A few months ago, in a CTO School lunch, the conversation turned to starting your own consulting business. Here are a few things I mentioned and what I wish I’d known earlier.
It starts with fear, and that’s fine
Everyone who’s done this will tell you the same thing: it’s scary to start. The practical advice is simple: don’t carry debt into it, and build a savings buffer before you leap. But there’s something more important underneath that advice. Before you even think about clients or positioning or pricing, you need to be honest with yourself about what you actually want.
If stability and a reliable income are what matter most to you, staying employed is probably the smarter path, at least for now. There’s no shame in that. But if what you’re after is flexibility and autonomy, the ability to choose your work, your hours, your people, then going independent might be worth the risk. Just know that “flexibility” doesn’t mean easy. You’ll still work long hours. The difference is that they are your long hours and your choice (not someone else’s choice).
Stability isn’t glamorous, but it’s everything
Consulting has a rhythm that catches a lot of people off guard: busy stretches followed by slow ones, income that spikes and dips without much warning. We call that rhythm: feast-famine. You have to learn to save during the good periods, and you have to get serious about your finances in a way that most employees never need to.
What gave us our confidence early on was an ongoing client engagement, part-time over a few years. It wasn’t flashy. But that predictable income created something more valuable than money: it gave us the freedom to say no. To decline work that didn’t fit, to wait for the right opportunities rather than grab whatever came through the door.
Knowing what you want to be known for
Here’s a tension nobody warned me about: early on, you need to say yes to things to learn what the market actually wants. But every yes shapes your reputation. Say yes to the wrong things long enough, and you’ve accidentally built a business you don’t want.
When we started Blackmill, we built our foundation on values: keep learning, do good work, and do it with people we like. That clarity helps with decision-making later.
Additionally, my advice is to stay mindful of what you want to be known for, even before the work fully reflects that. Clear positioning matters, but it conflicts with the exploration phase most new consultants go through. There’s no perfect answer here. Just awareness.
Being a great consultant, engineer, or coach is not enough. You need to switch from working in the business to working on the business. That means doing sales, marketing, admin, networking, and outreach, and getting good at all these functions. Starting a business is the first step, but it is not enough. Like thinking that if we build a website, they will come. They will not. You will need to capitalise on your previous reputation and relationships to bring in the first clients. And that work never stops.
How you charge changes everything
There are various pricing models. Here are three:
- Time and materials puts the risk on the client: you bill for hours, and scope changes are their problem.
- Fixed pricing flips that: you absorb the risk, but you can charge a premium for the certainty you are providing, and you have to manage the scope and client relationship along the way (or scope will creep and profit will diminish).
- Value-based pricing ties your fee to the business impact you create, often as a percentage of the outcome.
Each model reflects a different relationship with the client and a different belief about your own contribution. Value-based pricing can be difficult to implement, especially in training and coaching, where the results don’t always show up neatly in revenue figures, but it’s not impossible. It requires confidence and a willingness to have a different kind of conversation.
The through-line in everything I’ve learned building Blackmill is this: the craft gets you in the door, but the business requires something else entirely. You stop working in it and start working on it. That shift, from practitioner to founder, and learning to talk about what you do smoothly, is the real challenge nobody talks about enough.