The Pros and Cons of Being A Consultant
The Location-Independent Six-Figure Consultant Course goes on Sale this Friday for just one week. To help you make the decision on whether or not being a consultant is for you, today I’ll lay out the pros and cons of being a consultant. After all, while I consider consulting a fantastic (and relatively easy) way to make a lot of money, as in all types of businesses, there are both good things and bad things you need to be aware of.
I’ve been a full-time professional consultant for 23 years, and several years before that part-time. I’ve also worked with scores of consultants over my business career. In my opinion, the good things about being a consultant are really good, and the negatives are all ones that can be easily mitigated provided you are aware of them and are proactive. The only time the negatives bite people in the ass is when they aren’t aware of them, or are aware of them but just get lazy.
I’ll start with these negatives first. There are two.
The first possible negative of consulting is that if you’re not careful, you’ll get stuck selling dollars for hours. This means you’ll quickly put yourself into a scenario where the only way to make more money is by working longer hours so you can bill more hours, sort of like an accountant or attorney.
Obviously, this directly violates Alpha Male 2.0 lifestyle standards, since the goal is high income on a low amount work, not high income working 60 or 70+ hours per week.
This is what happened to me way back in my twenties when I started getting successful as a consultant. I charged an hourly rate and got a bunch of business. I wanted to increase my income, so I increased my hourly rate. This was fine, until I reached a point where I couldn’t raise the rate anymore without looking strange to the marketplace. Then I was screwed. The only way I could make more money was to either work more hours (which I did) or hire a bunch of god damn employees (which I also did).
Those of you who know my story know what happened. I blew my brains out with work, was stressed out and unhappy, damaged my health and my marriage, and became the very slave I tried to avoid becoming when I quit my corporate job.
Finally, in my early thirties, I converted my consulting business to an Alpha 2.0 model. At that point, my work hours dropped by 42% and my net income went up by 72%, just like I talk about in my primary book.
As always, my job is to help you avoid all the problems I experienced in life when I was young and stupid. The wise Alpha 2.0 consultant avoids all this hours-for-dollars garbage by avoiding charging by the hour or by the day. In the consulting course, I go into great detail on how you can instead charge numerous other ways, and get clients and prospects to agree to these alternate billing methods. That way, you decouple your income from your hours worked.
The second possible downside is that a consulting business is what I call a “Model A” business. This means you can make a lot of money very quickly, but the business itself is not a separate asset you can sell or retire on. In other words, when you stop consulting, the income stops. This differs from a Model B business where it takes a really long time to make any money, but once you do, you can sell the business and retire or do something else.
The Alpha Male 2.0 avoids this problem by following the Alpha 2.0 business model. This means you don’t have just one business, but over time you develop 2 – 4 businesses so you’re not reliant upon one. This is why, in addition to my consulting business, I also have my Blackdragon business (an online business and Model A, but one that is heavily outsourced) and a marketing company (a Model B offline business that is almost 100% outsourced), both of which are totally location independent and have nothing to do with consulting with corporate clients.
Wise consultants, knowing their consultant practice is not an asset, also need to make very sure to save a lot of money for the long-term so when they’re older they’ll be financially set. This is something I talk a lot about over at the Caleb Jones Blog.
Now let’s cover the positives.
The biggest positive by far in regards to being a consultant is that you can make a lot of money very, very fast. You can literally be making thousands upon thousands of dollars a month within just a few months of starting from zero, and I’ve seen this happen many times (including with myself).
If you price your consulting properly, position yourself properly (niche!), and put in the marketing work, you only need one, two, or three clients to make double, triple, or even quadruple what you now make at your bullshit corporate job.
Consulting is not like selling hard products or ebooks, where you need a vast audience all buying a lot of stuff so you can make a bunch of money. No no, you just need 1-3 good clients and you’re there. Over the years I’ve had single, individual client accounts pay me as much as $3,000 to $14,000 per month, many months in a row, often years in a row. And that’s just one customer. How hard is it to get one customer? Not hard.
