Leaping and Learning: Four Insights from Starting My Own Consulting Business
Image credits from top: Joel Worthington (@thephototypinglife), Betsy Berg
A little over two months ago, I set off on a new journey – becoming an entrepreneur at the intersection of human-centered design, systems thinking, and collaborative change-making. While entrepreneurship is often associated with creating a new product or service that can scale within X months or years, I’m more interested in creating a service for a handful of clients that is robust, highly relational, and customized to their needs. Of course, I’ve discovered that there are many independent or small firm consultants out there doing just that, and I plan to partner with many of them to scale our abilities to create a more significant offering over time. It’s a value proposition that allows clients to tap into premium expertise and skill in a more personalized, nimble, and efficacious way while allowing my peers and me to maintain creative autonomy, sustain personal life flexibility, and a chance to realize and execute our professional visions.
While I’ve been thinking about taking off on my own for a while now, as I mentioned, the real whirlwind of commitment and activity has taken place in the last two months where I’ve applied my human-centered systems theory for creating change to myself. With prototyped thinking about my service offering already in hand, I iterated, prioritized high value activities, and have been getting my message out into the world as quickly as possible in order to foster new connections and get feedback that I’ve used to tweak and improve each new communiqué. With that in mind, here are the top four insights (so far) I’ve discovered in building my own independent consulting business that I think can inform if not inspire others considering a similar leap:
What I’ve always said matters the most, matters even more now. I’m an evangelist for human-centered design strategy (for client work and internal stakeholders); generative over ‘templated’ approaches or solutions; and prioritizing my personal life to be present for my family. While making that belief system work inside an organization is likely possible somewhere (I’m all ears!), taking the reins on creating something on my own has already empowered me to use these fundamental values to help design my work and life the way I see fit.
Moving from design thinking to design doing has helped me trust the process…and myself. Over these two months, I’ve created proposals, formed an LLC, hosted a visual identity design contest for my brand, developed and launched a website, started my own CRM, read multiple books that I’ve been meaning to read, and connected and networked with 100+ people one-on-one in some fashion – just to name a few things while also being a dad and a husband. I’ve been influenced by the human-centered design mindset of prototyping, lean startup principles, and plain old resilience and a sense of urgency. Looking back, I realize now that I was a) well-positioned to start executing, and b) executing this has always been right there waiting for me; I just needed the conditions and circumstances to be right for me to take the leap. If you’re reading this and thinking about doing your own thing, I encourage you to consider what the conditions and circumstances need to be in your life to make it happen because the doing part can happen fast.
The combined power of turning inward and outward exponentially increased my potential and my ability to achieve that potential. Most people who know me would probably bucket me as an extrovert. The truth is, I think I’m probably more of an ambivert – someone who has a balance of extrovert and introvert features. I love being with people and meeting new people (sometimes), but I also crave alone time to reflect, regroup, and refocus. By tapping into both sides of my ambiversion during this time, I’ve felt more ‘me’ and developed more professionally and personally than I have in a long time, which has unlocked the door to new stairs to a higher ceiling.
It’s a balance between having confidence and managing uncertainty. I know I can do this – I’ve got great experience, a unique service offering, a target audience, and a robust network. On the other hand, there’s so much to figure out! At the end of the day, figuring things out – solving tricky problems with no single answer and generating new solutions or approaches – is what I do best. Further, there’s a healthy level of anxiety about the future that fuels performance and self-improvement. So, no time like the present – let’s do this!