Will Bachman: Building an Independent Consulting Practice With a 5-Decade Success Mindset

[01:41] Paul: Today I'm talking with Will Bachman, the founder of Umbrex, a talent network for management consultants, as well as the host of Unleashed, which is probably one of the most prolific podcasts. Out there, but also an incredible resource for freelancers and independent consultants. Welcome to the podcast, Will.

[02:01] Decade Success Mindset: Paul, thank you so much for having me.

[02:04] Paul: Excited to talk to you today. I'd love to dive into a bunch of things. So I think you're definitely somebody I've looked up to as kind of paving the path for independent consultants leaving the big consulting firms. Want to talk to you about how you think about talent platforms, how your creative journey has evolved, and also you just launched a course on setting up your consulting practice.

[02:27] Decade Success Mindset: All right, fantastic. I'm happy to talk about all those things. Well, maybe we'll talk about the most recent thing, which is something I'm real proud of that just launched this week, and that is this course. It's The Umbrex Guide to Setting Up Your Own Consulting Practice. Really, it's more general. Really, it's anyone who's interested in being an independent professional.

I've been working on that for 8 years. I had the idea back in 2012 on creating a guide. At that point, I had been an independent consultant for 4 years. It took me— I worked on it, outlining it and writing chapters for 5 years. Then 3 years ago, I realized that I needed more insights than my own, so I started a podcast. Now, 280 episodes later, I finally got the course online.

It has 90 videos. About 30 downloadable templates and tools, uh, and checklists. And you can find it if you go to umbrecht.com and click on the tab that says Start Your Own Firm. So, uh, I'm really excited about this as a resource to help people get started as independent professionals.

[03:35] Paul: A lot of your resources are places I send people taking the leap to independent consulting first. I say check out Will's stuff. You have a lot of podcasts and articles about kind of setting up your business. This course is obviously the next iteration of that. Where does that impulse come from in terms of kind of the sense maker and somebody that wants to just basically help as many people as possible?

[04:04] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah. Well, thanks for that, Paul. Well, a couple of things I'd say. One is a couple of mindsets that I have is number one is taking a 5-decade time horizon to your professional career. And when you start doing that, it opens up a whole range of activities and investments that you might make both in building your own skills and building relationships and building your visibility that don't make sense if you're thinking 1 or 2 years out. So long-term, I'm really passionate about helping independent professionals thrive, partly because I've benefited so much from, from choosing this path.

I want to help other people be successful at it. And part of what Umbrex is trying to do is trying to help build and invest and help create that ecosystem to help independent professionals thrive. So that's what drove us to start Umbrex, which connects independent management consultants consultants with one another, and that was the real driver behind the genesis of this course of helping people get started. And I've tried to boil down and create the guide that I wish that I had when I started out in 2008.

You know, there's so many questions when you're starting your practice, even if you know how to do your craft, whether you're a graphic designer or consultant or a writer, you may know your craft, but running a practice There's all these factors, setting up your entity, legal, contracts, how do you get health insurance, business insurance, how do you build your visibility, how do you find clients, how do you negotiate proposals, all these different things. Um, and it's, it's tough to figure out. There wasn't one single resource that I could find, uh, that answered all those. So that, that's why I created the course.

[05:55] Paul: So first I'm curious, what, what do you want that 50-year reflection to say about what you're doing now? One thing that jumps out, just observing the work you're doing, is a spirit of generosity. I'd love to hear if that resonates with your own vision and maybe some other themes that you're thinking about.

[06:17] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. You know, like in Adam Grant's book, "Givers and Takers," "Give and Take," I think generosity in that spirit, I'd be bold enough to say that it is an important driving element in how I think about running the business. Now, you still have to make a profit, but profit I think about as the right to keep playing the game is how I think about profit. My goal is if you are generating 100 units of value, Maybe I want to take home 5 of those units and give away 95 or be generous with the other 95 as opposed to the reverse. If you generate 100 and you keep 95, well, you're still giving a surplus of 5 units, but I'm trying to create as much value as I can.

I still need to feed my family and run a business. So, I need to keep something. But trying to create value and certainly, I think everyone listening to your show can follow your example. Got inspired by you and the courses that you've created to make it public. So taking what you know and sharing that with others and teaching others, one, it's a great way to learn yourself. But to answer your question about generosity, yeah, it's a way of trying to be helpful to other people.

Eventually, in kind of a universe of karma, it comes back and people appreciate that when they see that it's authentic and not just a kind of a tactic.

[07:47] Paul: Yeah. So in terms of setting up a practice, what do you know, having worked several years at McKinsey, we share this in common and there's a lot of knowledge or kind of like tacit knowledge you pick up that's hard to explain and hard to really understand unless you've worked there. So what do you know that others, especially starting out as freelancers or a couple years in, what don't they understand?

