CHAPTER 40

Becoming a Successful Consultant: From Startup to Market Leadership

Andrew Sobel

Consulting can be one of the most challenging yet highly rewarding professions. Being your own boss, doing meaningful work, choosing exciting projects, and working with organizations and people you respect is satisfying. But there are hard realities too. Success requires that you sell and market your services, that you have a strong network and know how to build relationships, and that you have robust intellectual capital that others value and that draws clients.

I once had a client who had clearly experienced too many internal meetings and too much corporate hierarchy. One day he said to me, wistfully, “You’re lucky. You don’t have a demanding boss telling you what to do. You get to travel to interesting places and give speeches. You write books. You’re always working on some new and different project.”

I smiled politely, knowing full well that my client didn’t realize how much careful planning, hard work, and commitment has to go into building an independent consulting practice. And on some days, truth be told, I was a far worse boss than his.

To my client, however, it looked easy. It is a challenging journey, and there are some land mines you must watch out for on your road to independence. But you can achieve great success—and hard-to-achieve personal satisfaction—if you follow some basic strategies that have helped many go from startup to market leadership.

So how do you develop and sustain a successful, independent consulting practice? During my own 40-year career as a management consultant, I have built or helped to build four significant consulting businesses. The first two were for a large global consulting firm, where I worked for the first 15 years of my career and served as a senior vice president and country CEO. Then, in 1995 I founded my own global firm, Andrew Sobel Advisors, which has grown steadily in revenue to exceed seven figures today. The fourth is a successful online learning business based on my books, research, and client practice, which has attracted clients from around the world.

Based on these experiences, I have developed a practical approach to help consultants develop, grow, and sustain a consulting business—and ultimately, achieve market leadership in your chosen niche. I call it the practice growth model. It comprises three concepts:

•  The six competencies for success

•  Accelerating to breakthrough growth

•  Achieving market leadership

The 6 Competencies for Success

You must master six major competencies to become a successful solo consultant who is able to sustain and grow a practice over many years. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Robust Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital (IC) comprises the set of frameworks, ideas, strategies, points of view, and analytical approaches that you have developed to help solve your clients’ important challenges. These constitute your thought leadership, and they underpin and inform your client work. Intellectual capital becomes intellectual property (IP) when it is embodied or expressed in a product, such as a how-to framework, assessment, video, or tool. Generally speaking, you can copyright or trademark IP, whereas IC is too general for legal protection.

In a world crowded with lookalike competitors and clients who are overwhelmed with choices, robust IC is essential for setting you apart from the masses. Two keys to developing strong intellectual capital are consistency and freshness.

For the topics you want to be known for, you must create a flywheel effect by writing and speaking regularly. Over time, your recognition will grow. Not least, when clients search for your topic, your name will be near the top of the search results. Freshness means having a new or different perspective on the issues you write about. If you are simply parroting what everyone else is saying about leadership or teamwork, you won’t stand out.

Strong Client Relationships

Consultants must not only be able to form enduring relationships with a core group of clients; they also have to earn repeat and referral business from them.

How do you know you have a strong client relationship? Here are six signs:

•  Trust. Your client has confidence in you, enabling you to work informally and without frequent check ins.

•  Value. Your client perceives strong value-add from your relationship.

•  Respect. Your client listens to what you have to say and respects you as a professional and as a person—and vice-versa.

•  Transparency. Your client communicates frequently and openly and is willing to share their plans with you.

•  Loyalty. In your area of expertise, your client will always call you first to discuss their need.

•  Reference-ability. If asked, your client would provide an enthusiastic review of your work. In the best relationships, your clients will actively promote you to their colleagues and peers.

A good consultant needs many different skills, and, frankly, some are the same as what you need in any professional job. I tend to focus on what sets you apart from the crowd around you, not just the table stakes. For example, your analytical skills may get you in the door, but being able to synthesize and engage in big picture thinking will make you truly stand out in your clients’ eyes.

