How to get out of the feast-or-famine cycle as a consultant
In 2019, I ran up $100,000 in credit card debt investing in a new business, and I felt more financially secure than I did five years earlier, when I had $100,000 in the bank but didn't know how to reliably make money.
That might sound backwards. But financial security has never been money in the bank for me. It's the ability to make money: to pick up the phone, reach out to your network and close a premium client whenever you need to.
Feast or famine is what happens when you don't have that. It comes from a business model that doesn't leave enough time for consistent marketing and business development, and you get out by changing the model. It comes down to three things.
What the opposite feels like
Steve and I always referred to our branding agency as our cash register because we could walk up to it and make money whenever we needed to.
We used that cash register to fund our life and our ideas. We used it to fund amazing travel, like a 3 week trip to Maui and a 7-week trip to Europe. We used it to write my first book, taking three months almost completely off from client work.
And when you have a cash register, you have financial security and peace of mind.
Nobody can take that away from you.
Why the cycle happens
I was running my business in what I call the Default Model, the same hamster wheel most experts selling their services get trapped on.
You get stuck swinging between feast and famine because you oscillate between months of delivering underpriced work, followed by panic and spaghetti-at-the-wall marketing efforts when the pipeline dries up.
You never get ahead because you're too busy serving clients to build a sustainable business foundation that would solve the problem long term.
1. Protect the time
All of your revenue needs to be generated in 50% of your working hours or less. At least 25% of your time goes toward working on your business: marketing, sales, pipeline, staying in front of the right people. That's the 50/25/25 Rule.
If client work takes all of your hours, you're inevitably setting yourself up for a dry spell when your projects come to an end. You just can't see that cliff yet.
When you run this math on your current offers, one of two things becomes immediately clear. Either your offers are profitable enough to support your financial and freedom goals, and you just need more of the right clients. Or they're not, and no amount of hustle is going to fix that because the problem is in the math, not in the effort.
2. Do one thing every month, even when you're busy
Most expert service providers get the majority of their best clients from referrals, but they have no system for generating those referrals consistently.
That's what a 1KO is: One Killer Outreach. A clear, specific thing to do every month to keep your network warm.
The famine starts in the feast, in the months you were too busy to stay in touch with anyone.
3. Check whether it's really a lead problem
I was coaching someone recently who told me she needed more leads. She was asking where to find them, how to get in front of more people. Then I asked: how many fit calls have you had in the last month?
"Seven."
How many closed?
"Zero."
Bingo. You don't have a lead problem. You have a clarity problem.
She was getting on phone calls with people who would buy from her, and then scaring them away because her offer wasn't clear!
If you get in front of more people and you still lack clarity, you're just going to get in front of more people who won't hire you.
The honest part
This is not passive. When you stop doing the work of nurturing your network and closing clients, the pipeline eventually dries up. There is no machine running in the background generating leads while you sleep.
What you get instead is a cash register.
Start here
Open your calendar for next month and block the 25% first. Then decide the one thing you'll do in it every month.
How a 1KO works is on the Referral-First Marketing page.
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