[08:19] Decade Success Mindset: Hmm. Let's see, a few things. So one, it's, at least in terms of consulting, consulting truly is an apprenticeship craft. So that means it's tough to learn from a book. So as much as possible, seek out opportunities to work with someone who's more experienced than you or just who knows a different skill than you, maybe even less experienced, but they know something about an area that you don't. So that's number one, is seeking out those opportunities.

Number two, you can somewhat replicate that if you can't find paid opportunities, then start creating content like you do, Paul, where you have an opportunity either just, you know, writing and creating it out of your own brain, which is great. It's a great way to discover something or research a topic. My approach with Unleashed, with the podcast, is if I created a vehicle intentionally to force me to keep learning. So if I have to publish an episode every week, then there's that hole to fill and I need to carve out a piece of my calendar to make sure I'm interviewing someone each week to have that discussion. And so, you know, I hope my leaders, my listeners benefit something from the show, but really it's to drive my own curiosity and to keep myself learning. And if listeners enjoy it as well, that's kind of a bonus.

So it's easy to let that kind of thing slide. But if you are making a public commitment to be publishing on a regular schedule, then it just becomes a habit and becomes part of your routine. And in fact, during the pandemic, I switched from a weekly routine to a daily episode. So I've been publishing near-daily episodes during the pandemic. And it's been an amazing opportunity to connect with folks and just keep learning a tremendous amount. I interviewed the VP of cargo sales at American Airlines, the CEO of a hospital, CEO of a global manufacturing company, and touching the universe.

So I'd say for folks starting out, apprentice, figure out a way to create content on a regular basis. Some of the things you can learn from books, so read, you know, in terms of negotiations, you can read good courses on that, carve out topics. And continue investing in your skills.

[10:43] Paul: Yeah, I love that advice about just creating the vehicle for doing. I think when I reflect back on consulting, the thing that was so shocking— I went from GE to McKinsey— was the pace of iteration. So you might go through an iteration of something in a couple hours in a consulting team or project. Versus maybe a month you might have to wait for feedback at a big company. And then compounding that over and over, you kind of get addicted to those feedback cycles because when you reflect back, you realize, wow, I really learned a ton. And I think a lot of my independent path has been trying to create those vicious or virtuous circles, cycles for myself.

It's, and it seems like you've done that with the podcast. I mean, that's been similar to my approach as well.

[11:39] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah. And I'd say a couple other things to think about, um, start building a portfolio of sanitized work that you can share. Uh, that's something that a lot of even experienced consultants don't have. And it's, you know, sort of, I'm sure, you know, Paul, the story about Benjamin Franklin from his autobiography. He taught himself how to write by taking articles from, I think, The Spectator and cutting them into pieces and then trying to rewrite those articles a day later after taking notes on them. You could do the same thing if you're trying to learn consulting.

It's outside in. You can hire yourself. Outside in, pick a merger that's been announced recently and read the public filings of both companies and try to What is the strategy document that you would have handed the CEO, you know, before the merger to convince him or her to go forward with it? Or, you know, take a scenario that you're, you know, your local bagel shop or the Department of Motor Vehicles and write an operational diagnostic of how, what the improvement opportunities are. So force yourself to actually create, you know, consulting deliverables that you can share and get feedback on them. Is a great way to learn in public.

[12:57] Paul: A lot of people I talk to who are becoming independent professionals think that someone like me knew exactly what they were doing when they went from consulting to independent consulting, which is somewhat true. There's, I kind of know the flow of things, how a quality level, but I actually did a pro bono project before I took the leap and I realized, oh crap, I don't actually know how to manage the complete stack of things a consultant does because at a big firm, it's all pieced into chunks of different responsibilities and roles. So I definitely encourage that pro bono work.

[13:39] Decade Success Mindset: Pro bono work and find— I mean, this is essential— is, I mean, this is one thing, reason that we create Umbrex, is find someone who can mentor you, or just not even be that formal, but just advise you as you're getting started, someone who's been in the independent world for a bit, because there's so many different factors. When I started, Joachim Fischer and Rosina Samadani were really important mentors of mine. I had known them at McKinsey, and they helped explain to me, okay, here's how you write a proposal, or, you know, here's what you roughly should charge for a project, here's how to craft a statement of work, because those are just aspects that, you know, I hadn't been exposed to.

And even partners leaving McKinsey They call me with advice on, "Hey, how do I get health insurance?" or "How do I get business insurance?" or "Hey, do you know where I can get a contract for this?" or "How do I get a graphic designer?" I mean, they've been relying on the firm resources for 20 years. So, it's really helpful to be connected with at least one and hopefully several folks who are doing this. And most people in my experience are generous and are happy to share their experience.