There is a critical mindset shift that enables you to develop trusted advisor relationships with clients—the move from expert for hire to client advisor (Figure 40-1).

In short, entry-level capabilities include deep expertise in an area important to your clients, analytical skills, being seen as credible to prospective clients, rapport building, and other more general qualities like intelligence and communications skills. But in the client marketplace, these don’t truly set you apart from other “experts.”

Those who stand out bring something else. They have well-developed questioning skills, deep listening, big picture thinking (synthesis), the ability to go beyond professional credibility and build deep personal trust, a deep generalist knowledge set that adds breadth (business acumen) to their expert depth, and a mindset of independence (enabling them to disagree and push back).

I once worked with a client who was facing a demotion and pay cut from his firm because of a gradual decline his consulting practice had seen over several years. When I first met him, he said: “Andrew, my clients know what I do and when they need me they’ll call me.” I knew right away that this reactive, expert mindset was holding him back because he was simply waiting for clients to call.

To be a consultant you need deep expertise. But to build great client relationships you need to shed the expert mindset and develop a client advisor mindset. This mindset shift affects every aspect of your day-to-day behavior. When you have an expert mindset, for example, you tend to set a high bar before you see a client—you think you need a great idea and most likely a PowerPoint deck to boot. When you have the advisor mindset, in contrast, you lower your threshold. You know that you can go have a cup of coffee with a client, ask some thoughtful questions, make some observations about practices that are helping your other clients, and have a great conversation.

A Network of Valuable Contacts

This competency expands on the previous one. My research has found that in their careers, most professionals have around 20 to 25 key relationships that really make a difference. And not all of these relationships are with clients. In fact, it turns out you need to think broadly about your relationship capital and consciously develop relationships in several major categories:

•  Clients and prospective clients

•  Catalysts who can introduce you to others and make deals happen

•  Collaborators, which could include law firms, banks, and accounting firms

•  Counselors, who advise and mentor you

•  Companions, your friends and family who nurture your emotional and spiritual side

If you work in a firm, then your colleagues would be an additional, important category. I call these 20 to 25 individuals the “critical few,” and they merit a substantial amount of your time investment in relationship building.

In addition, there are also “the many”—the hundreds of other contacts in your database whom you should stay in touch with using a cost- and time-effective approach.

Try writing down a list of your 20 most important professional relationships. How easy was it to make your list? Are there people on it whom you have been ignoring and need to re-engage with? Do you understand the priorities and needs for each individual? How could you help them achieve one of their goals?

A Compelling Value Proposition

A value proposition describes how you add value to your clients. Some consultants mistake their methodology for a value proposition, saying things like “I coach executives” or “I re-engineer supply chain processes.” However, I have always described my value proposition—how I tangibly help my clients—as follows: “I help organizations and individuals develop their clients for life.” Or a longer version would be, “I can help your company grow revenues by developing the individual and institutional capabilities needed to consistently expand existing client relationships and acquire new clients.”

In conversation, it’s often effective to follow up your value proposition statement with a short client example. For example: “I help clients dramatically strengthen their leadership capabilities to support their strategic goals. Let me share an example of that.”

How you frame what you do for clients can make all the difference. One consultant I coached was marketing her workshop facilitation services to HR managers who constantly tried to bargain about fees due to their limited budgets. After we redefined her value proposition toward helping clients make faster, better decisions, she was able to attract business unit executives as clients and charge higher fees.

Effective Marketing and Sales: A Client Attraction Strategy

There is a big difference between calling on a prospective client to pitch your services and getting a call from someone who says, “I need to speak with you!” Do you want to knock on doors? Or do you want to wake up and open your email to see the subject line: “Keynote Speech Request”?

You should communicate a well-articulated value proposition to your chosen target clients through carefully selected channels. There are several dozen ways to do this, such as through publishing, speaking, newsletters, direct mailings, whitepapers, client referrals, your website, blogging, videos, and client forums that meet regularly.

