Consulting Mastery

You're halfway through the year and thinking about how to finish it. Maybe you're behind on revenue. Maybe you're planning to take some time off because nothing happens in summer anyway. Meanwhile, your prospects are doing something else entirely: they're starting to decide where next year's money goes. The philosophical decisions about what's worth investing in for 2027 ar...

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You've seen the LinkedIn posts. The big firms are shedding staff, your revenue feels harder to hold onto, and three prospects in a row have mentioned bringing more work in-house. The narrative writes itself: consulting is dying, and AI is holding the knife. Except the market isn't shrinking so much as splitting in two. While mid-market firms get stuck between two worlds, unable to move fas...

A stranger reads everything you've accomplished and still doesn't quite trust you. The work is good, the track record is real, and none of it lands the way it used to. What changed isn't your expertise but the way people decide who to believe. They've turned inward, wary of anyone who seems to see the world differently, and a long resume now reads as distance rather than proof. For...

You realized you needed to do some marketing, so you asked an AI tool for ideas and got back a list. You worked the list. Some outreach, a podcast, an agency, a little of each, and none of it produced much. So you tried the next thing, and the next, always with a fresh tactic right behind the last one. Six months later you've tried everything and learned almost nothing, because nothing ran lon...

You realized you needed to do some marketing, so you asked an AI tool for ideas and got back a list. You worked the list. Cold outreach, a podcast, an agency, a little of each, and none of it produced much. So you tried the next thing, and the next, always with a fresh tactic right behind the last one. Six months later you've tried everything and learned almost nothing, because nothing ran lon...

You're on a sales call with a prospect who feels too big for you. Maybe it's the company size, maybe it's their sophistication level, maybe it's just that voice in your head telling you that you don't belong in this conversation. That voice isn't just living in your head. It's leaking into your tone, your posture, your energy. And your prospect can feel it. They're...

Another discovery call. Another prospect asking detailed questions about your methodology, your process, your approach, but something feels off. You can sense they're taking notes not to evaluate working with you, but to figure out how to do it themselves. What if that read is costing you more deals than you know? The DIY mindset isn't a fixed personality trait. It's a point in a buyer's journey,...

You left corporate with a clear picture of what you didn't want. No nightmare bosses. No managing people who didn't want to be managed. No meetings about meetings. Just you, your expertise, and the freedom to work however you wanted. Year one felt like exactly that. By year three, you were eating lunch at your desk alone, bouncing ideas off your spouse (which went about as well as you'...

What if growing your consulting business isn't just a personal ambition — but a moral and societal obligation? In this episode, Ahmad defends a provocative claim he made to a group of clients: if we're truly honest about the consequences of our work on the people we serve, each and every one of us has an obligation to grow our business. Ahmad and Karie unpack why self-interest is a surpris...

A consultant pushes back on something we said a few episodes ago: that you can't convince prospects they have problems they don't feel. His counter was fair. McKinsey does it. BCG does it. That's how the consulting industry has worked for decades. So who's right? In this episode, Ahmad works through the real answer, which isn't "stop educating" but "understand wh...

Most consultants assume feast or famine is just the nature of the business. The market goes hot and cold, clients come and go, and you learn to live with the uncertainty. But there's a pattern underneath the pattern that has nothing to do with the market. There's a number in your head that feels about right, a revenue level that, if you hit it consistently, would feel like things were work...

Most consultants we work with take pride in how unique their business is, and they're right to. But somewhere along the way, that pride shifts into something else: a belief that their problems are equally unique, that no outside perspective could really apply, that the right solution doesn't exist yet. In this episode, we unpack what we call Snowflake Syndrome, why it shows up most often i...

We hear this from consultants constantly: I just need more calls. More activity. Better numbers. And we get the instinct, because when the pipeline feels thin, motion feels like the answer. But in this episode, we make the case that more calls with the wrong people isn't a pipeline problem, it's a burnout strategy. We get into why the best consultants think less like salespeople and more l...

We hear a version of this question constantly: how do I make more money without working more hours? And most of the time, the person asking it assumes the answer involves some kind of hustle, or a new offer, or just grinding harder until the numbers shift. But there's a different way to look at it. In this episode, we walk through a real consulting business that went from a good income to a ge...

Most consultants think the problem with their positioning is that they haven't found the right niche yet. But that's not what's holding them back. The bigger issue is that they're conflating the positioning of their company with the portfolio of their career, and treating them as the same decision. In this episode, we're joined by Adam Levinter, founder of Scriberbase and Axis...

We get this question all the time: "My prospects don't realize they have a problem, how do I get them to see it?" And we get why it feels urgent, because you can see exactly what's broken and they can't. But the consultants who spend their energy trying to manufacture awareness in people who aren't feeling any pain are playing a losing game. In this episode, we break down...

We keep running into the same pattern: a consultant gets on a sales call, the prospect asks a great question, and instead of sitting with it, the consultant starts teaching. Advising. Consulting. For free. The call ends, the prospect says "that was incredibly helpful," and then disappears. Not because they didn't like you. Because you satisfied their curiosity enough that they think...

We've become desensitized to this story. A consultant hits a wall, panics, and hands a pile of money to a lead gen agency that promises to fill their pipeline. Six months later: zero leads. Not one. We heard three versions of that same story in a single week. But the scarier version isn't zero leads, it's the consultant who paid a premium agency for a full year of LinkedIn outbound, go...

We're going to upset some people with this one. Most consultants treat referrals as their business development strategy when they're actually functioning as a security blanket, a way to avoid putting yourself out there and risking rejection from the broader market. The result? You end up eating whatever someone else puts on the table, taking on clients you didn't choose, doing work tha...

We keep seeing the same pattern with consultants: they get an objection and the deal dies. Not because the prospect walked away, but because the consultant did. They hear pushback and assume the opportunity is over. Or worse, they spend months searching for the objection-free offer, the perfect positioning where nobody will ever question them. We've sat inside hundreds of these sales conversat...

You closed a few deals. You've got momentum. The logical next step is to hire, right? Not so fast. I've watched too many consultants scale before they were ready. They add headcount, build overhead, create obligations—and then spend all their time chasing random work just to keep their team busy. The growth they wanted becomes the cage they're trapped in. In this episode, Kerry and I b...

We ran a diagnostic assessment after our recent Power Positioning workshop and one phrase kept appearing: "I've tried positioning before. It didn't work." These weren't beginners. These were consultants who understood the theory, agreed with the framework, and still couldn't make it land. Their conclusion was that positioning doesn't work for them. But that's like...

We get this request constantly: "Hey, I'd love for you to look at my positioning statement." As if us agreeing with the words is somehow consequential. We're not your client. We're not writing you a check. But the bigger problem is what the request reveals: the belief that positioning is a wordsmithing exercise. That if we just arrange the right words in the right order, the...

In this episode, Erica Lee Garcia shares how she went from charging $10-15K and feeling uncomfortable asking for more, to landing a near seven-figure engagement with a single client—beating out a major consulting firm in the process. The transformation wasn't about better sales tactics or fancier proposals. It was about committing to a lane, going deep instead of broad, and becoming the person...