March 1, 2025

It helps if you know what you're doing

So my only goal as an actor was to be someone people wanted to work with and to have one job lead to another. And I thought that was about as fine an ambition as you could ever have.

Sigourney Weaver, The Great Creators podcast

Five years as an independent consultant; you’d think I might have learned something.

Today - March 1st 2025 - is Day 1 of Year 6 for me as an independent consultant. Day 1,827. That’s a biggish deal for me. Five candles. Make a wish. But it only matters to you if I’ve learned something from the experience that’s worth sharing.

That’s the general idea with this article.

The big, juicy themes - including the one from which this post takes its title - are further down the page. But let’s start small. Most formats end with a quick-fire round but, hey ho, it’s my birthday and I’ll be contrarian if I want to.

Before we dive in, thank you to all the clients who have trusted me so far. Thank you to everyone who’s helped me get this far. I’m a lucky boy.

Quick-fire round

• This collection of mini-essays by Tom Critchlow - The Strategic Independent - is the best thing I’ve read about about setting yourself up for success as an independent consultant. Better than anything you’ll read in this post. I wouldn’t blame you if you clicked away here and didn’t come back.

• This Consultancy Business podcast by my friend Phil Lewis is also pretty darned good.

• Don’t waste time beating yourself up and feeling guilty about not being busy as a freelancer. Not being busy is inevitable and also (when you embrace it) fucking glorious. The swear word is entirely justified in this context. I used to manage a team that was spread across three offices. I used to be part of a senior leadership team. I used to attend lots of meetings where we talked about doing some work. Now I just do some work. In the agency, I spent about 70% of my time doing things other than earning fees. As a freelancer, earning fees is all you do. So of course you’re not busy, not by agency standards. You work damn hard, but you’re not busy in the way you were on the company Dollar. It took several months of futile angst about not being busier for this penny to drop.

• There’s no resentment when you work for yourself. If I work in the evening or at the weekend it’s because I want to. It’s nice when working isn’t labour. (See what I did there?) But be wary. Resentment is useful for establishing boundaries between work and all the other things that matter. Without resentment, work is a slow-spreading but deadly infection, like blood poisoning. You need to establish a good enthusiasm/resentment balance.

• One of my biggest expenses in Year 1 was paying a lawyer to draft a standard contract that reflects how I want to engage with a client. I’ve never used it. Sometimes I’ve signed the client’s contract. A lot of times we’ve just agreed scope and terms (and IR35 status!) in a formal email.

• I’ve only been asked present my credentials once. I’ve never shared a creds document. Suits me. It’s more interesting and more productive to talk to a potential client about them rather than me.

• I’ve never submitted a tender or responded to an RFP.

• I’ve never pitched for consultancy work. Pitching is insane. Pitching is fun if you work in an agency, as long as you don’t look at the numbers. I got paid to work on someone else’s pitch recently. It was stimulating work. The people were lovely. The agency was on fire. But it’s a batshit way to win business.

• It can be lonely but you’re not alone. In October 2022, Marcus messaged me out of nowhere, and apparently apropos of nothing, to see if I fancied a chat. We were both free so we jumped on a Zoom call. It turns out that he’d picked up on a turn of phrase in what I thought was a perfectly normal LinkedIn post, and he wanted to check if I was ok. The man is a seer because I wasn’t feeling great. I was getting snow-blindness from staring at an empty Google Calendar. The call was exactly the pick-me-up I needed. I could tell you a bunch of similar stories. People are nice.

• It’s nice when you introduce people who can help each other. It’s easy. It takes hardly any time. And the connection might be just what one or both of them needs. I love the asymmetry of introductions: the tiny cost to the introducer versus the possibly huge value to the introduced. For reasons I won’t go into here, the company through which I do my consulting is called I Know Some People Ltd. With a name like that, making introductions should come with the territory.