Even better, unlike with a bullshit corporate job, to make a lot of money consulting you do NOT need a college degree (I don’t have one), you do NOT need any special training (I didn’t have any until much later), you do NOT need a lot of job experience (I sure as shit didn’t have very much when I was 24), and you do NOT need to come from a well-to-do family (my parents were poor). You don’t need anyone’s “permission” to make shitloads of money very, very fast.
It’s awesome.
The Location-Independent Six-Figure Consultant Course as well as the bonus course: Consulting: Getting Started From Scratch go on sale midnight this Thursday night (PST/PDT time zone), for just one week. You don’t even need to speak English to learn everything in the course, since we have subtitled all the videos for English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German! And if you speak English but most people in your country do not, you can make a lot of money selling this course to them because of those subtitles. Email us here to become an affiliate so you can do this.
Just four more days left…
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BD, in your course, what does “one day of coaching” mean exactly? Does it mean we can send you tons of mails that day, full of questions? Or is it just one mail and you answer the same day and that’s it? How does it work?
I’m intrigued first as a customer, but also as someone about to start a coaching business; I might as well understand what works and what doesn’t.
Selling dollars is an interesting proposition for sure, especially if done for hours on end.
Are you looking for Russian translators for this?
I signed up for the email, gonna figure a way to get this course. Turning the corner and leaving corporate life is what I want.
Yep. All day.
No thank you.
Your life belongs to you. No one can turn it around except you. So, good.
p.s. Ive seen two guys leave my current job for their business. gotta make this happen.
That happened to me too! Back when I was working in the corporate world. It made me so mad!
is there a difference between a Consulting business vs a Coaching business?
@Eddie
I think BD explained that in a previous article:
Coaching = working with individuals
Consulting = working with businesses
Can you please give an example or two of what a consultant could be, apart from computer IT or accounting. When you say “consulting” those are the two things that immediately come to mind. I’m certain there’s others, but when you designed this course what type’s of would-be consultants did you envision you were speaking to/teaching?
BD what are the hands down the best consulting business books you’ve ever read?
One or two examples? I could give you a 300 examples, but a few off the top of my head:
Security consultant
Inventory management consultant
Image consultant
PR consultant
Supply chain consultant
Productivity consultant (that’s me)
Marketing consultant
Industrial pipeline consultant
Any type of consultant. There are literally thousands of types.
The best one is probably Million Dollar Consultant by Alan Weiss, but there are so many more. The course includes a recommended reading list.
Hi Blackdragon,
I really like the way you frame the positive and the negative sides. There is just one thing I do not quite get yet. How are customers going to pay you thousands of dollars or even trust you without any consulting experience? Do you need to start with a great branding strategy to compensate that?
Sometimes the way you put yourself out there and present yourself is more attractive to people than experience itself if not properly marketed, but I would like to read your thoughts on that.
As an example from another field, I am in the music business, I produce Techno tracks and it goes very well since DJ’s are buying tracks all the time to have their sets fresh and not repetitive, so it is very profitable. Before the tracks are released to the public, there is a final process called mastering, which is done by a master engineer. I do not trust any master engineer that does not have a portfolio, or any experience. Would it be a similar situation?
Thanks.
That’s a long and complicated answer, not one I can answer in a quick comment, other than to say I go over exactly that in GREAT DETAIL in both courses, particularly in the bonus course, where I show you literally, step-by-step, how to get your first three clients.
Yes, branding is certainly part of it. But not all of it. (I didn’t have much branding when I first got started.)
Branding is super critical, and more so for consultants than with other types of businesses. It’s a core part of your business you must master.
For example, I made an entire friggin’ blog (Sublime Your Time) just to brand myself for my consulting; that’s literally the only reason I did it. (And it worked.)
No, because what you’re describing is a make-or-break, must-be-done-right-on-the-first-try type situation. Hiring a consultant isn’t like that; if you hire a dumb consultant you just shrug and fire him. Happens all the time.
“you do NOT need a college degree (I don’t have one)”
It shows in your writing
It shows in your writing.
*I fixed it for you, professor.
That’s sort of the point. I didn’t even graduate high school. I’m a total dumbass… and I make more money than you.