The secret consultant: your first steps to independence
Photo by Ernesto Norman on Unsplash
You roll over lazily in bed and eye the clock. Somehow or other you don’t quite fancy going to work. How strange! “Hey, boss,” you murmur intimately. “Okay with you if I have the day off? I’m not sick, I just don’t feel like getting out of bed today.” “Sure thing,” your boss responds. “Sleep in, treat yourself to a leisurely late breakfast, and spend the day lazing on the sofa, pottering about, or taking a walk, with my blessing. Do a little light work later if you want to, but if you’re just not feeling it, use the time for self-care instead.”
Sounds good, doesn’t it? You’re not sleeping with the boss, of course; that would be most unethical. You’re the boss.
As we saw in Self-driving people, many of us dream of one day working for ourselves, but just aren’t exactly sure how to get started. The trouble with dreams of independence is that it’s easy for them to remain just that. Without a clear timetable and plan of action, you’re unlikely to achieve much. As with most things, the hardest part of building your independent career is taking the first step.
The best time to start, then, is before you start. Don’t quit your job yet: there’s some ground to prepare before that time comes. It’s wise to start planning and working towards independence long before you take any irrevocable steps:
You can figure out how to start getting revenue for side hustles, and project when it’ll enable you to go to work for yourself full-time
You can polish up the skills you’ll need to go solo before you quit, while you’re still drawing that sweet, sweet salary
You can play a little game I like to call “the secret consultant”; it’s a new way to think about your work, by asking how what you’re doing actually creates value for the person who’s paying for it. Your employer won’t be mad. On the contrary, they’ll be delighted.
Let’s talk about how to start moving the needle towards freedom.
Setting a deadline
While you shouldn’t try to launch the rocket before you’ve built it, you do need some kind of time-bounded plan. Vague deadlines like “in a few years” are too nebulous to spur you into any definite action. Instead, they keep receding as time goes on, always remaining just a little way off, like the end of the rainbow.
So I think it’s important to pick some specific date as your Independence Day: the day you’ll be ready to support yourself entirely with the revenue from your own business. Once you have a deadline, things will start to fall into place.
You’ll be able to identify the specific skills and experience that you need to get between now and then. It’ll give you a head start on the networking, brand-building, and business knowledge you’ll want to have in place when the time comes. And you can figure out how much money you’ll need to be making for independence to become sustainable.
Once you have a reasonable estimate of what your business needs to bring in just to keep your head above water, start thinking about how long it might take you to reach that level of reliable monthly revenue.
Your salary is fairly predictable, but the same won’t be true of your independent business earnings, especially at the start. It may take you months to get your first customer. Even once you’re established, you might make a decent amount one month, but nothing at all the next.
So you can, and should, start working independently long before your official Independence Day, if at all possible. (One thing to check, though, is that your contract of employment actually allows you to do this: some may not.)
Sharpening your skills
You need to be pretty good at something to make a business out of doing that thing. You can’t learn on the job—or rather, you can and will learn a great deal, but you’ll also need to have decent skills before you start.
The best way to get them is on your employer’s dime, of course. So even the most independent-minded people should figure on spending at least a few years in employment before launching their own solo career.
And it makes sense to start with something you’re already good at, something that you can sell, and that most people can’t do for themselves. Remember, you don’t have to be the world’s expert at whatever it is. You only need to be able to do it.
Whatever the skill, ask yourself: are you good enough yet that paying customers should be happy with your work? If not, why not? What aspects do you need to improve to bring your skill up to commercial standard?
You know more than you think
Remember that everyone suffers from impostor syndrome to some extent. Actually, you know a lot more than you realise. That’s because before you know how to do something, it seems complicated and impossible, and after you’ve learned how to do it, it seems trivial and obvious.
A good way to compensate for this cognitive bias is to try teaching somebody else to do the skill. You’ll be amazed at how much you know that most people don’t know. This will bolster your self-confidence, and also help you deepen your own knowledge. When you understand something well enough to explain it to somebody else, you really understand it.
Bear in mind, though, that any specific knowledge, especially about technology, will inevitably go out of date. The more immediately marketable the skill, the more limited its shelf life. That means you’ll need to keep learning, even when you’re working independently.
All good companies invest in research and development, and yours should be no exception. When you’re not fully booked with paying work, use your spare time to read, study, and practise new skills. Even when you are fully booked, make sure you still regularly carve out time to top up your knowledge tank and keep abreast of new developments.
