How to Build a Consulting Business That Doesn’t Depend on Referrals with Brian Hansen

When Brian Hansen left corporate to start his independent consulting business, he assumed his network would help him land clients.

He had more than 15 years of experience. He knew the problems he could solve. He had relationships from his corporate career.

But the referrals didn’t immediately show up.

What Brian discovered was that having a network and having the right network are two different things.

In Episode 287 of the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business podcast, Melisa Liberman talks with Brian about what it has looked like to build a more proactive consulting business from the ground up, including how he expanded his network, created a more intentional business development process, experimented with new ways to generate demand, and learned from a proposal he recently lost.

This is also the story of how Brian left corporate, moved with his family to Malaysia, and now serves primarily US-based clients from the other side of the world.

But the core of this conversation is not about geography.

It’s about building a consulting business that doesn’t depend on referrals arriving at exactly the right time.

Building a US Consulting Business From Malaysia

One of the more unusual parts of Brian’s consulting business is where he runs it from.

After living in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, Brian and his family relocated to Malaysia, where his wife is from.

Most of his clients are still based in the United States.

That means his client schedule can include early morning calls with West Coast clients and late evening calls with East Coast clients. But it also creates long stretches of uninterrupted time in the middle of his day for strategy, business development, and asynchronous client work.

Initially, Brian worried that being based in Malaysia might become an objection for prospective clients.

It hasn’t.

His company is US-based, his contracts are US-based, and his clients are ultimately focused on whether he can deliver the outcome.

That experience reinforced something important about independent consulting: the business can often be designed around the way you want to work, as long as the client experience and results remain strong.

When Your Existing Network Isn’t the Right Network

Brian expected his first consulting clients to come from people he already knew.

He had heard the common advice: your first clients will come from your network.

But his experience didn’t unfold that way.

As he looked more closely at his relationships, he realized he didn’t have a particularly strong network inside his ideal client market. He wanted to work with B2B SaaS companies, but he didn’t have enough direct relationships with founders, CEOs, or venture capital investors.

So he started building those relationships intentionally.

Through friends, former colleagues, and introductions, Brian gradually expanded his network until he connected with a venture capitalist whose portfolio company needed help with retention.

That introduction became his first client.

It gave him something more important than revenue.

It gave him evidence.

He could do the work independently. He could produce value. There was a blueprint he could repeat.

Brian’s experience challenges a common assumption among independent consultants: if your existing network is stale, retired, in the wrong industry, or simply not connected to your ideal clients, you are not stuck with it.

You can build the network your business needs.

Reframing Outreach as Being Useful

One of the biggest barriers consultants face when expanding their network is the fear of bothering people.

They worry that cold outreach will make them look desperate.

They worry they’ll damage their reputation.

They worry that following up will make them seem pushy.

Brian approaches it differently.

He starts with the belief that it is useful for the right people to know he exists.

His prospective clients are CEOs under pressure to improve retention, increase expansion revenue, satisfy investors, and create a path toward their next funding round or exit.

If Brian can help solve part of that problem, then making those CEOs aware of his expertise is valuable.

That mindset changes the purpose of outreach.

Instead of asking, “How do I get this person to respond to me?” the question becomes, “How can I make it useful for this person to know I’m here?”

Brian has been experimenting with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, connection requests, direct messages, and value-focused follow-up. Rather than immediately asking for a meeting, he shares tools, useful questions, and ideas that could help the person he is contacting.

His approach is to give people enough evidence of his expertise that when the timing is right, they already know where to find him.

Moving From Reactive Referrals to Proactive Business Development

That desire for a more proactive approach is one of the reasons Brian joined Melisa’s Consultant Lead Gen Sprint.

His business development strategy had been heavily dependent on referrals.

Referrals were useful.

But they were reactive.

Brian wanted a system where he could take more responsibility for creating the opportunities in his pipeline instead of waiting for someone else to make an introduction.

One of the first shifts was thinking about his business mathematically.

If he wanted to reach a specific revenue goal, what would the pipeline need to look like?

How many opportunities would need to exist?

What revenue streams could contribute?

Could he offer shorter engagements alongside larger consulting projects?

Could a productized offer create a different entry point?

Those questions forced him out of the practitioner mindset and into the role of business owner and sales leader.

Instead of thinking only about delivering client work, he started thinking about the system required to continually create it.

Business Development Needs Time on the Calendar

Brian also realized that building a pipeline could not remain something he worked on when he happened to have extra time.

Like most consultants, he naturally gravitates toward client delivery.

That work is interesting. It uses his expertise. It feels productive. And someone is already paying for it.

Business development can feel less immediately rewarding.

But as Brian points out, if he had a chief revenue officer sitting beside him, that person would not allow him to spend every available hour on delivery while ignoring the future pipeline.

So he began protecting time for business development.

That shift sounds simple, but it is one of the foundations of a more predictable consulting business.

You cannot create a proactive pipeline with leftover time.

Ask Past Clients What They Actually Valued

Another part of Brian’s process has been going back to previous clients and asking why they hired him and what they found most valuable about working with him.

One answer surprised him.

Brian assumed a client had hired him primarily to create a customer retention and expansion strategy.

The client described the value differently.

He wanted to test an important hypothesis quickly with someone who already knew what they were doing, without having to figure everything out himself.

That distinction gave Brian better language for his sales and marketing.

It also illustrates why asking clients for feedback is different from admitting that you don’t know what you’re doing.

As Brian explains, businesses are constantly iterating.

Products evolve.

Services evolve.

Messaging evolves.

Asking a client what they valued is simply part of improving the product.

People generally like sharing their opinion, especially when the request is thoughtful and doesn’t create a burden.

And for consultants, those conversations can uncover buying motivations that would be difficult to invent from inside your own business.