[14:44] Paul: Yeah. What, what has changed about the kind of people that are becoming independent consultants now versus what you were seeing when you started? I got somewhat of a lens into this because I was working at A-Connect in 2012, and the talent pool was still pretty small, a certain type of kind of like mid-level senior ex-consultants, but not that broad, maybe deep in a couple industries. And now it's exploding and people are coming from different directions, different industries, different domains. Uh, what have you seen in terms of what shifted?

[15:24] Decade Success Mindset: Well, I think it's certainly becoming more and more common, uh, to, to think about doing it. There's a greater awareness both on the consultant side that this is a feasible path to pursue, uh, as well as on the client side that this is a good source of a way to get certain projects done. Where you need that caliber of talent but maybe not the full team. So, you know, it's just as more and more people become aware of it, it's maybe just not just oddballs anymore like me but just a broader swath of folks. And there's all sorts of reasons why people do it, as you know. You know, some people do it because they just like the freedom of it.

Some people want to work 6 months and take 6 months off or travel, be a global nomad. Work from different parts of the world, or they have a family member that they need to take care of, or they have a startup on the side. Tim Duroche, I'm a Brex member, he just wrote a novel and he came out with a nonfiction book just now. So people do it for all sorts of reasons. Yeah, I mean, a fine line. I just interviewed him about it.

And so people do it for all sorts of reasons, but I think more it's becoming maybe just a broader swath of people. So you still have some of the same types of folks, but just a becoming, I think, more accepted and more recognized that you can make a decent living and have more control of your life.

[16:42] Paul: Yeah. So earlier you said you figured out that this is a game you want to keep playing, right? And that resonates so much with my own journey. I think the first year of becoming an independent consultant, solopreneur, was figuring stuff out, experimenting with different opportunities. And then about a year in, it clicked. It was like, oh, the whole point is to keep this going because for me, the point is learning and growth and trying to design a life that makes sense for me.

So, there's no outcome, right? We're so trained in our careers or in big companies to think like, oh, it's this title or this position. And the people who are most alive who are self-employed, figure out this secret. When did that occur for you and how has that evolved for you?

[17:37] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, it's an interesting thing. If you're self-employed, then you're never going to get promoted again in your life, right? You can give yourself whatever title you want, but you're not going to get promoted. So it's a question of, okay, what do I want to do with my life? And, you know, as an independent professional, my goal is I mean, there's a financial goal. You want to keep earning enough to pay your bills and to so forth.

But then you also say, okay, I want to keep growing. I want to help as many people as possible. I want to keep having interesting experiences. And more and more, I want to be able to pick the type of work I do and how I spend my time. And I think the ways that you get about that is think about the portfolio of Number one, it's relationships, continuing to invest in relationships. Our mutual friend, David A.

Fields, talks about he thinks about his wealth, he thinks about it in terms of relationships, and I think that's a great model. So, one, relationships, how can you invest in those over time? How do you think about building your skills over time? How do you think about building just your knowledge over time? So, your understanding of a given industry or function. And then, how do you build your visibility over time?

So, how many people know you? What have you created? Content you've created and so forth. So think about what's your portfolio of work across those. And just the right to keep doing that is what keeps me in the game. I can understand now better than I could 10 years ago, like why does Bill Gates keep working?

Why does Warren Buffett keep working? Because it's basically a game and they enjoy it. It's like you wouldn't want to necessarily quit golf if you suddenly won the lottery. I don't play golf, but I mean, I'm just guessing if someone played golf, right? Or if you're a chess player, you wouldn't quit chess if you won the lottery. You do it because you enjoy it.

And that's just a wonderful spot to be if you're an independent professional and you're doing something that you would keep doing even if you won the lottery.

[19:33] Paul: How has your creative journey evolved over the years? I think I remember one interesting moment, and this may be a phase shift for you or may not, but you posted an episode on your podcast, which was 10 minutes of just the beach in Mexico, right? And you put it up as kind of like a free meditation mindfulness background. And I remember thinking at the time, it's like, oh, Will's playing here. Like he's experimenting. He's just going to see what happens.

Was that a meaningful moment for you or anything with that?

[20:14] Decade Success Mindset: And I remember you responding to that one, Paul. I think you were the only one who reacted to that. So I guess we're on the same wavelength. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, it's sort of playing around with it. And that one, though, that one was fun. I suppose, I suppose a real phase shift for me was just in terms of creativity and content creation.

I, I tried a number of different formats over, you know, just in channels. I tried writing a blog for a while, and, and I did daily for a while and spotty, and it just didn't really work for me. I, you know, you're— I love your new newsletter, Boundless. So for folks who love to, really love to write, that's awesome, you know, keep at it. Didn't work for me, but I think the message is it's okay to experiment and to quit if it's not working for you. When I started the podcast, I'd maybe say for me that was a real phase change because that was just the right format for me.

