You left corporate with a clear picture of what you wanted.
Autonomy. Control over your time. Work that felt meaningful and paid what you were worth. A business on your terms.
Here’s what happens instead for a lot of independent consultants: the business gets built one micro-decision at a time. You take the client that isn’t quite right because it’s available. You agree to the schedule compromise because the work is clear. You keep doing execution work because that’s what comes in. And then one day you look up and realize the business you’ve built doesn’t look much like the one you intended.
In Episode 280 of the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business podcast, Melisa Liberman addresses this directly, walking through why it happens so easily and what to do about it.
Three Consultants Who Built the Wrong Business by Default
Melisa opens the episode with three real scenarios that inspired it.
The first is a consultant who always knew he wanted a boutique consultancy, multiple millions in revenue, eventually 10 million plus. From the beginning, this wasn’t a “maybe I’ll stay solo” situation. He started solo, landed amazing projects globally, and has been doing a lot of travel in the first half of the year. He’s also exhausted. The work is good. The trajectory is good. But he’s off by one or two degrees from the business he actually meant to build, and one or two degrees compounds over time.
The second is a consultant who built a successful solo practice doing high-level strategy and fractional work. She’s started bringing on subcontractors to handle execution, and she’s realized she wants to flip the model entirely: from 80% self-delivered and 20% team-delivered, to 20% self-delivered and 80% team-delivered. Mostly working on the business, not in it. The challenge is that the 80/20 model is working well, and adjusting the plane while it’s flying is harder than it looks.
The third is a solo consultant who’s landing a lot of work but not the right kind. It feels like staff augmentation. Extra pair of hands, not strategic partner. The revenue is fine on paper. The fulfillment isn’t there, and neither is the autonomy or the pricing that would come with the work she actually wanted to be doing.
None of them built the wrong business on purpose. They built it through micro-decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time.
Why This Happens: Micro-Decisions and Invisible Trade-Offs
Melisa names the pattern directly. When independent consultants don’t have a clear picture of the business they’re building toward, the business gets built by a collection of micro-decisions instead.
You take the red-flag client because it’s in hand. You agree to underpriced work because the engagement is clear and you can handle it. You compromise on your schedule because it’s probably not that stressful. None of those decisions feels significant on its own. Over time, that collection of decisions becomes your business model. And most of the time, it isn’t the model you wanted.
These come with invisible trade-offs. Every opportunity depends on you, and you’re the one responsible for everything. You’re context-switching between three clients and your own business development. You’re making money but can’t take time off. You’re charging by the hour and every vacation becomes a decision between rest and revenue.
You might be successful on paper and still feel like the business is running you rather than the other way around.
The reason most independent consultants end up here isn’t laziness or bad judgment. It’s that they never defined what they actually wanted clearly enough to build toward it intentionally.
Two Questions to Start With
Before doing anything else, Melisa asks two questions.
Why did you leave corporate? Not the surface answer. The real one. What did you outgrow? What were you no longer willing to tolerate? What were you moving toward?
Why haven’t you gone back? For Melisa, 14 years in, it’s that she doesn’t want anyone telling her what to do, when to work, or how much she can make. That clarity is what keeps her going when it’s hard. Your version of that answer is what will keep you going too.
These questions matter because the answers tell you what actually matters to you. And that’s the foundation for building the business you actually want rather than the one you fell into.
The Five Steps to Build the Business You Actually Want
Step 1: Get clear on what you want. Not what’s realistic. Not what seems achievable. If anything were possible and your business could be anything, what would it look like? Financially, in terms of the work you’re doing, the clients you’re working with, how you’re spending your time, where you’re located. Start from a clean slate before adding filters.
Step 2: Define your ideal job description. Within that business, what would you be doing? Not what’s left over. Not what you should be doing. What would you love to be doing most of the time, and how close to that can you get?
Step 3: Figure out who you’ll need to become. The way you think right now, what you believe is possible, how you carry yourself in conversations with ideal clients — those are creating your current results. If you want different results, you need to think and operate differently. Who does that require you to become?
Step 4: Identify the obstacles. Write them all down without filtering. What will stand in your way? What has stopped you before? What are you afraid will happen? Then build a response plan for each one. Not to prevent all obstacles — obstacles are part of building anything worth building — but to have a plan when they arrive rather than being caught off guard.
Step 5: Give yourself multiple attempts. Break the goal down to monthly metrics and give yourself 12 chances a year to make progress. If the goal is to flip the revenue model from self-delivered to team-delivered, the monthly version might be generating five new leads per month for the type of work the team will handle. Hit it three times out of 12, then seven, then 12. That’s how the business model shifts over time without requiring everything to change at once.
Put This Into Action
Melisa closes with a direct charge.
Ask yourself what business you actually want. Not what you’re managing right now. Not what seems realistic. What would you build if you were starting from scratch and knew you’d succeed?
Then ask what your ideal job description is within that business.
Then commit to making it happen — not evaluating whether it’s possible, not asking if anyone has done it before. The question is how you’ll make it happen.
The business model chapter in the Grow Your Consulting Business book is the companion resource for this episode. It walks through the business model design process in the same framework Melisa uses with her private coaching clients.
Resources Mentioned
Companion Resource: Grow Your Consulting Business Book and Toolkit — download free at melisabook.com or buy on Amazon
Mentioned in this Episode: Episode 267 — the Frankenbusiness episode referenced in this one
More Resources for Independent Consultants
- Coaching for Consultants: Click here to apply for your Coaching Fit Call.
- Book: Grow Your Consulting Business: The 14-Step Roadmap to Make Your Independent Consulting Goals a Reality
- YouTube Podcast Channel
- Melisa’s Free Resources, Books, Planners & Journals: https://linktr.ee/melisaliberman
- Website