• I don’t like Slack. The last agency I worked at introduced Slack, ostensibly as a project management tool. But people used it for a lot more than that. It created sidetracks, cliques, and extra unwanted management issues. I didn’t like what I saw. I thought this might be a personal prejudice, having only experienced Slack in one environment. Now that I’ve worked with several clients who use Slack as their main communication channel I’m confident that all the counterproductive shit is a feature. Slack does more harm than good. Slack says bad things about a culture. Slack is a case-study in nominative determinism. Maybe it works on the inside, but it’s a pain to deal with from the outside. It’s an amber flag for me. A pale shade of amber.

• Control is in short supply so take it where you can. Freelancing is precarious. It takes a lot of work and not a little luck to maintain a reliable pipeline of the right kind of work, and I haven’t cracked it by any means. You never feel entirely in control. So control what you can, particularly the financial admin. Pay for accounting software (FreeAgent has been a Godsend). Process every transaction as it happens. Hire an accountant to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. File on time. Staying on top of this stuff feels good and it at least keeps the runaway train on the rails.

• Want a dopamine hit? Raise an invoice for work that you brought in and delivered all by yourself. It never gets old.

• Want an even bigger dopamine hit? Raise an invoice for 100% of your project fee up front, as agreed with a client who’s fully bought into working with you.

• Want the ultimate dopamine high? Have a happy client refer a perfectly-qualified hot prospect to you.

• I’ve had leads from LinkedIn that turned into good projects. But here’s the thing. They all said they’d noticed me on LinkedIn, and that they liked my style. But none of them had ever signalled any interest by liking or commenting on any of my posts. None of them had ever viewed my profile. I had no idea they were even aware of me until they got in touch. My theory is that the most useful people on LinkedIn are also the least likely to explicitly “engage”.

• Freelancing cuts you down to size. Your popularity on platforms like LinkedIn evaporates on Day 1 of you on your own. The harsh reality is that most of the attention you had been enjoying was down to your job title and the name of your employer, not you. People want things, and they give attention to people who are in a position to deliver. There are lots of things you gain from freelancing, but this kind of status isn’t one of them. If attention is important to your freelance pipeline, you have to work much harder and much smarter to earn it. No one fawns over freelancers. (Better-known people than me have made similar observations.)

• Quality control is more difficult on your own. I miss second opinions, searching questions, and alternative perspectives from people I respect. So I use my experience as a blogger and writer to compensate. Over the years I’ve learned to leave a piece of writing for a day or two and completely detach myself so that I can attack the editing with objective brutality when I come back. Often that involves rewriting from scratch. Writing has taught me to be cool with that. So the trick with independent consulting is to finish the work a week ahead of deadline, walk away for a while, and come back to it fresh as a different person. In those conditions I really can be my own second opinion.

• Reflecting on it now I realise I’ve done some things that you only get to do if you set something up: registering a company, registering for VAT, submitting VAT returns, paying corporation tax, registering a trademark, submitting annual accounts, and such like. It’s all bureaucracy at the time but it’s good experience to have under your belt.

Ok, now for the big stuff

These are personal views. I’ve tried to give appropriate context so that you can decide for yourself whether they apply to you. They might not.

What do you want?

Just what is it that you want to do?
Well, we wanna be free.
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do.
And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time.

Primal Scream, Loaded

I didn’t choose this. I had freelance thrust upon me. So I thought hard about how to make the best of a bad job. What did I want, and what would it take for this independent consulting lark to be the best thing (professionally) to ever happen to me? It looks something like this:

I have a target amount of fee I’d like to earn every year. It’s a bit more than my last agency salary. It’s a lot of money by the standards of most people in the UK, but it doesn’t feel greedy to me. (Privilege.) I’ve come close to that figure in one year and I’ve done just fine whilst falling short in the others.

Getting loaded (financially) isn’t the priority. Money is important but it isn’t the thing. The thing is minimising the time I spend earning the money. I set myself a target of spending no more than a hundred days each year on client-facing, fee-earning work.

I used to hate timesheets in agencies, for good reasons.