You know, it's sort of a lower bar doing an interview show and And then I also found that I could write for the podcast easier than I could write as if I was about to publish it as a blog. So obviously my interview podcasts are just interviews, but then maybe 15% of them are more just me talking, how to source experts for an interview, how to improve your LinkedIn profile, how to update your resume, topics like that. And I would find it hard to write those if I were going to publish it as a blog post. But when I'm writing them, it's a little bit more conversational, it flows a little bit more naturally. And so just creating that channel of the podcast for me has really just opened up the creativity and kind of given me my curiosity a way to explore because, you know, I have guests on the show just because I want to learn about a topic.

[22:04] Paul: Yeah, I think that's one thing people misunderstand about a lot of these creations is it's almost a trap to worry too much about any expected outcome, number of listeners, the goal, the theme, because I think within 5 to 10 blog posts or podcast episodes or whatever you're creating, you basically come to new insights pretty quick and realize, okay, what are the things I actually want to keep doing, or where is this headed in a new direction, rather than Oh, this is the job. This is the goal where I'm headed.

[22:41] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, that's right. I mean, number one, I picked up a huge range of fantastic tips that I've incorporated in my own practice from the show, like the tool Mixmax, M-I-X-M-A-X, which is a kind of a plugin to Google, to Gmail, and is superpower email superpowers. I picked up that from one of the episodes, and that has been an amazing tool. Other tools I've definitely picked up from my guests and just as a way to learn about stuff. Like I recently was just curious about how does food safety work and food inspections and restaurants and coronavirus. And so I reached out to Austin Publicover who has a practice, you know, advising restaurants on how to prepare for the New York City health inspection.

And he just walked me all through it. It was amazing. Worry too much about the number of listeners. Listeners, you know, I'd love— welcome to join my show and listen, but I don't really use that as a metric. My metric is, am I still interested in it? Am I learning?

And, you know, it's sort of— I've done almost 300 episodes now, and just, it's not so much about trying to build your visibility. The question is, gives you an opportunity to build a relationship with your guest, you know, and have a really amazing conversation. In a way that I think if you just called someone up, it would feel a little different. You can have— you can interview someone more and have a deeper conversation as a podcast.

[24:04] Paul: Yeah, it's a pretty special experience because a lot of the people I talk to are— they're not famous people. Um, some are, but I think a lot of people, I'm just one of the people that spent a few hours digging into their background and asked them pretty deep questions, and they usually get pretty excited about what comes out of their mouths. And they at the end are like, wow, I never thought about that I do these things or that I'm excited about these things. And I think that's a pretty cool output of the podcast experience.

[24:42] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, I definitely recommend it. I did a couple episodes of my show. I think you have some material on how to start a podcast, right? I think episode 10 of my show. I was only 10 episodes in, I did a show on how and why to start a podcast. So I definitely recommend it.

And if you're not, if the podcast isn't right, fine. You know, YouTube channel, a blog, you know, if you're active on Twitter, fantastic. Find a format that works for you and then plan to, you know, don't plan to sort of evaluate your audience after 10 or 20 episodes. It takes a long, long time to build a following.

[25:20] Paul: Let's talk about talent platforms. So this is something that's fascinated me as somebody that went from working at a talent platform to eventually going out on my own. I've done a couple projects with talent platforms, both some of the tech-enabled ones and some of the old-school, more hands-on ones. I've never done a project with Umbrex, but hopefully sometime in the future. And I, I think what you're building is really unique. I think from my experience working at a talent platform, one thing we realized is that it's just hard to scale these things while still aligning the incentives with the individual consultants.

How did you think about that when you started? And I mean, we can dive in as you share some of the details, but how are you thinking about that now as well?

[26:12] Decade Success Mindset: Well, I think You know, we started, um, a bit differently in that we were community first. So when I left McKinsey and started my own practice, I read Tribes by Seth Godin, and this was in 2008. And the book talked about build your tribe, you know, connect people and, uh, that are like-minded. And it wasn't about one-to-many. It wasn't about the relationship of the tribe members to the tribe leader or founder, if you will. It was about creating opportunities for the tribe to connect with one another.

So that was the genesis of Ambrex. We didn't, you know, found it till 2015, but back in 2008, I started, you know, reaching out to other folks that had left McKinsey and then Bain and BCG and connecting them with one another. 2013, we started organizing in-person events, professional development events. And from the beginning, it was really about connecting consultants with one another. And to serve my own purposes, right, I wanted to learn how to run a practice. Along the way, the business model kind of fell into our lap where clients, you know, heard that I, you know, had this community and knew people, and they began asking me to help find people for projects.