The most valuable skills, though, are those that never become obsolete: problem solving, time management, self-discipline. Patience, determination, methodical working, keeping good notes and records. Absorbing new information, listening to people and understanding their requirements, writing clearly and precisely, explaining complicated technical issues, communicating with non-technical people; all these will stand you in good stead throughout your independent career.
Make a list of these and all the other skills you can think of that would possibly be useful in your future solo business. Grade yourself on all of them, and identify where you think you need to improve. Start working on those areas right now.
Learn on your employer’s dime
While you’re on salary, you have more leeway for this kind of learning and experiment. If it takes you slightly longer to do something because you’re learning new techniques, that’s okay; if you screw it up and have to start again, it’s not the end of the world. Failure is an option.
Use every opportunity you have to bolster the skills and experience you’ve decided you’ll trade on when you go solo. Your employer can hardly object to you taking the initiative on self-training: it makes you more valuable to them as well as to yourself.
With that in mind, it’s a good idea to start thinking of yourself like an independent worker, even before you technically become one.
Let’s play a game called “the secret consultant”. In this game, you role-play as a consultant who’s been brought in to your company to solve some kind of specific problem.
The secret consultant
When you’re a consultant, even a pretend one, it fundamentally shifts the way you think about what you’re doing. Ask yourself questions like “What does the client actually need me to do here? Am I listening and understanding their requirements properly? What am I doing specifically that delivers value to the client? Am I communicating that value to the right people, in the right way?”
When you’re asking these questions, and getting the right answers, you’re winning the secret consultant game. This will build valuable experience and confidence, and you may even find that it makes you better at your job. Your employer may think so, too.
If you feel stressed, anxious, or under pressure in your current position, being a secret consultant can help. After all, a consultant’s engagement is time-limited: whether it works out well or not, they’ll eventually move on to new clients and new problems. It’s easier to maintain a healthy degree of emotional detachment when you know that.
One major source of work stress for employees is the knowledge that mistakes can have long-term consequences: if your boss doesn’t view you favourably, or you have a difficult relationship, it can seriously damage your career prospects. As a consultant, though, that’s not the case. If you screw up an engagement with one client, that’s not ideal, but don’t worry too much about it: there will always be other clients.
When you play the secret consultant, it helps you take a more relaxed attitude to your real job, too. Loosen up a bit, be more experimental, and get less involved in arguments about how to do things. The stakes might be high for the company, but they’re not so high for you, since you won’t be here forever. So chill out, and take a more objective view of things.
Diversifying your client base
One other interesting thing you’ll notice as a secret consultant is that your client base suddenly looks rather over-concentrated. One hundred percent of your revenue comes from a single company, and if anything happens to it, your income will drop to zero right away.
No sensible business owner would let themselves get into such a dangerous position. They wouldn’t want any single client to account for more than, say, a quarter of their total revenue. So they would diversify: they’d look for new clients, learn new skills, open up new areas of business, and spread their risk exposure.
But that’s the one thing you can’t do when you’re a full-time employee. So, if you’re not actively working towards independence already, you’re living on borrowed time. I don’t say this to scare you, but as soon as you start thinking about yourself as a business, full-time employment suddenly seems rather risky, doesn’t it?
On your independence day, and maybe well before it, start getting yourself into a safer and more sustainable position by taking on multiple clients. While the prospect of going it alone may seem scary, it’s actually less risky than the position you’re in right now. You never know when you’re going to lose a client; it could be tomorrow.
Are you ready to be… Master of Your Domain?
So start planning your independent future today, because it might arrive sooner than you expect. My new book Master of Your Domain is all about how to do that, and how to build the skills you’ll need when you’re ready to go to work for yourself.
You’ll learn how to monetize the knowledge and experience you’ve built up over a lifetime, and how to turn them into a real, functioning business with its own letterhead and IRS number.
I’ve packed the book full of everything I know about being a consultant, getting clients, making deals, marketing yourself, making and selling products, producing great online content, teaching, mastering your craft, and even writing and publishing your own books.
If you’re a self-driving person and you’ve been looking for a way to get more agency and autonomy, as well as a better work/life balance, then I wrote Master of Your Domain just for you. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and before too long, you’ll be sleeping with the boss every night. Sweet dreams!
