When you’re a solo consultant, your speed and agility are valuable assets for you and your clients. But just because you can go fast, doesn’t mean you always should.
When I was a young consultant, hearing that Fortune 500 clients wanted to hire me because of this speed and agility encouraged me to move as fast as I could.
Need a project done ASAP? I’d work around the clock to deliver as quickly as I could.
But this wasn’t usually a good idea.
While clients liked having work completed, they often couldn’t digest it for some time. So after pushing myself really hard and creating unnecessary stress, I sometimes had to redo portions of projects because I hadn’t been clear about when things were due, and as the organization moved to digest the work, people needed changes. This was all reasonable, and all I had to do was ask about the schedule, not just for my work (“ASAP” usually sounds good to clients), but for the larger projects that my work fed.
When you ask those questions, you can create a much more compelling proposal, and also give yourself space to work without (or at least with lower) stress. You can also often serve more than one client at a time, and do ongoing business development work because you’re not wall-to-wall with one client’s tasks.
This lets you use that velocity in a way that moves your business forward, without the frenetic stress.