I started doing that just as a side thing while I was mainly focused on my own consulting projects. Then as interest in that grew, eventually, and the number of people joining this community grew, we figured, okay, we should give a name to it and a website and so forth. We founded Umbrex officially in 2015 with Margarita Soto and Jing Lang as my co-founders, but it was really community-led first. From the beginning, that's been the driver. Our primary mission is to connect independents with one another, create opportunities for our members to build relationships, share lessons learned with one another, find ways to collaborate. And the business model supports that and allows us to do that work, but we're not primarily driven by profit.

We don't have investors, so we don't have any kind of growth targets to hit and satisfy. So it's trying to create a good experience and thinking again with that 5-decade time horizon, what sort of relationships do I want to build and what reputation over the next 5 decades?

[28:42] Paul: Yeah. The talent platform, it just seems that once you get investors involved or owners who need that kind of market-level growth, it kind of undermines the incentives. Have you thought about growing it in a different direction and kind of pulled back, or has it always just been this community first, don't worry about scale or anything like that?

[29:08] Decade Success Mindset: Well, we've been approached by some investors who were interested and we're not because I agree with you. If you have investors, then you become a broker and the commodity could just as well be soybeans, right? Soybean futures, where it's about hitting financial targets and so forth, and the focus becomes much more short-term. Even a 5-year time horizon feels short-term to me and doesn't really allow you to focus on building truly long-term trusted relationships to say no to a project if it doesn't really fit the— isn't a great fit or if we don't think the client is going to be a good client to serve for our members, to be thinking strongly about what that member experience is, you know, the talent experience and serving, you know, serving that side as well. So I think it's great what other talent platforms are doing. I mean, the way I feel, it's not competition.

It's the more the merrier. And I love what, you know, certain firms have done to raise awareness. With articles in Harvard Business Review and just, you know, with their sales forces knocking on doors. We don't have a sales force, but you know, they have armies of sales reps, which is great because it raises awareness and the idea that independent consultants are available. So I thank what they do. I did projects myself through some of the talent platforms when I started out, so I'm grateful for the work that I had then.

I have a lot of respect for the founders of those firms. We have a slightly different approach, but I think that there's room in the market for different approaches. I think that in some cases, because they layer on sales forces, I mean, you were at one of these firms, that just raises the total expense and then that forces you to raise higher margins and then it's harder to sell, so you have to have more sales force. It's a little bit of a cycle. And one of the reasons we started Umbrex was I felt that the margins just seemed really extreme to me as one of the talent who was doing work through them. Like, I can't believe that you're charging that much more on top of what I'm getting paid.

[31:21] Paul: Right. Yeah. It's, it's hard to sustain that and scale because it doesn't really scale. The, I think the, I call them consulting for talent platforms 1.0.

[31:34] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah.

[31:34] Paul: They work really well, but they're really high touch. So a lot of the firms that try to copy that have trouble scaling because they outsource some of the high touch to both the consultants and the clients, and it just, it doesn't keep the quality bar as high. I think the interesting thing is it's still really early in terms of how the market and businesses leverage independent consultants. I still find that a lot of clients I work with, they're surprised at how easy it is to work with me and how much they can get done in a short amount of time, but that there's still quite a bit of disconnect in terms of helping clients think about how do you actually work with an independent consultant? Have you learned anything? In that regard or worked with any interesting clients who do that in an evolving way?

[32:36] Decade Success Mindset: Well, let's see. No, I agree with you that it's still early days, and I would expect— it's hard to predict, but I would not be surprised if 10 or 20 years from now, we're seeing a much greater percentage of work at corporations being done by a workforce that in US terms is not W-2 employees. So in terms of what sorts of things that— what are sort of the lessons learned or recommendations for companies? Well, one is certainly if it's a skill that is— that you're not going to need for a long-term time, then really think about using an independent consultant for that instead of an employee. Um, anything certainly, uh, that doesn't require directly connecting to a lot of internal parts of a company on an ongoing basis. Uh, we're researching a new industry, uh, we want to get a sense of how could we improve the operational efficiency of this factory.

Uh, we want to Do an analysis of our org chart. Anything that could be done by a large consulting firm in many cases could be done by an independent consultant, particularly if the scale is appropriate. There's certainly a place for the large consulting firms where you're rolling out changes to 27 factories around the world.

[34:08] Paul: Yeah.

[34:08] Decade Success Mindset: Right. Hire Deloitte, McKinsey, Kearney. But if you're doing to one factory or two, then an independent might be actually much less disruptive to your organization. So I'd say bring the consultant, an independent particularly, you don't have to have a separate team room for them. I'd say, you know, bring them into the process. You can treat them as an employee, you know, bring them into your internal meetings and so forth.

