Have you ever dreamed about starting your own consulting business some day?
Consultants are entrepreneurial by nature, leading many of them to jump out of the corporate world to startups or other new ventures. And due to their business acumen and connections, they are often successful.
Maybe you are a current management consultant who plans to consider your options after a few more years at the firm. Perhaps you are a candidate for consulting, weighing the long-term options of different career paths. Or perhaps you are not even considering a consulting career, and instead a handful of potential clients are interested in your expertise in AI, marketing, engineering, law, or another sought after field of expertise.
There are hundreds of articles, books, videos, and courses out there for starting your own consulting business – I encourage you to look into what is available.
In this article, we will skip the basics – finding clients, registering a business, pricing your services – to address two mission-critical mindsets that have proven true for every consulting project I have been a part of, from social impact to corporate strategy to market research. Anyone can start a consulting business, but not everyone chooses to master the mindsets that make the greatest consulting firms great.
1. Humble confidence – avoiding imposter syndrome
Everyone has at some point experienced imposter syndrome, which is a feeling that one’s qualifications or contributions fall short of what other people expect, and someday those people will be upset to find out the truth. This has one of two potentially devastating effects: overconfidence or extreme pessimism.
Overconfidence deals with imposter syndrome by ‘faking it until you make it’. Talking a big game so as to encourage people to overlook your weaknesses by appearing to be more capable and qualified than you really are. Often, this leads consultants to take on work that exceeds their capacity or is more than they can handle. It is manipulative in nature, and clients will see through it in the end, if not from the outset. Sometimes, overconfidence even leads consultants to ignore their own mistakes entirely and go on to become an “incompetent jerk”.
Extreme pessimism is the opposite of overconfidence – it is a subtle acceptance of the lie that your work will never be enough to satisfy your clients. For many consultants, with years of practice with perfectionism and high client expectations, this mentality is more common than they might like to admit. Clients may feel that their needs are being met, but they will lower their confidence in a pessimistic consultant’s work and expertise by default. Extreme pessimism might even lead a consultant to pass up good opportunities because they seem daunting or insurmountable when, with just a little learning, they would actually be well positioned to provide valuable services that people are ready and willing to pay for.
The “Goldilocks” option is what I call humble confidence. This mindset is self-explanatory. It combines healthy self-confidence with a sense of reality. It leads consultants to be 100% responsible for their achievements and mistakes, while allowing them to be optimistic about the potential for growth and future opportunities. Humble confidence means a consultant will deliver the highest–quality results while being willing to adjust and learn throughout the process. Clients will feel a sense of trust that will significantly raise the value of the consulting deliverables by default. Clients will respect their adherence to a limited project scope and will be satisfied enough with their services to return in the future.
2. Tailored automation – avoiding burnout
Consultants often struggle to automate their work because it is highly detail oriented and client specific. While deliverables provide a semi-tangible product that we can point to as evidence of project value, slides and documents are just a conglomeration of concepts and recommendations. If a consultant takes on more clients, there is often a proportionate increase in inputs. In other words, consulting provides few obvious opportunities for economies of scale.
The best way to automate consulting work is to create a framework for deliverables – project proposals, agreements, and executive summaries can follow a very similar format for each client. Decks can include a general flow and specific slides that can be copied and pasted between projects. Design decisions should be made from the start, allowing all deliverables to be seamless. Moreover, branding on each deliverable should be simple enough to not overwhelm the material provided while still evoking strong brand recognition for clients. Over time, a consultant will become so adept at their consulting frameworks that they will be able to scale their consulting more than was previously possible.
Artificial intelligence and other technology tools may allow consultants to scale their work. For example, consultants may automate the process of creating project organization, generating data insights, or proofreading deliverables. However, these tools must not be used in place of thinking about problems deeply, communicating with clients, or ensuring that deliverables are of the highest quality. At least for now, technology and AI do not replace the power of human thinking, they only augment it.
However, while automation and simplification allow a consultant to scale their business, tailored recommendations are always the best deliverables. Clients can quickly sense when they are receiving cookie-cutter ideas, and they will feel very dissatisfied if they feel their consultant has not focused on their specific problems and questions. To work around this, a consultant does not have to stray far from conventional ideas and concepts – often, the problem lies with word-choice and framing. Winning frameworks are often difficult to apply to a specific company, and clients will look to a consultant’s words and deliverables for that connection.
The bottom line
Consulting is a competitive industry, with many people starting their own private consulting businesses.
While winning and keeping clients may require many tactics, the foundational mindsets put forward in this article can make or break a consulting business from the start.
Consultants with a combination of humble confidence and a mind for tailored automation will see their businesses grow by building trust and a perception of expertise among clients.
Wes Brooks is an incoming Summer Business Analyst at Cicero Group and an undergraduate studying economics, management, and strategy. He is a serial entrepreneur, works in venture capital, and enjoys singing a capella and piano improvisation.
Image: DALL-E