From Independent Consultant to Full Consulting Business

If you're a consulting business owner and you feel like your business has hit a ceiling, this is your invitation to break through it. Imagine this. Three transformative days in beautiful San Diego, surround by high performing consultants, trusted mentors, and a tight-knit mastermind community. All focused entirely on helping you scale with clarity, grow with confidence, and run your business with far less stress. From April 30 to May 2, 2026, you're invited to the consulting success mastermind, an intimate, results-driven experience carefully crafted for consultants who are serious about growth. Over three days, you'll dive into hands-on workshops that help you refine your positioning, pricing, and pipeline. Personalized coaching sessions, we'll get direct feedback from world-class mentors, strategic roundtables with six and seven-figure consultants, high-value networking that leads to partnerships, referrals, and lifelong relationships. You'll walk away with clarity in your strategy, actionable next steps, and a community of people who genuinely want to see you win. Don't try to build your consulting business alone. Come build it with us. Spots are limited and selling fast. Don't wait. There are only a few seats left, and this event has sold out in the past. Secure your spot now by going to consultingsuccess.com/sandiego. That's consultingsuccess.com/sandiego. Unlock clarity, confidence, and real business momentum in San Diego this spring. Your future self will look back at this as the moment that everything accelerated. Today, we're going to share a recording from our YouTube channel. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to the Consulting Success Channel on YouTube. I'll now turn it over to Michael. What's up everyone? Hope you're having a great day. I'm in a different place today, but I still want to get this video over to you. What we're going to talk about is how to go from being a solo consultant to building a consulting team. Once you make this decision, and just to be clear, this is not something that you need to do. This is not a judgment of "voy or solo consultant," and therefore you're less successful than somebody that has a team around them, whether that's a team of five people, ten people, twenty people, five hundred people. It's not about success. It is most important that you decide what you actually want. What is your vision of success? What is meaningful for you? And lean into that. We have many clients who have built high six-figure and almost seven-figure consulting business as solo consultants, and they have absolutely no desire to become consulting business owner in the sense of owning a firm and managing people and building something bigger than themselves. And that's fantastic. We have others who, in many cases, initially believe that they don't want to create a consulting firm. They want to be a solo consultant, but as they start getting more traction, more success, they realize, "Hey, I can actually build this a lot bigger," or there's greater demand. Or, "I want to be able to generate more revenue," or "I want to be able to create a business that has more value, whether I want to sell it or not." It can't then fully rely on myself. Or, "I want to shift and move away from doing everything inside of my business," which is what typically someone who a solo has to do or does do, to being very selective and only working in the areas where I feel I can add the most value. So there's a multitude of reasons of why somebody might decide to build a business that is bigger than just themselves and add team members, whether those are full-time or part-time or remote or on-site. This can come in so many different flavors and shapes, which is what makes it beautiful because you get to build a business that you truly want. But once you make that decision, you need to think about things that maybe you haven't thought about before. So there's some very important distinctions and considerations that will allow you to successfully go from being a solo consultant to being a consulting firm owner. And if you avoid these or you just don't think about them, you likely are in for a bit of pain, discomfort, and I'm hoping that this video will help you to avoid a lot of that. If you're enjoying this video or you want to learn more about upcoming videos, you can subscribe at any time, click the bell or whatever there is, you guys know how it works on you too, hopefully. But let's get back into it. So once you've made that decision, the first kind of mindset shift and the first adjustment and transition that you want to be thinking about is that you're going to be going from being a doer to being a leader. Now what that means more specifically is that when you're running a solo consulting business, you're doing pretty much everything, right? Or most things. One of the most important parts of that is that you're used to doing the work, right? The business is you, the brand is you, the work is you, the client know you, right? Like you're doing all of that and the delivery is a really big part of what you do. A lot of consulting business owners want to shift away from doing 100% of the work to doing anywhere from, you know, 50% to 0% of the work. Again, no right or wrong. I've talked, interviewed as part of the consulting success podcast, consulting business owners who are running $25, $30 million per year, consulting businesses. And they still do about 15 to 20% of their time is spent doing delivery. That's because they enjoy doing it. So