The more you get them involved and closer to what's going on and explain what you're trying to accomplish, the more helpful the person's going to be. One final thought, I'm sorry, is that think— be thinking about not just the traditional necessarily, okay, 2 months, 5 days a week kind of structure. The nice thing in the independent world is you have a lot more flexibility. So you can say, well, what if I just get someone a day a week for 9 months instead of 5 days a week for 2 months? You know, you have a lot more flexibility on how you use on how you engage people?

[35:11] Paul: Yeah, I think I've been talking to some companies about— I was talking to one company a couple of months ago and they were saying, we need to hire this basically a really expensive role, right? Senior level. They don't really know if it's going to work. And I said, really, you should be thinking about bringing in somebody for 2 months, have them teach you what they know, see if they fit. And then you can level up from there. Maybe the independent doesn't want to work for you.

A lot of them don't want to transition to full-time, but they can help you shape and craft that role. So I think that's something that will definitely emerge as well.

[35:49] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, I've seen a lot of that kind of date before you get married, you know, sort of, you know, contractor to permanent, you know, check it out on both directions. It's a little bit lower risk for both sides. You know, it's, it's For the talent side, it's not embarrassing then if you're not getting fired. It's just you did a 3-month consulting project and you wrapped it up. It's not this life-changing thing. And for the company, they get a chance to work with a person.

If they provide some value, great. If they're not perfect, that's okay. So I'm seeing, I am seeing that. And another twist on that, one that I did myself actually was if you're thinking about hiring a permanent role, one of my clients, one of my earliest clients, They wanted a plant manager. The president wanted to hire me, but it was a small company. It wasn't a fit.

So what I did was I sort of started acting in that role. I helped clear up some of the issues with the plant and then wrote the job description and helped hire a plant manager who ended up at a much lower salary than I would have been and helped kind of get that role started. So sometimes the startup of a role requires a different talent level, different skill set than someone who's going to do the role.

[37:04] Paul: I love that. We need to come up with a catchy name for that.

[37:07] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, right?

[37:09] Paul: I feel like companies would definitely buy into that, but I mean, like recruiters are just so focused on full-time hiring that it's hard to conceive of that. Maybe we can brainstorm offline, but I want to read—

[37:23] Decade Success Mindset: it's like the person who, uh, it's like the person on Broadway who like creates the role in the opening cast or something.

[37:29] Paul: Oh yeah, it's true.

[37:30] Decade Success Mindset: You know, it's like, I don't know, opening cast for the general manager, something.

[37:34] Paul: Yeah, the initial headliner, but not, not as, uh, well known. But, um, so I want to loop back to the course you created. I think— thanks. It's really impressive. You've, I'm going to point a lot of people to it. What are some of the other unexpected insights that people just don't expect?

I know you used to take calls with pretty much anyone who was thinking about becoming an independent consultant. You would just send them your phone number and if they called you, you'd connect with them. I don't know if you still do that, but I guess your brain is now in the course, so they could just enroll in that. But what, what are some of the unexpected things or the common misconceptions people get about launching a practice or thinking about starting an independent consulting career?

[38:32] Decade Success Mindset: Well, let's see. Um, I suppose I'm not— I don't know if it's a misconception, but the most common questions I get are, "What fees can I charge?" and, "How do you get clients?" Because I think people who have been at a large consulting firm, even if they've been a partner and they've been responsible for selling work or generating work, they have questions about how that part's going to work out. Most people are pretty confident, at least if they've been at a big firm, of doing the work. And then I get questions around— oh, I get a lot of questions around Well, how, if they're, let's say they've been an associate partner, engagement manager, partner, well, how do I get all of these services that the firm offered me, right? So how do I find subcontractors if, you know, if I sell work? And by the way, you can come to Umbrex for that, we can help you.

Or you can, you know, or even better, you know, build relationships with, you know, other independent consultants who are more junior than you over time. They have questions about just all the stuff like, how do I get overnight PowerPoint production? How do I get health insurance, business insurance, contract templates, proposal templates? How do I get research? A lot of people ask about data and research. You know, where at the firm we had all this, you know, research capacity.

Well, you can find research support either through Upwork, and I know you're, you're familiar with Upwork. There's a firm that we found in India that we really like working with. I know the owner, En Route Consulting. They're fantastic. And it's very much sort of, they're kind of alumni of the McKinsey Knowledge Center. So they're great.

So you can really replicate a lot of the services you had at a big firm and you can piece that together. But maybe something people don't appreciate is you do need to invest time in building what I call your virtual team. So at a consulting firm, that was part of what was given to you, and that's one reason they charge so much overhead. As an independent consultant, you need to build your virtual team, and that means tax accountant, attorney, bookkeeper, which I recommend, administrative assistant, probably graphic production support, as well as potentially an advisor, uh, swing capacity. That's David Field's term. On, you know, someone who can come in and give you some leverage when you're, when you're busy.