Now that I’m working for myself I meticulously record every second that I’m working on a project. I don’t use this data for pricing. I don’t share it with anyone. I price on the value of the work, not the time it takes me to do it.

I use my timesheet data to tell me how good my pricing was after the event, not to inform my pricing before the event.

At the end of a project I can divide the fee by the days worked to calculate my Effective Day Rate. Let’s make that an acronym. My EDR is a measure of how well I priced the job and/or how efficiently I delivered it. The EDR is private, for my eyes only.

I have just three numerical metrics for success:

• My runway (how long until I have to bring in more fee,) measured in months.

• My total fee-earning time, measured in days/year.

• My effective day rate (EDR,) measured in £/day.

These measures tell me what I need to know. How secure am I? How well is this lifestyle working for me? How good is my pricing?

Because I’m diligent about monitoring fee-earning time, I know to the minute how long I’ve spent at the coal-face over the last five years.

My fee-earning time for these first five years has averaged 69 days per year.

So far, I haven’t worked more than 90 days in total in any of my five years of freelancing. That’s fee-earning time, remember, which doesn’t include the substantial amount of time I spend on business development and business admin.

Nonetheless, I have a lot more free time as a freelancer to pursue other interests than I ever did in agencies. I have more time for writing things like this newsletter and more time for writing for pleasure. I have more time for film making. I have more time for travel. I’ve had more time for learning and development in my fifties than at any other time in my career. For these reasons, and as long as I have enough money, I can’t imagine ever being on a payroll again.

Other people will want other things from independent consulting. All good. But my advice is to have an honest conversation with yourself about what those things are and to proceed with intent.

For me, whenever someone asks what it’s like, I say it’s bloody tough but it’s fucking magnificent. (So far.) (Swearing entirely justified again.)

Money changes everything but money isn’t everything

I didn’t feel lucky when I was made redundant, but it’s the best way to leave a job. It meant I had money in the bank from the get-go.

My erstwhile employer also helped by paying me to see out a few jobs on a project basis. I was working from Day 1.

And I was soon referred for my first entirely independent piece of work.

It was a good start and it was mostly due to luck. Since then, touch wood, I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to take on work for financial reasons. Money buys you the right to be choosy and, in that respect, it changes everything.

You can’t be too choosy in an agency. You can refuse tobacco clients on principle, but you can’t turn down uninspiring work from difficult clients if it’s also lucrative work that pays ten people’s mortgages.

You can be choosy, much more choosy, as an independent consultant if you have money in the bank. I don’t measure money in Pounds Sterling any more. I measure money in months. How many months until I have to earn fee? As mentioned above, this is known as your ‘runway’ in the trade. The more months, the more choosy you can be about work. The more confident you can be with pricing.

Money isn’t everything (unless you don’t have any of course.) If you have enough, money allows you to be picky and not to be a pushover. For five years, touch wood, I’ve only worked with lovely people on stimulating projects. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of a freelance existence.

Most of Year 1 was spent in lockdown. I thought it would be a disaster but the work kept coming. And the involuntary frugality of lockdown (we were all InFrugs) made me realise how much money I’d been forking out on items of little consequence. So I did a brutal cull of direct debits. Cancel culture is great when you apply it to your finances. And I renegotiated all our utilities. I didn’t miss any of this stuff once lockdown was lifted, so it stayed culled. In 2022 I got rid of my car. I was hardly using it anyway. Now I live happily, spending less than I did pre-Covid. The lower your outgoings, the longer your runway.

There are lots of people that achieve short term success. They get lucky... But they haven't got in them to be sustainable. And that's because they don't think poor. They think they've cracked it.

Barry Hearn on the High Performance podcast

More on being choosy

You have a gut feel about every opportunity. After a period of listening to my gut on various chemistry calls I wrote down what was making me excited or wary, so that I could turn these visceral feelings into objective criteria for assessing leads.

Being a brand strategist I wrote them as a set of values or principles. They’ve stayed the same since Year 1 and they’ve served me well.