there's no right or wrong in terms of percentages, but you are making a shift from being a doer to being a leader. And that's because you need to build a team. You need to think strategically about how do you get the most out of your people? How do you set a clear vision of what future looks like so you can rally your team around those people or actually say around the objectives or the goals, the metrics, right? Initiatives that are necessary in order to go from where you are to where you want to get to. If you've been involved in leadership, maybe you've led teams before. Fantastic. You already have that experience. But if you don't, you need to invest in that. You need to spend time learning about it. And I'll tell you in my case, you know, going back to the first time that we started to build a team. I didn't have a lot of leadership experience. Minimal. I had maybe leadership in sports, being a captain of the rugby team and being involved in different types of projects and things, you know, different businesses where I had exposure to managing different people. But I wasn't what I would call a true experienced leader. And so that meant I had to spend time reading books, taking courses, you know, learning from other people going into coaching programs, getting mentors like all of that, right? That is necessary to really get better at it. And I'm still learning today. That's number one. Really understanding that you're going to need to go from being a doer to being a leader until your business grows to the level where maybe you decide that you're going to bring somebody into connection, manage your team. But until that time, right, you will be managing your team. However big or small that team is. And when the business grows to a point where it makes sense, both financially and strategically, you might decide, yeah, I'm going to bring somebody into managing my team, whether that's somebody like a head of operations or COO or a CRO, a chief revenue officer, depends on how you structure your business. But that's number one. Number two, pricing. You're pricing likely will need to change when you go from being a solo consultant to being a consulting firm owner. Why? When it's you, your costs are very low, right? You don't have much in terms of expenses. Your time is directly connected to the project. When you start building a team and you have other people involved in the business, the first consideration is that your costs are going to go up. This is why many people are in for a bit of a shock when let's just say they're making $4,000 a year as a solo consultant. They decide, I'm going to build out a team because they have a bigger vision. Maybe they want to sell in the future or maybe they just want again, for all the reasons that I mentioned. And so they go ahead and they do that and they bring on one person or another person. Maybe they're two or three people in and they look at their revenue. Their revenue has grown, but it hasn't grown yet to outweigh the additional cost. And so they may have been taking home $4,000 a year. And now they might be taking home $200,000 a year. That's one possibility. It happens quite often if you're not really clear, if you don't have a good plan in place of on how to manage all of that. If you want help with that kind of stuff, that's what we do inside of our Clare E coaching program with clients. But the other thing that you might find is just that your profit margin may have been 80 or 90% and now once you've made this transition to being the firm owner of your margin, if you will, your profitability, your profit margin, you could go down to 60 to 50 to 40, but even go lower that depending on what you have going on. So these are all things you need to consider. And this directly impacts your pricing. If you're not paying attention to your fees and how you structure them, then you might find out very quickly that you're still doing work, but it's not profitable and that's sinking into a hole. So really important that you look at number one, what is your pricing strategy? Are you using still hourly fees? And if so, you need to start thinking about things like utilization and margin, really understand the math behind that. You can do get into that another video. If you all want to let me know in one of the comments here or get in touch if that would be of interest to you. But the main thing is that you want to take a good look at your pricing strategy and the model that you're using to ensure that it still works based on the trajectory and where you are taking your business. Another kind of consideration here is that when you are building your team, you're also delivering greater value to clients. So you're generally not only going to increase your fees when you go from solo to being firm, just because you have costs, although that's part of it, it's also because you are able to generally provide an even greater experience for clients, a greater outcome for clients. And so that's another kind of thing to think about. Ideally, you're not just bringing in somebody who has no idea what they're doing. You're bringing people that are knowledgeable or people that you can train up to be very good in there. Therefore, collectively, what you will create for clients and what you deliver for clients can be better because you're doing one plus one or one plus two or whatever. And so the outcome therefore becomes greater. Everyone understands that. Organizations understand that if you're a solo consultant, your fees will likely be different. And if it is a firm with more people, doesn't