On an intro call with a new consultant yesterday, I spotted an interesting tension.

This consultant had recently left an impressive CHRO post to pursue a more self-directed path as a soloist.

She really hit the ground running, too — outlined a few potential offers, whipped up a pitch deck, activated her network, pushed out her first proposal, all in just a couple months.

She admitted she was getting impatient though.

She’s eager to close some projects, start learning, keep narrowing, build IP, etc.

All music to my ears, to be honest, but the tension was that typically, the common gripe when leaving corporate is “it was too slow, too bureaucratic, too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Her experience was the opposite - she’d come from a high-growth software platform that she helped grow from 100 to 1000 employees. Things happened fast, decisions were quick, feedback was relatively instant.

Now out on her own, in theory she could go even faster. She has no organizational baggage, after all!

Except she’s realizing that this baggage does still exist - it’s just on the client side.

So what did I tell her?:

1. You’re doing all the right things - you’re in motion towards your first client which will give you SO MANY answers to a lot of the questions swirling in your head including the big one of: what do I actually want to be selling
2. Start building an authority catalog - it’s the longer, slower play, but distilling thoughts into content deepens your expertise and compounds authority over time
3. Consider a paid intro offer which can spur some urgency in your buyer and get you out of proposal limbo (check out Pia Silva’s short on why proposals kill momentum)

And most importantly, remember this is part of the fun.

Learning in real time where your expertise meets the market and discovering, piece by piece, how you want to self-deploy is the foundational work of building a solo business.

Enjoy it. Even if it feels slower than you’d like.

💡

-Wes