Losing the Proposal After a 100 Percent Close Rate

One of the most useful parts of Brian’s story is a proposal he did not win.

Before this opportunity, he had effectively maintained a 100 percent close rate. He had won approximately five out of five proposals.

Then a prospect chose another direction.

Brian could have treated that as evidence that something had gone wrong.

Instead, he evaluated the process.

One thing stood out immediately.

His previous proposals had included multiple options.

This one did not.

He had listened to the prospect, decided he understood what they needed, and proposed one three-month engagement.

He included language saying they could negotiate the scope, but the prospect still had to push back if the option wasn’t right.

In hindsight, Brian saw how offering multiple paths could have changed the conversation.

A shorter engagement could have created a lower-risk entry point.

A second or third option could have allowed the client to compare outcomes and investment levels without having to redesign the engagement themselves.

And there was another factor.

This was a relatively cold relationship.

Although the introduction came through a friend of a friend, Brian and the prospect did not have an established working relationship.

The client ultimately said they felt more comfortable going in another direction.

That prompted another question: had he moved to the proposal too quickly?

When the prospect asked for next steps, Brian responded quickly and produced a proposal within days. He interpreted speed as responsiveness.

But faster is not always better.

Sometimes the better sales strategy is another conversation.

Your Close Rate Should Leave Room for Experimentation

Melisa points out that consultants often celebrate a 100 percent close rate without asking what it might be telling them.

If you close every opportunity, you may not be experimenting enough.

Your pricing could be too conservative.

Your offer structure may be too safe.

You may only be proposing to people who are virtually guaranteed to say yes.

Losing a proposal is not automatically evidence of a problem.

It can be data.

The key is having an evaluation process that allows you to look at the result objectively after the initial disappointment has passed.

What worked?

What didn’t?

What assumptions did you make?

What would you repeat?

What would you change next time?

That is how a sales process becomes stronger.

The Hardest Part Is Often the Mental Side

Brian currently considers two significant client engagements to be a full consulting roster.

At the time of the conversation, he had one active client and wanted to fill the second spot.

That means navigating the question every consultant eventually faces:

When is the next client coming?

A project ends.

The pipeline looks promising, but nothing is signed yet.

Prospects move more slowly than you want.

And your brain starts filling in the blanks.

Am I doing this right?

What am I missing?

Why isn’t this happening faster?

Brian describes the mental side of consulting as one of the hardest parts of building the business.

His approach is to separate what he can control from what he cannot.

He can take business development action.

He can build relationships.

He can follow up.

He can experiment.

He can improve his offers.

He cannot force a prospect to make a decision today.

Brian also studies manifestation and uses visualization and gratitude as part of how he manages the uncertainty.

Rather than spending the day focused on the absence of the next client, he practices feeling grateful for the business he is building and visualizing the next signed engagement.

But there’s an important distinction in how he approaches this.

He is not using mindset instead of action.

He is using mindset while taking action.

As he puts it, he focuses on “taking daily action and taking the right action” while staying out of the anxiety of needing to control exactly when the result arrives.

Referrals Can Be Part of the Strategy Without Being the Strategy

When Melisa asks Brian what he would recommend to consultants who want a more predictable pipeline, he comes back to experimentation.

Keep cultivating your network.

Keep creating value.

Keep looking for ways to get your expertise in front of the people who need it.

That could be podcasts.

Speaking opportunities.

Panels.

Direct outreach.

Content.

Relationships.

Productized services.

Or something else entirely.

Brian has his own interview series where he talks with CEOs in his ideal client market. It works for him because he genuinely enjoys it.

That matters.

Some business development activities will feel natural.

Others won’t.

The goal is not to find one perfect strategy and hope it works forever.

The goal is to create multiple ways for the right people to discover, understand, and eventually hire you.

Brian still expects referrals and word of mouth to remain an important source of clients.

He simply doesn’t want to rely on them.

Building a Business One Experiment at a Time

There is no moment in Brian’s story where he suddenly discovered the perfect lead generation formula.

That is what makes his experience useful.

He built the business by paying attention.

He noticed that his original network wasn’t sufficient, so he expanded it.

He noticed that referrals felt too reactive, so he built a more proactive system.

He interviewed clients and changed his messaging based on what they told him.

He experimented with outreach.

He started building productized offers and AI tools that could create easier entry points.

He lost a proposal and evaluated why.

And he continues to work on the mindset required to keep going while the outcome is still uncertain.

That is how a consulting business becomes more predictable.

Not because every tactic works.

Because you develop the ability to run an experiment, evaluate the evidence, and decide what to do next.

Put This Into Action

Look at your current pipeline and ask yourself one question:

If referrals stopped arriving for the next six months, what would create your next client?

Not what could theoretically create one.

What system are you actively building right now?

Look at the business development activities you are using.

Where are your ideal clients discovering you?

How are you expanding the relationships around your ideal client profile?

What are you learning from the prospects who say yes?

What are you learning from the ones who don’t?

And where are you still waiting for someone else to create the opportunity for you?

Referrals can be part of a strong consulting business.

They just shouldn’t be the only plan.

If you want to build a more proactive, repeatable system for generating consulting opportunities, join the Consultant Lead Gen Sprint at www.ConsultantSprint.com.

About Brian Hansen

Brian Hansen is a customer success consultant and fractional leader who helps early-stage and growth-stage B2B SaaS companies improve customer retention and expansion revenue.

Before starting his consulting business, Brian spent more than 15 years working across account management, sales, and customer success. Today, he helps CEOs and leadership teams improve the people, processes, systems, and strategy behind customer retention and growth.

Brian launched his consulting business after leaving corporate in early 2025. He now lives in Malaysia with his wife and two daughters while primarily serving US-based clients.

Website: www.brianhansenconsulting.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bhansenconsulting