I ran my consulting practice for twelve years. For most of them, it looked like this: multiple clients, nothing uniform about them, projects starting at different times and different depths, some ten hours a week, some ten hours a month, billing hourly, spending more energy fitting myself into my clients' working styles than building a working style of my own. There was always a low level of anxiety underneath everything, not a crisis, just a steady hum, the kind you normalize after a while and stop noticing until something forces you to notice. The business was doing well. I had no trouble finding clients, the money was good, and I had every reason to keep running it exactly the way I was running it.
Then my hair fell out, all of it.
That was the moment I stopped running the business I had and started figuring out the business I wanted.