When my plan to start a management consultancy company began to form two years ago, I was oblivious to many aspects of this endeavour. Below is a list of resources that I found helpful along the way.

Because your situation will not necessarily follow my own, it is worth clarifying my perspective. I started out as: “This is all that I am good at and I want to keep doing it, wrapped as a service.” I had a reasonable network, and I had experience in building initiatives that took several years to start gaining momentum. I was also used to working very autonomously.

But before we get started, a word of caution.

Beware of the business self-help industry

There is a plethora of offers out there that promise to help you on that journey, but I found that navigating it is tricky. Business self-help is a genre infamous for dubious quality. Sorting the grift from the gems is non-trivial. The podcast If Books Could Kill does an excellent job of taking on the genre thoroughly, paired with acerbic humour.

When it comes to support through coaches or consultants, there is an entire industry analogous to the yoga industry. You train as a yoga teacher, but to make it in the long run, you need to become a teacher who trains new yoga teachers. In the consulting space, this may introduce a conflict of interest because you are training your competition. The temptation might be to help you some of the way, but not far enough.

You can spend a fortune on learning methods stamped with ™ or ®. A trademark, like a patent, is a legal exclusion device, but unlike a patent, it does not require proof of invention. Hence, training largely takes place outside formalised university degrees, and there is resistance to giving up protected gardens of practice tended in an artisanal fashion. Counting the number of coaching professorships, for instance, won’t overwhelm a child.

When evaluating a training programme, be sure to inquire about who the typical audience is. For instance, is the programme selling coaching competencies to HR professionals or is it training professional coaches? More on that from Die Zeit.

Further reading

Bräutigam, Barbara, Martina Hörmann, and Michael Märtens, eds. 2022. Alles Erfindung? Länderübergreifende Perspektiven auf Beratung und Psychotherapie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Clark, Timothy, and Matthias Kipping, eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Professional identity

Having gotten this out of the way, let’s discuss concrete resources that I found helpful for my situation.

Let’s start with professional identity. I remember doing an assessment survey offered by the startup service of the local chamber of commerce. I don’t remember much from it. It presumably told me something about stable traits, which has its merits. But by this point I was already convinced of going forward. After all, it took years of tacit dreaming to come up with the courage to leap.

Importantly, a new career is not a plan, then implement, then evaluate move, but an experience, evaluate, decide sequence. Herminia Ibarra’s work on career changes gets to the point. She argued that a career change is not a thought experiment, but that you need to make little experiments to get an embodied sense of whether this new career suits you. For instance, identify a situation in which you can experience the prospective career, be it as an internship, volunteering, or part-time independent work. I keep recommending this book over and over. Thank you, Maria O´Shea, MBA INSEAD, for the tip.

As a sidebar, the Zürcher Ressourcen Modell (ZRM®), a largely German-language resource developed by Storch and Krause, develops an entire model around why we need experiential data for our embodied evaluative pathway to be able to take a meaningful decision. It shares foundations with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

The identity question is about more than how I can experience this new career before committing to it. I am in my mid-40s and, looking at life course and career trajectory research, it is almost a cliché that I am reinventing my career at this point. It is an inflection point where ambition and the momentum of a particular education peter out and the “so what?” questions start appearing. Julia Yates’ The Career Coaching Handbook attuned me to these broader patterns.

Further reading

Ibarra, Herminia. 2003. Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business School Press.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Storch, Maja, and Frank Krause. 2014. Selbstmanagement – Ressourcenorientiert: Grundlagen und Trainingsmanual für die Arbeit mit dem Zürcher Ressourcen Modell (ZRM). Verlag Hans Huber.

Yates, Julia. 2022. The Career Coaching Handbook. London: Routledge.

Rational planning

Being mindful about how professional identity evolves is important. But be mindful not to sink the ship with an identity experiment. 📚Michael Bungay Stanier, who hosts the Conspiracy community, keeps going on about the distinction between above the waterline and below the waterline mistakes. In short, you can fix damage to a ship’s hull only above the waterline. Anything below it will sink the ship.

