The Unvarnished Truth About Successful Independent Consulting

Making It Big by Thinking Small

As an independent consultant, you might think the path to success lies in groundbreaking ideas and revolutionary solutions that will “disrupt” your client’s industry. Let me disabuse you of that notion right away. The cold, hard reality is that true innovations virtually never get implemented by large organisations. The gatekeepers and bureaucracies in place mean breakthrough concepts get strangled in their cribs before they ever see the light of day.

The Humble Path to Riches

So how does one build a lucrative independent consulting practice? Through understanding that enterprises overwhelmingly want incremental, digestible improvements—not game-changing overhauls. They simply don’t have the risk tolerance or metabolism for radical change. As the consultant, your job is to provide mediocre solutions that scratch the itch just enough to justify your fees, but don’t upset too many apple carts.

Perfecting the Mundane Money-Maker

Rather than trying to boil the ocean with a visionary new approach, focus on packaging up mundane, low-complexity suggestions that a schoolchild could implement. Maybe it’s a minor process tweak, a negligible tech integration, or repackaging something they already do in a slightly different framing. The key is making it just novel enough to be billable, but so straightforward and unobtrusive that it gives political and operational cover to those signing off.

The Beauty of Intentional Incrementalism

This intentional incrementalism is beautiful in its simplicity. By never swinging for the fences, you avoid getting knocked out of the game entirely by the corporate immune system. Instead, you can settle in for a long, fruitful stream of billings by just moving the decimal point a nudge at a time through iterative half-measures. It’s like a death by a thousand cuts in reverse—a rejuvenation through a thousand nips and tucks.

In Summary: Damning With Faint Praise

Does this approach perhaps lack a certain… inspirational sizzle? Sure. You’re not going to get featured in case studies or spoken about in reverential tones. But who cares when you’re lapping up gravy train after gravy train of consulting gigs by simply being a pragmatic mediocrity mechanic? As the old sayings go, perfection is the enemy of good enough. And he who dares, wins a whole lot less.