Building Your Practice

Whether you are planning on staying a solo entrepreneur, or are aiming at building a boutique consulting business (or indeed, the next consulting giant!) there are some simple principles which will stand you in good stead.

Marketing

From Day One, understand that you are the product. Later on, it may be you and half a dozen others - but you collectively will still be the primary product. If you eventually grow to the point where people are buying your approach and your system, rather than you, that’s fine: but you are the product for now.

Why does that matter? Because the temptation is going to be to say, “there is no point in trying to sell my services until…”, where … stands for building your web site, your social media platform presence, your marketing collaterals, your slide decks, and any number of other things that simply do not matter.

You are the product. Get out there and talk to people. This is the people economy; your prospective customers will probably be delighted to meet someone who isn’t hiding behind 30 slides. And once you have heard what those prospective customers are actually saying, you will be far better placed to position your offering with an elevator pitch, five well chosen slides and a simple web presence.

Pitching

Now forget what I just said. Yes, you are the product: but pitching is all about the prospective client - not about you. That is also why if you eventually have a slide deck for those days when things aren’t going so well in the pitch meeting, there should only be five slides, max. (I keep repeating this because I know you don’t believe me: but it’s true.)

At the start of the meeting, be ready to say what you do in one sentence or less. This is the elevator pitch, but without the luxury of 90 seconds. Something like this: “I specialise in outsourced onboarding for technology companies who use Claude Code.” Or “I develop benefits packages for Insurance companies that increase employee retention rates.”

“But what would really help me is to hear you talk about your top five onboarding challenges [or retention issues or whatever]…” From there on in, you are interviewing the prospect, and looking to discover the pain points that really matter to them. Then the last 10-15% of the meeting time allocated is where you are going to say, “as a first step, what if I was able to interview people who have joined you in the past 6 months and write a report on what would enable them to get up to speed faster?” The reason you are going to let 85% of the meeting be about them, is that you really need to have the right question there.

And never be afraid to cut yourself some slack; instead of the question, give a more general overview of the detail of what you do - and then contact them with that brief “what if” suggestion when you have had time to think. But do it the same day, within an hour or two, or you have lost momentum.

Design your Offering

You might - quite reasonably - think this one comes first; but actually, to start with, you are looking to get paying business that allows you to refine your view of what you can uniquely offer clients.

The temptation is to be all things to all people; resist that temptation if you wish to succeed. Your offering should be one thing, but seen through two to three angles of the prism.

So for example, if recruitment support is your one thing, then the three angles might be “writing better Job Descriptions”; “managing final Short-List Processing and Interview Structure” (ie mid and senior level recruitment); and “Supporting Recruitment at Scale” (ie something more appropriate to call-centre and other customer facing roles).

This is just an illustration, but it isn’t going to confuse anyone. This person clearly knows how to support recruitment, and whether we need help at the executive end of the scale, or in the call-centre, they have got us covered.

If, instead, you are saying “I do Job Descriptions, and Payroll consulting, and Executive Coaching, and OD…” then even if in your prior career you have done all of those things, you are leaving your prospective client wondering which of these is really you.

Work out what your one thing is, come up with three possible lenses on this area - and go and talk to prospective customers. And if you haven’t yet quite got your sweet spot right, be ready to tweak and try again, and again. The ability to keep pushing through the “no’s” until to get to “yes” is fundamental to business success.