A Year of Indie Consulting (Year Three)

All entries in the series

• A Year of Indie Consulting (Year One)
• A Year of Indie Consulting (Year Two)
• A Year of Indie Consulting (Year Three)

This is the conclusion of my third split as a part-time independent consultant (That phrase still makes me smile, sue me).

I’ve got a section about how you can work with me but to give you a sense of what I’ve been up to here’s some more intimate highs and lows from 2025:

• For most of the year I worked as an interim Digital Marketing Manager for ACO. We completely reimagined the home page, the contact flow, and a couple of landing pages within the existing CMS templates.
• Helped set up the first ever internal Barcamp for cosinex to enable new ways of employee engagement and developing the organization. The facilitation of the day itself was a blast! Let’s do this again some time!
• Did a research project for DTVP’s leadership team to gain more clarity about their customers’ actual needs.
• My low-light: By the end of the third quarter, all my projects and client engagements had ended. It forced me to contemplate how I can reliably find new clients in the future.
• My son is now four years old. When he walks into the room sharing what he found out or is sad when I am away for workshops, I realize I made the right decision to work from home most of the time.
• Rebooting CLOQ with a friend. While on the outside not much has changed, my former co-founder and good friend Christian got in touch with the idea to reboot the shared timer together. I really enjoy working with Christian again and look forward to our next steps for CLOQ.

The numbers

I have worked with three clients on a total of three projects.

For the first time, my consulting revenue exceeded my fixed income. It was a strong market signal for a viable source of income to make a living. Something that the years prior did not convincingly provide.

Counting content

• 18 Toots on Mastodon
• 5 posts on LinkedIn
• 4 articles on my website + uncounted notes
• 2 sessions at the AGILE.RUHR Camp 2025.

A couple of patterns…

I really, really love consulting for my clients and with people

Financially it was an amazing year. I proved to myself that I can reliably create value for my clients and can earn a living as a solo consultant. But what I valued even more were the conversations, the caring people. All of them had very healthy stance on balancing work life and personal life.

Network beats marketing, but network still needs marketing

At the moment of publication I found 100 % of my clients through my immediate network or speaking at events. The closing rates are perfect. But it heavily relies on outside forces (people recommending me, events taking place). Thus, I will need to find an additional way to continuously get in touch with possible clients.

My current hypothesis: through publishing content (channels undecided), I will find more reasons to start conversations with my network. This will lead to more engagements.

What I do for clients

My current, always in flux, value proposition:

I work with leadership and their teams. Whenever they feel the need to change - be it from the outside or within – I help them actively engage with that change.

I do this by setting up strategic processes, stewarding strategic initiatives through research and innovation work.

If you think this describes your situation: would love to hear from you!

What’s next…

A quick review of what I “expected“ from 2025:

• Transforming a one-off project with a new-ish client into a long-term relationship. I only kind of made that happen. A one-off project led to a mid-term project with a sister company.
• Securing my third, ongoing engagement. Made it to two, lost two by the end of the year.
• No noteworthy increase in product revenue. Absolutely nailed that one!
• Writing more in general, but especially for this site. 🫣 Yeah… no! Wrote two pieces I am proud of, wrote more in general, but did not publish as much as I hoped.
• Trying two or more events as a way marketing. Through other obligations I was only able to attend one.

I keep doing this just to prove a point: humans are – read: I am – consistently bad at predicting the future. As a running gag, here’s my outlook for 2026:

• I might reactivate my lecturer role.
• I could do my first open training.
• Securing at least one long-term engagement with three or more additional projects. I expect to achieve this through more public content that I publish.
• Rebooting CLOQ with Christian will finally make a visible revenue in my revenue streams.

— January 9, 2026