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Building a business you love should be exciting – not overwhelming! On this page, you’ll find LEAP resources and advice for starting your own consulting or freelancing business.
Katie & Kris
Co-Founders of LEAP
In our blog 5 Ways to Test if Consulting and Freelancing are Right for You, Kris and Katie take you through five ways to test and explore this career option. These five ways are:
The last way on the list is to ‘Build Your Business in Your Free Time,’ which includes a few main options.
For some people, you might focus on building your business foundation by going through a program like the Launch Series and then beginning to take on clients.
For other people, this might look like creating a side hustle, where you’re testing out consulting while you’re actively employed.
Don’t think about consulting as an “all or none” proposition. There are several ways you can maintain your full-time employment and “test” the consulting waters.
Some people can transition full-time into consulting by first starting a “side hustle.” Our definition of a side hustle is where you’re actively employed, but you’re also building your business and doing projects in your free time.
There are several reasons you might consider starting a side hustle. Some want to find a way to increase your earning potential.
Others want to pursue a passion and develop a business that is outside what they do day-to-day. And others begin to take on a few engagements “on the side” to begin to test the market, the skills, and if they truly want to move into consulting.
Another way to consult on the side is to find some “subcontracted” work. You might work with an agency, another consultant or consulting firm to work part-time in an engagement. As a subcontractor, someone else finds the work and manages the engagement and they look to you do some specific part of the work.
The upside of contracting is that you will not have to find the client, sell the work, or manage the engagement. The downside is that you’ll have to find ways to integrate this work with your main source of employment.
Another upside is that you will be paid – so you can both learn and generate income. However, recognize that your subcontracting partner will take a percentage of your bill rate to cover their costs of finding and managing the work. As such, you’ll be paid appropriately, which means at a percentage of the market rate for the type of work you do.
There are many different paths to consulting. See which of these paths you identify with most below!
In 2016, Katie launched Elevate Online straight after college graduation. At that time and when they first started LEAP, Kris thought that Katie was an exception. How likely was it that individuals were launching consulting and freelancing businesses directly after earning their undergrad or masters degrees?
It turns out, it’s more likely than expected. In fact, you might be wondering if it’s possible for you to launch your consulting business after college and some would say ‘without experience.’
Our answer is this: Yes, you can go out on your own at the start of your career, and it’s becoming more common that young professionals are choosing to do this.
But in order to do this successfully, you’ll need to make sure you have a strong foundation in place.
At a high level, in order to launch your business after college you’ll need to:
This path to consulting is fairly traditional. Get a college degree. Get relevant work experience by working in your industry or field to gain experience and credibility. And then, when the time is right, launch a consulting practice.
The benefits of this approach are many. Your employer often not only provides rich experience, but often pays for advanced education or training. You learn the ropes in a real life situation. You can build a network of professional peers, both inside your company and your industry. And this approach enables you to have a steady income that, with good planning, can help you build the financial safety net you’ll need to start your consulting practice.
What you are less likely to learn by working for someone else is how to be entrepreneurial or nimble. One way to partially overcome this when employed is to find assignments that require you to implement something new and untested. That might be a pilot program, a new product launch, a startup or working on a high priority project with a tight deadline.
When you go out on your own, you’ll also have to adjust to having to resource all the things that the company just took care of. This can include your own PC, phone and other tools (this includes software). You’ll have to find a way to do your own accounting and tax returns. You’ll need to get some marketing basics under you belt and additionally you’ll need to invest in your own development.
Many professionals find consulting to be a great second career after retirement from regular employment. Consulting gives these individuals the opportunity to use their considerable expertise and to focus on the work that they most enjoy. It can enable them to stay active, give back, and contribute in meaningful ways.
Without the stringent schedule demands of full-time employment, consulting later in your career enables you to blend work and free time more seamlessly.
No matter which path you take to get into consulting, we want to help you avoid one mistake we’ve seen eager consultants and freelancers make: starting their business without a solid foundation that allows for growth.
Here’s what we mean by that: you might be so excited to start your business that you start by choosing your name and branding rather than first asking yourself the strategic questions you need to build out a business you truly want to run and own.
Kris and Katie put together a checklist that outlines the path to building an independent consulting practice. At a high-level, here are the steps:
You can dive into each of these steps in our blog 10 Steps to Start Your Own Independent Consulting Business.
Or, you can download the Biz 101 Checklist by clicking here.
And a note: while these steps might seem overwhelming, we break them down into actionable steps and walk you through them in our Launch Series. When you download the Business 101 Checklist, you’ll notice which lessons in our Launch Series will help you through which step.
At a high level, there are three key steps when building your consulting brand:
An important note, your name is first in building your brand, but having a solid plan is first in building your business. Some people’s first step in starting their consulting business is to choose a name.
In actuality, a great first step for your business is to get your foundation and plan in place. At LEAP, we recommend you first get your business’s strategic foundation in place and then create your brand.
That’s why in our 10 Steps to Start Your Consulting Business, Creating Your Business (LLC Set-Up + Branding) is the fifth step.
However, if you already have your foundations in place, you are ready to start building your consulting brand!
We have seen it time and time again. In ourselves and in others.
Sometimes when we want something new or something different; we fail to take the concrete steps that move us toward a better place. We tell ourselves that one day we will (fill in the blank) – start that business, deal with that problem, go back to school, heal that relationship, write that book.
In this “frozen” state of inaction, time slips by, and you can invent many seemingly rational reasons that this is not the time to do something different.
Most often, the reasons you use to hold off from doing something are real. However, they’re things you could work through if you knew how.
We’re sharing some of our top tips for working through the internal resistance or fear you might have about starting a business.
We’ve discovered the truth in that ageless saying that “the first step is the hardest”. We all know that just getting something rolling is harder than maintaining it once it is in motion.
I’ve also learned that there is an art to taking the first step, well beyond just the courage to take it. Here are my tips on how to finesse that first step:
Learn more about each of these steps in our blog 3 Ways to Get Over the Fear of Starting a Consulting Business.
At LEAP, we have many resources that can help you start and grow your dream consulting business.
If you’re starting to explore consulting, we encourage you to:
If you are planning on launching your consulting business or have recently launched:
We created LEAP because starting our own consulting businesses was the best possible decision we could have made for our careers, and we want to help others start their consulting businesses swiftly, smartly, and with support.
Kris has over 16 years of experience in consulting as a leadership and organizational development consultant at Evergreen Leadership. Katie founded Elevate Online nearly four years ago and has been doing digital marketing consulting since.
If you’re interested in learning more about our consulting journeys, head on over to our About Page.