• Dealing directly (Access): There are two levels to this. One is nice to have. The other is usually a deal-breaker.
  
  Level 1: Dealing directly with CEOs or Founders makes for better projects. They know what they want. They hire you to do work that matters. They listen openly and avidly to advice. They like people who keep things simple. Their decisions are final. Finance people report to them and will pay your invoice immediately when your client tells them to. Working directly with the person at the top of a client organisation is cleaner than working with a CMO or working through an agency. I’ve had good experiences working with CMOs and agencies, but I don’t court them.
  
  Level 2: It’s 99% certain that I won’t take a project on unless I can talk directly to my client’s clients or customers. My main deliverable is the irresistible truth of my client’s brand. My client’s customers know that truth better than my client does - always - and they happily spill the beans when you ask the right questions. Brand strategy is an act of fiction if it isn’t informed by primary research with the primary audience, which is usually customers.

• The potential for novelty and learning (Adventure): Don’t hire me for a tick-box exercise or if you’re happy to go through the motions. I want to do something special for you, with you. I have the wisdom of a 58 year-old but I expect to learn on every job. Curiosity is the elixir of a youthful outlook.
  
  I don’t have a fixed process (other than talking to customers.) I don’t have a standard brand strategy framework that every client has to fit into. I like every project to be different. This makes extra work for me, which I do gladly because it makes things more interesting. It also ensures better outcomes for my clients.

• A well-balanced working relationship (Mutuality): Well-balanced doesn’t mean equal. I’m a supplier at the end of the day. Well-balanced means that each party commits to the project and the relationship in the right way and to the right degree. I get a sense of these things in a triage conversation, and I flush them out for sure once we get into the nitty gritty (see below).

At least respect yourself (next level choosiness)

This all started with redundancy. I was ‘let go’ in January 2020. It wasn’t part of the plan. It was scary. I was an agency lifer. Thirty-two years in agencies. I’d been institutionalised by agency life to the point where looking for a client-side job just didn’t compute. And agencies these days don’t hire people in their mid fifties. So going it alone felt like my only option.

I knew that I’d lose the reassuring feeling of control when I lost my job. And I recognised that my self-respect could be brittle, particularly as it had been dented by redundancy. So I resolved to be fiercely protective of my dignity as a kind of coping mechanism. I drew some lines in the sand.

• Line 1: Money up front on 14 days payment terms. I’ll find out how good my client is at paying before they find out how good I am at brand strategy. The power balance is always skewed in favour of the client for a freelancer, so it’s reasonable claw some power back. In the early days I proposed 25% of the project fee up front. These days I mostly ask for 100%, and clients mostly say yes. If they don’t, you can negotiate for other forms of value in return for compromise. Jonathan Stark wrote a collection of essays called Hourly Billing is Nuts. When you buy the ebook in a bundle, you also get a handbook called Learn Your Lines (What to say when clients put you on the spot.) The latter is useful if you find yourself defending proposals for fixed fees, payment up front, and such like.

• Line 2: Zero tolerance for late payment. Most of my clients have paid on time. A lot of them pay early. In the rare cases where they’ve been late I’ve sent a polite but unequivocal email on Day 15. It has always worked.

• Line 3: Zero tolerance for being treated badly. This has never happened. I’m long enough in the tooth to suss a bad-actor client during the courtship phase and politely walk away. I can count the number of times this has happened on one finger, and the culprit saved me the bother of politely walking away by disappearing without trace when I mentioned money. Ghosting isn’t just rude, it’s stupid when you do it to a well-connected person like me in Scotland, a country that works like a village. I’ve made sure that every freelance project I’ve worked on so far has been a delight.

• Line 4: No political game playing. Politics are inevitable in every organisation and for every project. Experience helps here. I have a good nose for political palaver. The worst thing you can do is pretend that politics don’t exist. Flush them out into the open and be explicit about your refusal to be a pawn in any political games. Founders and CEOs like you for this. Dealing directly at the top makes politics less of a factor and much easier to deal with.

