A Year of Indie Consulting (Year One)
All entries in the series
- A Year of Indie Consulting (Year One)
- A Year of Indie Consulting (Year Two)
The end of 2023 also marks my first split as an independent consultant. To celebrate that milestone, I want to reflect on what happened in these last twelve months.
- The Highlights
- My Low-lights
- The Numbers
- A couple of patterns, I recognized
- Get a feeling for what’s next
When I say independent, I actually mean ==part-time== consultant. Being a dad with a two-year old child and main financial provider of the family, I shied away from the risk of quitting my employment. For now, that’s a setup that works well for our lifestyle, but I have this itch to try myself out as full-time self-employed.
The Highlights of 2023
Getting my first client
Through a recommendation by Michael (I still appreciate you connecting us!), I found my big client for 2023. From there, we built a relationship that will be going strong even in 2024. I was lucky that I didn’t have to do anything resembling cold sales.
Holding a session for Adaptive Strategy at AGILE.RUHR Camp 2023
I took the leap, holding a session with a topic that I am slowly getting comfortable with. Combining long-term planning with adaptive behavior to build robust strategies. The session itself, conversations later on as well as projects built on that train of thought went pretty damn well. It gave me confidence to pursue this topic.
Launching an early version of lyrn.tools
Coming back from a training with Dark Horse Berlin, an idea stuck in my head. Great strategies are constantly tested with business experiments. They generate the data for people to decide: are we on the right track or do we have to adapt?
But what are some proven ways to test your hypotheses? Which ones work best in the current context? That’s why I started building lyrn.tools as a database of business experiments which I want to tag and make searchable/filterable (that’s not a word, is it?).
CLOQ is still organically growing
CLOQ, a shared timer for remote teams, is starting its fourth year of existence. At the end of 2022, I contemplated using paid channels to reach more users and decided against it. Still: more and more people visit (and return to) CLOQ organically. And more and more timers are created every month.
My low-light(s)
In 2023, there was always a project deadline, an important task or an appointment between employment, consulting and being a father and husband.
By the end of the year, I was really stressed out. Like, REALLY stressed out! Too many contexts in my head. Too many tasks on my to-do list. A constant feeling of not having enough time to complete things. Negative self-talk about not being good in any role I took. Whatever I was doing, I always felt like I needed to be doing something else.
I “paid” with procrastinating (yep, it’s pretty damn counter-intuitive), lack of sports, gaining weight, sometimes even neglecting relationships. This in turn put even more pressure on my mental health. Finally, I decreased my work weeks as an employee to allow for more room as a consultant and for family. I also decided to get professional help to work on that situation (learned a new concept: ”rush hour of life”).
The numbers
I have worked with two clients on a total of six projects. This lead to my independent consulting being roughly a third of my total income.
In the second half of 2023 I doubled my consulting revenue, while deciding to decrease my weekly hours (and my salary, duh). Towards the second half of the year, it changed to 61/39 from 76/24 in favor of the employment.
Observant readers will notice three things in this diagram.
Firstly, I said it’s my first years as an independent consultant. Yet, I’ve had revenue in 2022. This is correct. I already started an engagement in Q4 2022, but the revenue was negligible in absolute and relative terms. That’s why I count 2023 as my first year as a consultant.
Secondly, you find a label “products” in the legend. I made a whooping $20 with CLOQ in 2022 (you can barely see the bar, I know). In 2023 there was no additional revenue. It’s something I might work on in 2024.
Thirdly, for 2024 a bit of revenue is already assigned, as it’s the continuation of a 2023 project.
If I want to go full-indie, I will have to at least double – better tripple – the current non-employment revenue. This is due to a switch in taxing and mandatory state insurances.
A couple of patterns…
Workshops
Working with move:elevator, a lot of my workshops have the more or less explicit goal to create stakeholder alignment. This leads to workshops being structured conversations on making thoughts of five to twelve participants from two parties (agency and client) explicit.
In my indie consulting, the whole premise for workshops changes. It’s one party, a small team with mostly overlapping goals. That’s why we can use our workshop time together, to actually make decisions and build stuff together. I often get outside stimuli to open up roads towards new ideas. The whole workshop is often shorter and less formalized.
What I do for clients
My current, always in flux, value proposition:
I work with product teams and their leaders. Together we gain clarity about strategic initiatives and develop new digital products.
I try to achieve this by stewarding strategic initiatives and innovation projects, doing research, designing user experiences and prototypes.
What’s next…
As if I knew… my gut says, a couple of topics could be coming up.
- Finding my second and third client. Get in touch, if you are interested in working together.
- Monetizing CLOQ or lyrn.tools.
- Making a decision regarding employment and independent consulting.
- Writing more thought-out texts (kinda like this one).