Once you are in front of a prospective client, you then have to build a trusting relationship. To go from a general conversation to a sold project you must achieve five objectives:

•  Build rapport.

•  Establish your credibility.

•  Understand their issues.

•  Go deep and add value to a specific challenge.

•  Bridge toward a proposal and sale.

Remember, your goal is to build a relationship and create an eager buyer, not sell your solution. A key strategy during business development is showing rather than telling. Telling is when you say you’re the best, provide statistics about your practice, and describe your methodologies. Showing is when you share short client examples, best practices, potential ideas, and references with your prospect.

Self-Management and Development

The previous five capabilities require a foundation that consists of what I call your “deep generalist” capabilities. A deep generalist is a professional with great depth of knowledge in their core expertise, as well as a breadth of knowledge about the business world and the markets and industries their clients operate in. Deep generalists can squarely place their services within the context of their clients’ business goals, and, because of their breadth, they are able to make creative knowledge connections that others do not. They also connect with senior executives more effectively than narrow specialists. To become a deep generalist you must engage in continual personal development, maintaining a burning curiosity as you read widely and hone your intellect. Because you are basically selling your know-how as a consultant, it follows that regular investment in your personal development and skills is essential.

Accelerating to Breakthrough Growth

Each of these six factors is important. Two of them, however—intellectual capital and relationships—are especially critical and explain a great deal of an individual consultant’s success.

To create a simplified view of what it takes to grow a practice, let’s apply Occam’s Razor to our list. Occam’s Razor was postulated by the 14th century English theologian William of Ockham, who wrote that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, “the simplest explanation is usually the best one.”

So, if we combine the two super factors intellectual capital and relationships into a two-by-two square, we get the Practice Growth Matrix (Figure 40-2). Let’s look briefly at the four quadrants.

Quadrant 1. Opportunistic Growth

At this stage you are bringing your work experience, education, and historic relationships to the table as you launch and establish your practice.

The challenge: If you don’t develop a network of buyers, deepen your relationships, and start to build your intellectual capital, you’ll be living hand-to-mouth forever—your growth will be based on opportunistic factors rather than a systematic approach.

Quadrant 2. Relationship-Driven Growth

Often, during the first few years of a new consulting practice, you rely on just a couple major clients for your work. They don’t care if you haven’t written a bunch of articles, published a book, or developed a three-factor model for remote learning—they know you and trust you and appreciate your knowledge of their organization, your skill, and your judgment. (That’s how I got started when I left my old consulting firm 25 years ago!)

The challenge: It’s wonderful to have a core group of just a couple relationship clients, but it is also risky to be reliant on so few. If you’re just starting out, remember that acquiring one or two clients is a great start but does not constitute a sustainable practice!

Quadrant 3. Ideas-Driven Growth

By developing compelling thought leadership around a topic, you create your attraction strategy. This draws clients to you and makes you appealing to prospective buyers. A powerful idea that you can package into a ready solution for clients can drive very rapid growth—just look at the early days of strategy consulting firms like Boston Consulting Group, whose growth-share matrix and time-based competition concepts attracted many clients, or Bain & Company’s work on customer loyalty.

The challenge: Even with great ideas and intellectual capital, you still have to acquire, manage, and retain clients. You also don’t want to be a one-trick pony who is so strongly identified with just one management tool or service that you end up being a hit-and-run consultant with a purely transactional client base.

Quadrant 4: Breakthrough Growth

When you combine great intellectual capital with strong client relationships, you can drive breakthrough revenue growth. Your IC gives you a platform to reach out to a broader network with your marketing efforts (a published book, a newsletter, forums, speaking engagements, and so on) as well as the right to charge high fees. In addition, your powerful, core relationships provide a steady revenue stream, a low cost of sales, a referral business, and a testing ground for newer services that a longstanding client will willingly buy from you. In this quadrant, you are also often perceived as a trusted advisor by your clients.

