network: Consultants need to develop a community of people who want to help them succeed, focusing on mutual support rather than acting as a "lone wolf." This network will share their content, send people their way, and potentially hire them.
Nurture relationships over time: Meaningful relationships are built through repeated, genuine interactions. Invest time and effort in strengthening connections for short-term gains and long-term mutual benefit.
Leverage existing connections: Strengthen relationships with those you already know rather than cold-contacting new people. The key is building on familiarity and trust rather than starting from scratch.
Show up and engage in person: Attending even small events and meetups is valuable for creating strong personal connections. Consistently showing up helps to build rapport and expand your network.
Help others without keeping score: Be generous in offering help and support to others in your network, without expecting immediate reciprocation. Trust that the goodwill you generate will come back to you in time.
Put in consistent effort: Engaging with others regularly—through comments, content sharing, and calls—helps keep relationships alive and positions you as a valuable community member.
Use tools to maintain relationships: A CRM can help track and manage your connections, ensuring you don’t lose touch with key contacts. Keep your outreach meaningful by offering something of value when reconnecting.
Good luck!
p.s. If you want to increase your proposal win-rate, make sure you sign up for our Proposal Mastery course.
I can definitely appreciate this. I joined the OD Network in order to build relationships. It’s unfortunate that I didn’t learn the value of building relationships for career advancement until I was in my late 30s