Professional independence is a serious financial risk, as well as a risk to your professional reputation. What constitutes above and below the metaphorical waterline depends on your situation and requires clarification. Elaine Biech wrote excellent books on planning your entry into consulting: The New Business of Consulting, or the slightly more execution-oriented The New Consultant’s Quick Start Guide. Here you learn about the economic structure of consulting, for instance, and also the important topic of having a conversation with the significant people in your life so that you have a shared view of the risk you take. That is not trivial, and so, so important, because these people are important sources of emotional support for the many challenging episodes you are going to experience. If they think your operation is moot, they cannot support you wholeheartedly.

Further reading

Biech, Elaine. 2019. The New Business of Consulting: The Basics and Beyond. Wiley.

Biech, Elaine. 2019. The New Consultant’s Quick Start Guide: An Action Plan for Your First Year in Business. Pfeiffer.

Working with clients

When I first leafed through Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting, I was puzzled by the fact that there were five (!) chapters on contracting. By that point, I had only done organisational development work as part of a large government funding programme. We used the word transformation a lot, conceived of ourselves as critical social scientists, and took the printed mission statement at face value, no matter how vague it was. Reading about contracting was a true eye-opener and many things that had gone awry started to make sense. Indeed, that book has become a “single source of truth”, if ever that jargon should be appropriate. And a huge thanks to Cynthia Selin for the recommendation.

Contracting is about building an explicit relationship. Coming into consulting from an expertise-based professional identity, there is the trap that you think the mandate is clear and that you are “to have an impact”. That is exactly where the impact metaphor comes apart. Without a functioning relationship, you only feed friction. You can only move with your client, or not move at all.

There is a broader literature on process consulting. I just want to mention Edgar Schein as an important contributor.

Further reading

Block, Peter. 2023. Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Schein, Edgar H. 2009. Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Marketing and business development

There is work “in the business” and “on the business”. Marketing and business development are part of the latter. Many dread this work, but neglecting it is a sure way of making the waterline rise quickly on your metaphorical ship.

An early lesson was that my existing network contained only a few contacts who would be my purchasers, and that I needed to leverage “the strength of weak ties” quickly (Granovetter, 1973) and talk to the contacts of my contacts. Most people respond to a request for a coffee meeting. Even better if you say “hi” from so and so. Once at the meeting, remember that this meeting is not about you or what you could do for the client. So don’t try to sell. Inquire about your interlocutor’s professional needs. Listen. If they like you and have a need, they might ask you straight out, or at some later point, or never. Who responds and when is totally unpredictable, so it is not worth inventing stories for yourself about who loves you or loves you not.

I enjoy these meetings a lot. Setting them up takes more energy. I have joined a daily co-working hour to stay disciplined in my outreach work. Thank you, Kristin Austin, for running it.

Here is where reading about marketing, observing competitors, and progressing with my own professional identity transformation begin to converge: I have been treating visibility too much as a question of self-expression, and not enough as a way of learning what clients actually notice.

My concern with projecting the right image leads me to perfectionism, which is costly and has few benefits. It also leads me to expand my portfolio rather than reduce it to a clearly recognisable anchor for my core client group. I have not yet found a reliable way to calm my inner worrier, but I can see the effect: it distracts me from seeing my clients.

I cannot judge marketing success from the outside, but I can observe a pattern. Consistent campaigns tend to centre on content that is interesting to the client. This might mean performing the identity desired by the coaching client, feeding the appetite for psychology facts, or inducing reflection by sharing client and learning stories that could be part of the reader’s own reality.

There is a long list of books on marketing and sales targeted at the likes of me. Many try to sell you the easy secret to making it, with words like “prosperous” and “profitable” in the title. I have not perused them enough to make a recommendation. One book I am feeling drawn to now is Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing. I am intrigued by the subtitle: “You can’t be seen until you learn to see.” I think this captures the entrepreneurial transformation.

Further reading

Godin, Seth. 2018. This Is Marketing. Penguin Publishing Group.

Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–80.