So building a virtual team is like job one, something people need to do. I suppose I'm also surprised at how some people come into this and they don't use their consulting brain on their own practice, right?

[41:16] Paul: Yeah.

[41:17] Decade Success Mindset: So they, in some cases, I'll see people who are truly professionals who don't treat it like a professional. So about 25% of folks that I interact with, they don't have their own branded email address. I mean, that's kind of table stakes. Get a domain, register a domain, and, you know, set up G Suite or Microsoft Office. Get yourself— you wouldn't work with an attorney who is using an AOL.com address, right? Just, come on, come on.

So And then the other set of collateral. So update your LinkedIn profile, you know, don't let it show that you're still a vice president of procurement at IBM or something, you know, update that, get a resume, get a bio, update your LinkedIn profile. And if you don't have a website, people can survive without a website.

[42:11] Paul: Yeah.

[42:12] Decade Success Mindset: But at least, you know, I reckon it's nice if you have at least a one-page kind of Squarespace sort of thing that people can point to. And then building up your thought, your visibility through some content creation.

[42:25] Paul: Well, I find a lot of these things, the email, the website, the updating your LinkedIn, they're more of a symbol of a personal and emotional commitment to the journey. I talk to people who say, well, I'm gonna test it for 3 months and if I can't find work, I'll go back and get a job. And it's like, that is not going to work. Right. I think I tell people they need to commit at least mentally for a year and they need to kind of put that identity on, even, even if the whole point of leaving full-time employment is to kind of distance yourself from an identity, you kind of need to play with that freelancer identity and fully put it on for at least a year and tell everyone you're a freelancer. I do freelance work and kind of commit to it in a way that feels a little icky for people.

So I think a lot of those tactical things definitely help, like, the person shift into that aspiration. Do you see that as well?

[43:31] Decade Success Mindset: Well, what I, you know, I totally agree with what you're saying, Paul. And the way I explain it to people is Think about it in the reverse, right? Would you hire a tax accountant or an attorney or go to the dentist who's just like, well, I'm just kind of testing the waters here, you know, I'm just sort of testing out if I like this or not, you know, I'm gonna give it 3 months. You wouldn't go to a tax accountant and say, well, I'm gonna just sort of see if I like it. I'm using my AOL.com address, you know, until I really— no, you're not. You want someone from the other side, from the client side, because the client is making an investment in you as well.

They're paying you dollars, but they're also an opportunity cost because they're spending their time getting you up to speed on their business. And even if the project is only 2 months, it's always a thought in their mind that I'm gonna— hopefully this person's gonna be around, you know, next year if they want to call them back, because I don't have to get some other consultant up to speed as well. So they're making an investment in you. And if people think that you're no, fight, you know, just here, here today, gone tomorrow, then that's a real negative. So put your feet into it, act as if you're serious about it and committed to the long term. Even, you know, you can give yourself an out, and a year from now you can call the, you know, call the— pull the cord on it.

But act as if you're serious about it, because clients can sense people that are being tentative, and, and that's not a good sign.

[44:55] Paul: Right. The other one you mentioned earlier, how do you get clients, right? That's— there's not actually a perfect answer to that. I think I have a different way of getting clients than you probably do. I think what you need to figure out is you need to figure out what is your funnel. I think for me, it's a lot of outward creation.

For me, it's the blog posts. I write a lot about things I'm curious about, and then it kind of hits people who are searching that and then they come to me. That's now, that's like 3 years in. I think in the first year it was more outbound, basically cold emails to connections and friends saying, hey, I'm a consultant now, I don't know what I'm doing, want to chat about it? What's your current funnel? I mean, yours is probably kind of on autopilot now, but What is your funnel?

What are some of the other examples you've seen?

[45:52] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah, well, I'll talk a little bit mine, but also kind of share my perspective on if I were starting out, you know, if I'm a listener of yours, um, setting up a practice. And I'll give a mention here for the book of David A. Fields, uh, The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients: 6 Steps to Financial Freedom. I've given out a couple hundred copies of this book I really recommend it. It's the best thing that I have read. It's actually kind of funny.

He has a lot of good cartoons that he drew in there, easy to read. And that kind of— so some of what I'll say will be drawn from that. So in terms of what I recommend to freelancers starting out is the people that are most likely to hire you initially are the people that already know you, right, and like you and trust you, right? So there's a little mnemonic to getting a lead, uh, that I came up with called CLARC. C-L-A-R-C. So if you're gonna get a lead, uh, you need to satisfy those.

And that's— C is contactable. A little bit of a workaround, but people have to be able to contact you. So that means update your LinkedIn profile with your current email and contact info, right? Update all your alumni websites for college, business school, your consulting firm with your current contact info. When you send emails, include a signature. I mean, I've had so many cases where I wanted to call up a consultant for a project and I couldn't find their phone number and it was so time-pressed I couldn't email them, so I called someone else.