Selling not selling

2024 (Year 5) was a year of epiphanies.

At the end of 2023 I accidentally met a sales coach. Martin introduced himself as an ex-monk who helps nice people sell more. It’s one of the best pieces of positioning I’ve ever heard.

A couple of dinners later I paid for his Sales For Nice People coaching and it has changed my professional life.

I’ve always hated the idea of selling. I’ve always assumed that the skills required for successful selling are in direct opposition to my values and my personality.

Martin changed all that. He coaches ethical selling as an act of service to a potential buyer. Now that’s an idea I can get with. Sales might be anathema but service I’m good at.

Martin’s approach to selling is contrarian. He talks about the open rather than the close. He puts more value on the “no” than the “yes”. He encourages you to get your skeletons out of the closet and make them dance in front of your buyer.

Sales For Nice People is based on empathy and ambivalence. That’s intriguing isn’t it? I shan’t expand here. Contact Martin to learn more.

Martin helped me take the leap from time-based pricing to value-based pricing. He’s still not happy with what I charge, but I’m confidently charging more than I used to. Most importantly, Martin has turned me into a person who looks forward to sales conversations.

There’s nothing in it for me to recommend Martin by the way.

The pipeline

This is a work in progress to put it mildly. I haven’t cracked it with business development, if that’s even possible. I’d love to be in a position where the referrals just roll in from a long line of super-happy, super-well-connected clients. I do get referrals but not enough to keep things going on their own.

Occasionally I’ll invoice nothing in a month. Five years in and that still happens. It happens less frequently than the early days. And it’s less likely the result of me dropping the ball. In the early days it was entirely my fault. You get busy and you listen to the voice telling you that it’s ok to ease off on business development while you focus on earning fees. But the cost of slacking off racks up quicker than the interest on a payday loan. The price you pay is flatlined finances and cratered confidence.

These days a zero-invoice month is less likely to result from business development neglect. It’s probably down to project phasing, especially now that I tend to invoice 100% of project fees up front. Nonetheless, it stings. It’s a reminder that you have to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.

In principle, business development is simple. You need to be visible and salient* to enough of the right people to generate enough of the right kind of leads. And you need to be adept at converting the right leads when they come along.

In practice, there are many things to think about behind that deceptively simple theory.

Question: Are the right people your ideal clients or people who have your ideal clients in their networks?

Question: How do you define ‘ideal client’ anyway? It took me several years of being continually surprised by the apparently random nature of my clients to work out what they had in common. A snappy portrait of your ideal client and their typical problems makes it much easier for people to refer you. Your description should trigger a lightbulb moment, making it easy for them to pinpoint the handful of contacts who are the closest fit with your ideal. Without this description, you’re asking someone to do your thinking for you. They might be inclined to help you but they won’t if it’s hard work.

Question: How best to nurture a referral network? This is my business development priority for Year 6. It might be the answer. But at the time of writing I don’t know what form this answer might take. A fellow consultant in London specialises in brand strategy for technology scale-ups. The CEOs of these companies are all in a private WhatsApp group. They don’t compete with each other so they share experiences and help each other out. When someone in the group is looking for help with their brand, two or three others will mention the consultant’s name, and he gets a hot lead that’s probably a shoe-in.

Question: What are the most efficient means to build and maintain salience* that fit with your personality and values? Having lots of coffees definitely works, even if it’s not obvious how it works. There’s some serendipity black magic at play behind the scenes. LinkedIn works, as mentioned above, but reach is so badly throttled by the algorithm these days that it’s a case of ever-diminishing returns. At the moment, this newsletter is more about depth than reach. Maybe I should seek out some speaking gigs. I think about this stuff all the time. You have to. To paraphrase that old Reebok commercial, “flatline’s gonna get ya,” if you don’t do the bus dev exercise.

Martin encouraged me to be more systematic in my approach to CRM, or “people gardening” as he calls it. A few hours each week tending to your garden has a compounding effect on interesting conversations and useful introductions.