You can approach the breakthrough growth quadrant from either angle—from a position of having deep, core client relationships or by leading with strong intellectual capital—or through an equal blend of both. I actually started out with a relationship-based model and then shifted to an intellectual capital model when I wrote my first two books, Clients for Life and Making Rain. At that point the pendulum swung back as I built a new set of core relationship clients who had been drawn to my books.

Achieving Market Leadership

Solo practices can develop through four phases:

•  Startup. You are just finding your first clients and trying to get established as a solo practitioner.

•  Sustainability. Here, you bridge the gap between starting with a few projects for one client and having a sustainable practice based on multiple clients and a variety of projects. This can happen in the first year or it might take a couple years.

•  Market penetration. At this stage you further expand your practice and build a long-term network of past, present, and prospective clients. You have achieved strong capability in most, if not all, six competencies described earlier.

•  Market leadership. If you make it to this stage—and not everyone does—you become an acknowledged thought leader and a leading practitioner in your chosen market niche. Often, this does not occur until later in your career, simply because it takes time to build up a body of work and cultivate the lifelong network of relationships that support a position of market leadership. However, by focusing on and investing in the development of your core competencies, you can reach market leadership more rapidly—it can happen in years, not decades. Well-chosen investments in yourself will always have a significant payoff.

We can take these four stages of practice development and overlay them on the practice growth matrix (Figure 40-3) to show how much you need to develop your relationships and IC to progress toward market leadership.

Do You Have the Right Mindset?

There is one final thing that is essential if you want to work as an independent professional—I call it the mindset of independent wealth. Some years ago, I was interviewing a CEO of a $20 billion telecommunications company for one of my books. I’ll never forget what he said to me: “You know, Andrew, I wish all of my advisors were independently wealthy. That way, I’d know that they are putting my agenda first, being truly objective about my issues, and always telling me the straight story without regard to financial outcomes.”

You may not be independently wealthy, but you can cultivate a similar mindset regardless of your economic condition. This requires three things:

•  You need to treat your clients like a peer (not look up to them or down at them).

•  You must never have the clock running—you have to be completely in the moment when you’re with a client.

•  You need to exude enthusiasm and passion for your work (we all love enthusiasm—it’s contagious).

If you exemplify these behaviors, you’ll have an attractive aura that draws clients closer. After all, aren’t these the very same qualities that would attract you to someone else in your professional life? If you embody the mindset of independent wealth, you’ll have a centered quality that will serve you well in every aspect of your professional practice.

Final Thoughts

I suggest you start your journey by answering these basic questions:

•  What is the state of your practice today?

•  What intellectual capital and relational assets do you have that you can build on?

•  What are your aspirations and goals for your practice development over the next three years?

You can then identify the changes you need to make to achieve your goals. Does your value proposition need sharpening? Do you need to further develop your thought leadership? Are you reaching out to existing and prospective clients regularly? Should you expand your service offerings?

To better understand where you should be focusing your efforts right now, download the Six Competencies Assessment at andrewsobel.com/growth-assessment or on the handbook website, ATDHandbook3.org.

About the Author

Andrew Sobel is the leading authority on the strategies and skills required to earn lifelong client loyalty and build trusted business relationships. He is the most widely published author in the world on this topic, with nine acclaimed books that have been translated into 21 languages. His books, which focus on earning clients for life as a trusted advisor, include It Starts With Clients and the international bestsellers Clients for Life and Power Questions. As founder and CEO of the international consulting firm Andrew Sobel Advisors, he has advised many of the world’s leading companies on their client development and growth strategies. For more information and to contact him, visit andrewsobel.com.

Recommended Resources

Sobel, A. n.d. “Andrew Sobel’s Learning Academy.” learning.andrewsobel.com.

Sobel, A. n.d. “Knowledge Archive.” andrewsobel.com/articles.

Sobel, A. 2009. All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Sobel, A. 2020. It Starts With Clients: Your 100-Day Plan to Build Lifelong Relationships and Revenue. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Sobel, A., and J. Panas. 2012. Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.