I left a major consulting firm to work independently six months ago. The transition was something I'd been thinking about for several years; the actual experience has been different from the anticipation in ways worth documenting. Here's what the first six months taught me — about the work, the business model, and the things that turned out to matter more than I expected.
The expected challenges
The challenges I had anticipated:
- Generating my own pipeline without the firm's brand
- Pricing my own work without firm benchmarks
- Managing the administrative overhead myself
- Working alone after years of large team environments
- The financial uncertainty of variable revenue
Each of these has been real. None has been the surprising part of the transition. They're the obvious challenges of going solo; you can prepare for them, and to varying degrees, I had.
The actual surprises
What surprised me most was different.
The pricing power was higher than I expected
I had assumed pricing my own work would mean charging less than the firm did, because I lacked the firm's brand. The actual experience has been the opposite. My day rates are about 70% of what the firm billed for me; my realised margin per billable day is roughly twice what I produced for the firm. Clients have not pushed back on rates. Several have suggested I should charge more.
The lesson: clients who hire me independently are buying me, not the firm. They had been doing that within the firm structure too; they just hadn't had the option to pay only for that.
The conversations are deeper
Working alone, I have more time per engagement than I ever did at the firm. The fixed cost of running engagements (team coordination, deliverable production, internal reviews) is dramatically lower. The variable time goes into actual thinking and conversation with the client.
I had not anticipated how much of what I do would improve simply by having more time per engagement. The deliverables are simpler. The thinking is sharper. The clients have noticed.
The pipeline is more concentrated than I expected
I had expected to need many smaller clients to replace one firm-scale relationship. The actual experience has been the opposite. Three or four ongoing client relationships generate most of my revenue. The marginal new client adds modestly; the established relationships compound.
This is, I think, a better business than the firm's. Lower volume of relationships, higher depth in each. Closer to advisory medicine than consulting widget production.
The loneliness was less than expected
I had worried about working alone. The actual experience: I miss specific firm colleagues, but I do not miss the general experience of large team environments. The hours that used to be spent in internal meetings are now spent on client work or on writing. The trade has been favourable.
The loneliness, when it appears, is mostly when I write. It's the kind of loneliness that comes with thinking about hard things; it would have appeared at the firm too, just less visibly. The solo work has surfaced it rather than created it.
What I had wrong about the firm
Some things I believed about the firm experience that the solo work has clarified:
I had overestimated the firm brand's leverage in client decisions. Clients I work with now had been hiring me, not the firm, even when they were paying the firm. The brand mattered for cold introductions, less so for actual engagement quality.
I had underestimated how much of my time the firm absorbed in non-client work. The internal coordination, the recruiting cycles, the practice-development meetings — they were a real percentage of my time, not the minor overhead I had treated them as.
I had overestimated the value of large project teams for most engagements. Many strategy engagements don't need teams; they need one or two senior people working closely with the client. The firm structure encouraged team scaling for billing reasons more than for engagement-quality reasons.
I had underestimated how much I would enjoy writing. The firm rewarded volume of client work; writing was peripheral. Solo, writing has become a core part of the practice. It's how new clients find me, how I think through ideas, how I build relationships at scale.
What the firm did well that I have to deliberately replicate
Some things the firm did that I now have to do explicitly for myself:
- Continuous learning. Firm structures push you to learn from peers constantly. Alone, learning has to be deliberate. I read more now, but I have to schedule it.
- Quality control. Internal reviews caught real errors. I now have to be more careful before sending work to clients. I've adopted the practice of sleeping on every deliverable before it goes out.
- Rate calibration. Firm pricing committees benchmark rates against market. Alone, I have to do this myself, and I've probably underpriced as a result.
- Long-term thinking. Firms invest in capabilities for the future. Solo, I have to deliberately allocate time to capability-building rather than current-engagement work.
What the next six months hold
The honest answer is that I'm not entirely sure. The economic case for the solo practice is now clear; the question is how to evolve it.
I've been considering several directions: building a small team (probably one or two people, not larger); developing more standardised IP that can support engagements without me being everywhere; expanding the writing into a more substantive publication. Each has appeal. Each has costs.
For now, the plan is to be patient. Six months in, the model works. The mistake would be to scale prematurely. The discipline is to let the practice develop organically and to make structural decisions only when the evidence for them is clear.
What I'd tell someone considering the same transition
Three things, on the basis of six months:
1. The financial cliff is smaller than you think. If you can replace 60% of your firm income within twelve months, you'll likely be ahead financially given the lower overhead. The threshold for "viable" is lower than firm-internal mythology suggests.
2. The professional cliff is bigger than you think. Without firm structures, you have to build new structures yourself — for learning, for quality, for client development. This is real work and it's mostly invisible if you haven't done it.
3. Your existing relationships matter more than your reputation. The clients I have now were already in my network, even when they were the firm's clients in name. If your relationship base is shallow, the transition is harder. If it's deep, the transition is easier than it looks from inside the firm.
The longer reflection
Six months in, the move was the right one. Whether it remains the right one in two years, five years, ten years is unknowable. But the work I'm doing now is closer to what I wanted to be doing than what I was doing inside the firm. The trade has been favourable on dimensions that matter to me. That's a sufficient answer for the current vantage.
The longer arc — what this business model becomes, whether it scales, whether I eventually return to a firm structure or build something new — those questions I'm holding lightly. The work, day to day, is good. The clients are interesting. The economics work. The rest will reveal itself.
