The Pivot to a Practice

Building a real consulting or advisory practice at 58 looks almost nothing like the LinkedIn version. The LinkedIn version has a website, a clear offer, a steady stream of inbound, and revenue that scales. The actual version, in the first 18 months, is five clients you sourced through your existing network, pricing that you revised twice because the first number was wrong, work that you took for relationship reasons rather than economic ones, and a positioning statement that you rewrote four times before it stopped feeling like a job description.

The most expensive mistake senior operators make in the first year is anchoring their day rate to their old salary divided by working days. That number is almost always too low, sometimes by a factor of two. A senior operator who made $400,000 in cash compensation as an SVP did not produce $400,000 of value, the company produced multiples of that on top of their salary. Your day rate as an independent operator needs to reflect the multiple, not the salary. The right anchor is what a partner at a midsize firm charges for similar work, and then you decide whether to discount from that ceiling or hold to it. Almost no one holds to it in year one. Almost everyone wishes they had by year two.

The piece of advice that almost no one acts on early enough: the network you think you have is not the network you actually have. 500 LinkedIn connections is not a network. The network is the 12 to 30 people who will take your call in the first 30 days, refer you in the first quarter, and hire you in the first year. These are usually three different lists. They are usually shorter than expected. The work in the first 60 days of a pivot is to identify these three lists by name, not to build a website or a brand. The website matters in month nine. The lists matter in week one.

The briefs in this category will cover the first five clients and how they actually get sourced, the pricing floor below which you should refuse work and the ceiling above which you cannot yet credibly charge, the unglamorous cadence of the first 18 months, the diagnostic for the network you actually have versus the one you assume, and the work you should refuse even when you need the revenue, because the wrong first engagement sets the wrong positioning for the next three.