Location Independent Consulting vs. Normal Consulting
Most consultants, even very successful ones, are what I call “normal” consultants. These are consultants who are largely location dependent. This means the clients they work with all exist in the city where the consultant lives. He spends a good portion of his time personally going to their offices to conduct his work.
There’s nothing wrong with being a normal consultant. That being said, The Location-Independent Six-Figure Consultant Course (which you can get only until this Thursday night and then you can’t!) describes how to be this kind of consultant, as well as a different type of consultant: the location independent consultant.
The location independent consultant is a consultant who works with clients all over the country, or all over the world, without having to live in the cities where those clients reside.
For the rest of this article, I’ll call these two types LI consultants (location independent) or LD consultants (location dependent).
The LD consultant markets to prospects in his local city and works with clients in his local city. He may have a little business outside of his city, but not much.
The LI consultant markets to prospects anywhere on the planet and works with clients in any location in the world he chooses. He can still have a few clients in his local city if he wants, but these local clients only represent a small percentage of his income. Moreover, if he’s also an Alpha Male 2.0, these local clients represent income he is 100% financially and emotionally okay with dumping at literally any time.
Does this mean the LI consultant literally never goes to his distant clients’ offices? Not necessarily. He may choose to or he may not. It depends on his preferences and the type of work he does. If the LI consultant wishes to be a guy living in a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains and never visiting any of his clients, that’s perfectly fine. (I know a consultant like this.)
If instead the LI consultant chooses to visit his clients all the time, and travel the world all the time to do this because he chooses to (he chooses to, not because he has to), that’s okay too. I know several consultants like this as well, including some of my mentors in the field.
I’m a hybrid of these two types. I’m an LI consultant who rarely needs to visit my remote clients’ offices, but sometimes I do when I decide to go to those countries or cities for my own reasons. Again, it’s all up to you.
In the Consultant Course, I go over several degrees of location independence depending on what you want. Some guys love to travel all the time. Some guys hate it. Some guys like to travel, but just somewhat. Again, it’s all up to you.
Is it harder to be an LI consultant than an LD consultant? Yes, at first. Marketing, closing the deal, working with clients remotely, all of this stuff feels a little weird when doing it from 5,000 miles away, even perhaps a little scary if you’ve never done it before. If you’re starting from scratch, you have two options.
1. Start your new consulting business as an LI consultant right off the bat, and force yourself to get used to the system. Disadvantage: More discomfort at first, perhaps higher ramp-up time to the good money. Advantage: You’ll be location independent right from the very start and forever, you’ll get to the location independent income much faster.
2. Start off as an LD consultant and get the hang of that first. Then, when you feel you’re ready, start going after LI clients, slowly moving from an LD guy to an LI guy. Disadvantage: You’ll be stuck in your city for a while and your business won’t be Alpha 2.0 compatible (at least at first). Advantage: Easier to start.
That’s what I did. I started as an LD consultant and did that for a very long time. Frankly, the reason I did that was because I was a young dumbass and didn’t know I had any other options. I didn’t have a guy like me showing me how to do all of this (we didn’t even have the internet like we do today when I first got started).
Once I realized that LI was an option, and that I actually sort of hated LD, I slowly moved from LD to LI. And I really did it slowly, taking several years. In retrospect, I would have done it in 6-12 months had I known how and had I known the benefits. But again, I was largely on my own with this stuff back then.
The first thing I did was to convert my work for existing clients from LD work to LI work. I set up systems so that I could remotely access all of their needed computers remotely whenever I needed to, even if no one was in the office. Next, I set up a simple shipping system using UPS where they could ship stuff to me very fast (next day or 48 hours), and I could ship it back if I actually needed to work on it with my hands (which was the exception to the rule, but it happened). Then, if needed for certain clients, I set up subcontractors in the client cities I could use as my “remote hands” if that was needed.
When all of these LI systems were in place, I actually mandated to my clients that I was not going to personally visit their offices at all unless there was some kind of unusual catastrophe. (Though I could still drop by if I wanted to.) Later I used subcontractors to handle the catastrophe stuff, so I didn’t even need to be available for that.
A few clients I had didn’t like this LI stuff and left me. Fine with me. But most of them were cool with it, and many of them actually liked it.
