On my way out the door of the consulting firm where I cut my teeth as a consultant, my boss handed me a stack of client contract templates and three clients. It was a generous send-off, and a running start: I was profitable from day one.
It took me years to notice what else he’d handed me.
He’d handed me a blueprint, and I followed it as I grew my consulting practice without ever asking myself if this was the business I wanted to spend my time building.
For years I worked almost exactly the way I had at the firm. Same contracts, same pace, same way of showing up for clients. I was making more money, so I didn’t take the space to decide if that model fit me. It didn’t occur to me that I could make the same [or more] money within a different model that fit the way I work best.
I don’t blame myself for that, and if you’re recognizing yourself here, I’d offer you the same grace. The model was profitable. It made sense to everyone around me. From the outside, it looked like everything was working.
But the way I was working slowly chipped away at my sanity, because I was working within someone else’s blueprint.
Most of us are following rules we didn’t intentionally set. You answer email at nine at night because your first boss did. You charge what everyone else charges because that’s how you learned to set rates. Every project gets a weekly status call because every project you’ve ever worked on had one. Somewhere along the way, those choices answered the big questions for you: how available you’d be, what an engagement looks like, what you charge, what shape your week takes.
Those answers have a cost that’s hard to see. You spend capacity every day fitting yourself into a shape someone else designed.
Eventually I rewrote my blueprint. I changed how I worked with clients, what I said yes to, and what my weeks looked like. I got my sanity back and even more surprisingly, my revenue jumped. Don’t wait as long as I did to turn the tables in your favor.
Hi! I’m Carrie. I believe doing good work and living the life you want are not in conflict. If you’re ready to build that way, reply to this email or see how we can work together.
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