And I subscribed to OnePage. It’s a lightweight CRM platform. It’s the CRM software that I would have built for myself. It’s a compact people garden that puts positive pressure on you to plant more seeds, to nurture your relationships, and get rid of the weeds.

*If I ask you to think of an airline, you might say BA or Virgin. That’s awareness. If I ask you to think of a cheap way of getting to Spain, you’ll probably say Ryanair or Easyjet. That’s salience. Salience is being top of mind for a specific need.

Are you ready for this?

Y’all ready for this?

Get Ready For This, 2 Unlimited

On Day 1 of Year 1 I didn’t think I was ready for this, but it turns out I was. It dawned on me, once I started thinking about it rather than panicking about it, that my last two years at the agency had been a kind of finishing school.

I’d worked on a string of similar projects. They all ended up with a new website for the client. But they all started with brand strategy work: “Before we commission a new website, we’d better get our story straight. We’d better make sure we’re pushing the right buttons with our messaging.”

All of the clients were B2B and/or service businesses. And they were all of a certain size, which meant that they didn’t have a CMO. So the client was the founder/CEO.

All the projects involved me interviewing senior stakeholders and a sample of our client’s customers.

In finishing school I honed several important skills:

• Giving advice to CEOs.

• Discussing brand strategy in CEO language.

• Structuring and conducting interviews with the customers of service businesses.

• Having a nose for client culture and how to apply it to branding.

I’d inadvertently become a specialist in brand strategy for medium-sized B2B and service companies. I was enjoying the work and I was good at it.

So yeah, when I thought about it, I was ready for this. I had the makings of a positioning and the experience to back it up.

To be honest, I was quite pleased with myself. On a good day I thought I’d cracked it.

I hadn’t.

It helps if you know what you’re doing

I’m good at this. God knows I’ve been doing it for long enough. Even so, I feel like I stepped up when I stepped out on my own. From the get-go, it felt like I was doing the best work of my career as an independent consultant. If pitching is one form of madness to which agencies are prone, then ageism is another.

Sadly, knowing what you’re doing isn’t the same as ‘knowing what you’re doing’ in italics and inverted commas.

To ‘know what you’re doing’ (italics and inverted commas), you need to know what you’re doing (ability), but you also need to know what you’re about (aura). People who know what they’re about, who are comfortable and confident in their own skin, are inherently charismatic. The same goes for brands. The same goes for consultants.

Knowing what you’re about is the difference between a positioning statement and a brand idea.

A standard-issue positioning statement is a dry, factual, strategic statement that makes sure that everyone who works on the brand knows what they’re doing (and not doing.) It’s mainly, if not entirely, for internal consumption.

You need to give customers more than that. You need to give them the feels as well as the features. They’d never admit it, but customers are looking for solutions with soul. They’re looking for an identity upgrade as well as something to satisfy a functional need. And that’s what a good brand idea gives you.

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I mentioned to Martin that I was going to pay someone to give my website the polish that I’m incapable of giving it myself. At which he staged an intervention. He instructed me to do for myself what I do for my clients. He told me to contact some happy clients and interview them about what it was like working with me and what exactly I’d done for them. So that’s what I did.

Here’s the full story.

Out of that process came the idea of the irresistible truth. In so many words, the clients I spoke to said that the most valuable outcome of my work was helping them find, and helping them tell, the irresistible truth of their businesses.

Suddenly everything made sense. In hindsight, that’s what I’ve done for every single client for the last five years. The case studies (if ever I’m asked for them) will write themselves.

So now, finally, on Day 1 of Year 6, I know what I’m doing and I know what I’m about as a brand strategy consultant. I’ve always known what I’m doing with brand strategy. Now I know what I’m doing for my clients.

“I know what I’m doing” (in inverted commas and italics.)

And it definitely helps.

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Maybe try this too: Is this what success looks like? Different ways to weigh and measure your career.