always have to be the case. But most often, that is, you know, that is very true. Next kind of transition or consideration, very important one is around quality control. One of the most common reasons why consultants hesitate to build a team or to hire or to expand is because they worry about what happens with the quality of the work. And if you've been doing everything yourself, right, you control that 100%. You get to decide what quality of work you want to deliver. But the mindset for a lot of people is, if I'm going to be bringing somebody on and they're doing the work, they're doing the delivery, you know, what if it's not as good as what I was doing. And so they tend to hesitate to hire people. That's a very common belief, but it's not really accurate. And that's because you can influence the quality of work in a multitude of different ways. Number one, you can influence it by who you hire, right? Hiring who obviously really good people. It doesn't have to mean that they are very expensive. It could mean that, but it doesn't always have to mean that. That's number one. So hiring the right people, it could also be just to kind of go back first. I could be somebody a little bit more junior or mid-level, but they have the right ingredients, the right criteria, characteristics, right, the hunger, all that. And so they're able to become very good and proficient quickly. Number two, that you influence us by the type of training that you provide. If you don't provide a lot of training, if you don't set clear expectations with your team, then how can you expect them to deliver a level of quality that you want? This is about systems. This is about documentation. The more that you have documented about the way that you've delivered and the expectations are what excellence looks like. If you have that documented, you've built systems or you build systems. It's much easier for your team to deliver at that same level. The example I often share with clients when there's pushback on this is to say, listen, think of any large, established consulting firm, any of the big names that you know or even any mid-sized or regional players. Do you think that the founder or the CEO of that firm is still doing all the delivery? Of course not, right? They're probably not doing any of the delivery or they might be doing a little bit of the delivery, but they're definitely not doing the majority of the delivery yet they are very successful, which means that there's a way to become successful and to overcome that gap or the concern of quality control. But you need to think about and pay attention to the types of things that I'm talking about here right now. The next is client relationships. This is an important one because it can go in a few different directions. Very early on, as a solo consultant, you and the relationship you have with the client, I mean, that's all that really exists, right? They're buying you. You are the brand, you are the company, you are the work, you are the product. As you build a team, relationships start to again adjust a little bit and this is also a very common hesitation that people have. They worry about, well, the clients that I work with and the market that I'm in, they only want me, they don't want other people on the team. That is completely false. The only reason that exists is because number one, you probably haven't had other people, so you're worried about that. Or number two, even if you have people, you likely haven't done everything that you can do to shine a spotlight on those people to position them as experts, to put a spotlight on their strengths and their skills. The savvy leader will not try and stand at the front and say, "Here's what I can do or here's what we can do, but they're doing all the talking." No, the savvy leader will pull up one of their team members and say, "Okay, Jill, I'd like you to share this now or they'd introduce and say, "I want to introduce you to just an extremely talented member of our team." Her name is Jill. She's a real expert in blah, blah, blah. She knows even more than I do in this area. Jill, take it away. Jill now steps in and she talks about whatever it is. That's one way to do it. Another way is to have your team create content. Rather than just all the voice and everything. If it's all the podcasts or videos or articles, if that's all just you over and over and over again, then that's what people desire. But if you allow or you create the environment where your team can actually become the experts, they have a voice and they become known. Not only do you cast a wider net, which is beneficial for the overall company, but people start to see the rest of your team as professionals, as experts. It's still very important for you to maintain relationships, especially with your highest value, most prized clients. I've seen examples where founders, CEOs pull out completely and things don't go the way they want. But that's generally because they don't have a good system in place. But you can, you should really be encouraging your team to develop relationships with your clients so that things don't fall on you. That's for many reasons for the health of the business. Let's say something happens to your health and you're not around anymore. You want your team to be able to not only manage, but ideally continue to cultivate and strengthen those relationships with buyers because strong relationships tend to lead to great work and tend to lead to more work. And that's one of the best ways to build your business is not necessarily trying to find new clients. It's