Include your phone number, put your phone number on LinkedIn, make yourself contactable. And then there's L is likable. I mean, likable enough, at least. I don't know how likable I am, but at least likable enough. And then A is available. People need to know that you're available for projects, not necessarily like I'm available this week or I'm staffed this week, but available in general for independent consulting projects.

So that's the trickiest one. You need to, number one, update LinkedIn and make it look like you're not currently employed full-time somewhere, but that you're now an independent consultant or that you're running your own firm. And then you need to tell people that. And I think that some people try this approach of just blasting out an email, hey, I'm now an independent consultant, you got any projects for me? And that just rubs people the wrong way. And you don't want to call people up and tell them, hey, I'm an independent, you got any projects, or do you know someone?

It really kind of kills a relationship in some way because you can kind of ask that once, people are put on the spot, and then they say no, and then they don't really want to talk to you again. So the way I suggest on that is reach out to people and say, hey, I'd love to catch up and hear what's new with you. And they're going to tell you what's new with them. And then obviously they're going to ask, well, what's new with you, Will? Or what's new? And you're going to say, oh, well, I've started my new consulting practice.

I'm really excited about it. I'm serving XYZ segment. Um, and then just turn it back to what they're doing, right? So you don't want to dwell on it, but you plant that seed. And so you've let them know that you're available, and either if they have a need at 6 months from now or they know someone 6 months from now, you know, they may remember you've planted that seed. And then R is reliable and C is credible.

So you need to be reliable and credible. Um, but in terms— so in terms of getting new clients, you want to assess your core network and just look at every single person that you know. Uh, David Fields in the book has a good exercise on this. And then rank them by are they a decision maker, an influencer, or kind of the remainder, everybody else? And are they— is a really close relationship, is it a weak tie, or is it just a distant tie? And then take those decision makers and influencers and the strong ties and the weak ties and do these outbound calls.

Calls preferably, emails are okay, but calls are better. It's a warmer interaction and your initial client set is 90% gonna come from that set of people.

[49:52] Paul: I love that. One thing I did early on was just be very blunt about my vulnerability. Mm-hmm. And I would kind of address the elephant in the room. I would say, hey, I am starting as a freelance consultant, but I am not hitting you up for projects.

[50:08] Decade Success Mindset: Right.

[50:08] Paul: Um, trying to figure out what I'm doing. I'm a little nervous about taking this leap, but would love to just catch up and kind of see what you're seeing in the industry. I think it worked for me because I'm kind of wildly curious. I'm always asking people questions and stuff. But yeah, I think the takeaway is essentially just be honest with people, connect with people in a human way, and you'll be surprised. I think, I mean, my first project was I was seeing a professor right after I left my job and she goes, oh, what are you up to?

I'm freelancing now. I'm trying to figure it out as I go. It's a fun journey. And she's like, oh, work for me. I'm like, okay. And that eventually led into something.

But if you're not telling people and you're not available, like you said, it's— you're not going to get anything.

[51:06] Decade Success Mindset: Yeah. And, you know, I mean, there's different ways of handling it. I love your vulnerability approach and people respond well to that. So I think it's fine to be honest if you truly do want feedback on something, like as opposed to asking for a project saying, "Hey, I'm new to this. You're sort of in my client target space. Would love to get your reaction to my new website," something like that.

That's a way of asking for help. The other thing I'd say is once you've done those calls, then you need to find some way to stay top of mind. Different ways of doing that, but definitely content creation. There's, I think there's two primary ways of staying top of mind. Fundamentally, there's content creation and there's creating social interactions. So content creation, if you are doing a podcast or a blog or YouTube channel or white papers or whatever, then that gives you the right to post regularly on LinkedIn and on Twitter, ideally at least weekly.

Hey, I just created this. Here's my latest episode. And if the other way is creating social interactions, so, you know, in our world today, that could be some creating some small group webinars. It could be something fun, you know, a Shakespeare play reading, you know, together. Or so, you know, in the future when we can get back together, creating in-person events. And then, you know, so either creating content or creating those social interactions.

And then a newsletter is something that every freelancer should think about doing. You know, maybe a paid one, like I know some folks are doing on Substack, but at least doing some kind of newsletter where you can ask people, "Hey, do you mind if I send you my newsletter?" You don't have to write fresh content for the whole thing. Simply curating content. Whatever industry you're focused on, dog food industry, great. You know, here's the latest, you know, developments in the dog food industry this week that I thought were interesting and sending that out to your followers. Even if they're not opening every newsletter, it just reminds them that you exist and reminds them of your focus every week.

[53:12] Paul: Fantastic. So anything else you want to add on the course?