Once experienced with this system, I started bringing in new clients in distant cities/countries for consultant work that was “light” and didn’t require a lot of the systems I listed above. Soon, I was a pure LI consultant, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
With the Consultant Course, you won’t have to go through most of the crap I had to. That’s the entire point of these courses (and all of my content): to avoid the mistakes and trial and error I had to go through when I was trying to be successful with this stuff.
You guys seriously don’t realize how lucky you are… I would have killed for this information 20 years ago.
Oh well! My loss is your gain!
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This sounds ideal. Just need to live close enough to a major city to still have some dating prospects.
Agree. Location independent + living near a major city is probably the Alpha 2.0 ideal.
Accessing client’s systems? – Do you do this simply out of a preference or is there some specific reason? Like having first hand information on how your expertise is improving the client’s condition so you can bill accordingly?
A specific reason. If you need to regularly pull data from your client’s systems to get your work done, you may need that level of accessibility.
Some consultants need to do this. Other consultants don’t need this and instead just need a one-time information dump and then they go from there. It depends on what your service is.
It has nothing to do with billing.
You would already have a good idea of what kind of info you would need from your client in order to improve their condition. Do you need a one-time info dump? Or do you need ongoing, live data for a while?
You could also mandate that they send you regular reports instead.
There’s lots of ways to do this.
If you don’t need regular access to do your work but the nature of your service is such that it directly improves the client’s bottomline, then you would want access to know just how much it does so you charge appropriately?
Is this reason enough to require access? Just for billing purposes?
Depends on how you’re charging. If you’re charging on a percentage-of-improvement basis, then perhaps yes. But if you’re charging retainter, per hour/per diem, or retainer, then no.
Hey BD,
Apologizes if you’ve already addressed this.
Is it feasible to set up and run a LI consulting business as a part-time thing?
I like my current job, but won’t feel that way about it forever and would like something to move into later.
It would be great to have a part-time business I could go full-time with down the track.
Of course. In the bonus course I talk about how to run your consulting business while having a full-time job. You can just do that forever (or as long as you want).
Hey BD – I’d like to buy several of your e-books but they’re way too expensive for me. Is there a big promotion coming up soon? I’m mostly interested in your dating e-books.
I don’t know about “soon” but “sometime this year” probably.
BD,
I want your opinion on my consultancy model: Â I work for a large corporation as senior client engagement director (not sales). Â I do nearly all of my work remotely via phone with the ocasional client visit here and there. Â My clients are spread all over the US as are my employees. I can add new clients as I see fit, but would likely have to justify dropping them (as I am not the CEO). Â I never have to go into any of the corporate offices anywhere but at times (rarely) choose to do so when I happen to be in a city where one of my employees works just to keep my finger on the business pulse and to offer moral support/team building. Â I can work from any location in the world, but I cannot simply choose to disappear and go off-grid for lengthy periods of time without prior permission from the big boss. Â If I did, I would let down my clients and colleagues and would likely be let go, ergo would lose my income stream.
However in that same vein, if I was fully independent from the corporation and then played the disappearing act for extended periods, my clients would likely terminate our relationship effecting an immediate loss of income, ultimately ending in a similar result.
My point is that I am very location independent but still have to answer to a boss.  The benefits and pay of the corporate position that I am in would be extremely difficult to duplicate (and very likely impossible in my lifetime) in a private practice based on the fact that it took decades of prior work from others to build this empire. I am merely standing on the shoulders of giants, and those who came before me have now passed on the torch to me to ensure the business’s continuing success.
I am a mid 50s Alpha 1.x in the enduring process of transforming into a 2.0. I have found your data points on dating behavior to eerily accurate and am successfully employing your recommended techniques,  filling my rotation schedule with beautiful and interesting women.  My right hand I thank you for that—it has been life changing.
However, I have much to think about when it comes to career as I am not convinced that I should give up the money and perks just to gain another layer of autonomy.  Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem whatsoever leaving my comfort zone, and I am making zero excuses for trying to stay where I am—it is simply a numbers game for me as it is not trivial.  It boils down to this: where is the decision point between soldiering on to continuing financial success versus cutting bait in order to gain incremental freedom at a significant financial cost?  I am a happy person, but I always seek to self improve.  I don’t believe I am the rare exception—I just happen to be a 1 percenter because I continue to put in the effort required to be that, and I enjoy the challenge.
My question is, do you recommend that I spend my cycles to obtain absolute autonomy at the likely significant cost of income and lifestyle loss in the pursuit or do I stay the course? Â Your thoughts on this? Â As always, thank you for what you do.