Marking my own homework
I started this practice almost two years ago with a set of assumptions I'd never tested, because I'd never done this before.
Some held. Several didn't. This is the list, written mostly so I have a record to be embarrassed by in another two years.
Wrong: clients hire you for expertise
I assumed I'd be hired because I knew things the client didn't.
Sometimes. More often I'm hired because the client already suspects what needs to happen and needs someone external to say it, or to do the work nobody internally has capacity for, or to make a decision defensible to a board.
This isn't cynical and it isn't a lesser role. But it changes the job. If the value is partly in being credible and independent, then how you communicate matters as much as what you conclude — and a technically excellent recommendation delivered badly is worth nothing.
I spent my first year optimising almost entirely for the analysis.
Wrong: the best work generates referrals automatically
I believed that if the work was good, word would spread on its own.
It does — very slowly, and only within the referrer's immediate reach. Two years in, my best-performing engagement by results produced exactly one referral, while a smaller, more visible project produced five, because it happened to involve someone who talks publicly about their work.
Referrals are a function of visibility as much as quality. I don't love that, but designing around it is more useful than resenting it.
Wrong: I should say yes to everything in year one
The standard advice for new consultants, and I followed it.
It's half right. Early on you genuinely don't know what you're best at, and breadth is how you find out. But two of my first-year clients were poor fits I knew were poor fits when I signed them, and both cost more than they paid — in time, in stress, and in the opportunity cost of the work I couldn't take.
The better version: say yes to unfamiliar problems, say no to bad fits. Those are different axes and I was treating them as one.
Wrong: pricing by day rate is a neutral choice
It felt like the simple, honest option. It's neither.
A day rate means you're paid for time, which means every efficiency you develop reduces your income. Get twice as fast at a channel audit and you earn half as much for it. The incentive is precisely backwards.
I've moved most work to fixed-scope pricing, which is harder to quote and occasionally goes wrong, but aligns what I'm paid with what the client actually gets. It also removes an uncomfortable conversation about how long something took.
Right: narrowing the focus
The one significant thing I got right.
I went in specifically on B2B SaaS demand generation for early-stage companies, and resisted broadening when work was thin — which it was, twice.
Narrowness makes you findable. "Growth marketing consultant" is a category with thousands of people in it and no way for anyone to choose between them. "The person who fixes demand generation for Seed to Series A B2B SaaS" is a description someone can act on when a specific problem appears.
Almost every inbound enquiry I've had came from that specificity.
Right, but harder than expected: writing
I started writing to make myself findable. It has worked, but not on the timeline I expected.
The pattern that surprised me: the posts that generate business are almost never the ones I thought were best. Highly practical, narrow pieces — a checklist, a diagnostic — reach people with that exact problem right now. The broader strategic essays I enjoyed writing more mostly reach other consultants.
Second surprise: the delay is enormous. Several enquiries this year referenced posts from 2021. If I'd judged writing on a three-month return, I'd have stopped.
Still unresolved: capacity
The problem I haven't solved.
Consulting income scales with your hours until it doesn't. The standard exits are hiring, productising, or raising rates until demand thins. I've raised rates twice, which helped, and it isn't a strategy that extends indefinitely.
I don't have an answer yet. What I've stopped doing is pretending the question isn't there — for the first year I treated a full pipeline as success without noticing that a permanently full pipeline is also a ceiling.
What I'd tell myself in January 2021
Decide the rate with arithmetic. Say no to bad fits even when the month looks thin. Write the narrow, practical thing rather than the impressive one. Assume everything takes three times longer to produce results than it should, and plan the runway accordingly.
And treat the first year's revenue as tuition. Mine was, and it was worth roughly what a year of formal education would have cost — with the advantage that the lessons arrived attached to consequences.
Hilal Tasdan
B2B SaaS Growth Marketing Consultant & Fractional CMO. Partner in Growth.