to do more work with your existing clients. Now, the final thing I'll mention for this, but critically important, it's probably the number one reason that businesses go out of business, and that is cash flow management. It's your responsibility, even if you have a bookkeeper and an accountant, which you should, even when you get to the level of being able to hire, let's say, a CFO or probably it even begins with a fractional CFO or somebody like that, it's still your responsibility as the founder, as a CEO, as the owner to pay attention to the financial position of the business. And that will mean different things depending on what stage you're at and what your expenses are and what your goals are. Generally, it means that you want to make sure and that it's your responsibility to ensure that you have a certain amount of money in the bank at any given time. When you're a solo consultant, that's still a factor. It becomes even more important when you have a team and you have to make payroll because your responsibility now is not only to make sure the businesses is growing. But it's to ensure that you can take care of your team through the ups and through the downs. And I can tell you, going through multiple ups and downs in terms of dealing with the economy, with pronavirus, and all these other things that changed market dynamics, I had to pay attention to all those things. As a leader, as a firm owner, it's your responsibility to really understand the financials of the business. How are you doing on a week to week basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, on an annual basis? What is the cash position of the business? How much money is going out and how much is coming in on a regular basis? And even if this is not something that feels very natural or comfortable to you, you can learn it. You can get people by your side, you can talk to people, you can give you some tips. This is an area that is important to understand. I'll say another thing, which maybe goes a little bit beyond what I was initially planning to say, but as your business becomes more successful, it's also very important for you as the leader to be thinking about how to make strategic investments with the excess capital or excess money in cash that is coming into the business. I remember reading a book that talked a lot about the most successful CEOs, and this is generally a larger organization, but it still applies to smaller companies, the best CEOs understand or become great at capital allocation. That's just a really fancy, essentially a fancy way of saying they are smart and they're good at deciding where to put money. Right? And so they look at decisions, they look at opportunities, not as cost or expenses, but they look at them as investments and what is the potential ROI. That's why I always say for us, probably one of the greatest gifts that we are given early on, we work with our first coach and we've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years and working with different coaches ourselves. But one of our early coaches helped us to understand that yes, you might pay a lot for coaching, you might make a big investment, but the thing about that is if you can get a much greater return. So everything around you, when you start seeing it not from the perspective of, is this an expense or is this a cost, right? But if I put money into this, how likely is it that I'm going to get more back? And to what degree? And does that make sense? Just to clarify, I'm not saying don't pay attention to cost and expenses. That's actually one of the most important things that you need to do. If you spend too quickly, if you put too much out there, if you're not thoughtful about the decisions that you make, that could lead to ruin. But likewise, you want to also start to put that hat on of looking for opportunities all around you and thinking through the lens of if I put money into it, if I make an investment, will this help us to grow? Will this help us to achieve our goals? That is a great way to an a great mindset to grow your business. So I hope this has been helpful. These are just a few. There are so many considerations and important kind of pivotal points and keys that you need to pay attention to. If you're thinking about going from a solo consultant or maybe you have one or two people right now and you want to grow in the business to the next level, that's what we help our clients with inside of the clarity coaching program. So you are very welcome to reach out to have a no obligation conversation about your current situation. About what you want to accomplish and will tell you very frankly whether or not it is a good fit and whether you would qualify for the clarity coaching program and if we can help you. But we have three different levels of the clarity coaching program. You can learn a lot more about all of that by clicking on the link below this video or if you are consuming this in some other format like audio, they'll probably be a link somewhere around. If not, just go to consultingsuccess.com and you will be able to easily find access to all of them. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this, you'll love all the free resources, case studies and best practices at consultingsuccess.com. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Thank you so much. Before you head out, I've got a quick ask. If you're finding value in the podcast, go ahead and hit that follow button right now. It's the easiest way to make sure you never miss an episode. 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