How to Build a Consulting or Coaching Business That Lasts

 How Do Consulting and Coaching Business Owners Sustain Success Year After Year?

Sustaining success as a consulting or coaching business owner takes more than being great at what you do. You have to commit to the business, learn the skills you don’t have yet, take responsibility for getting clients, keep learning and growing, and trust yourself enough to try things, let go of what isn’t working, and keep moving forward.

Are you looking to build a consulting or coaching business that lasts?

Not one that gives you instant income or a few good years. But one you can trust to deliver ongoing profits, doing the consulting and coaching you love?

If yes, you’re going to love this episode of the Consulting Matters podcast with my friend and colleague Dan Weedin.

Dan and I met back in 2009 at an Alan Weiss workshop, where we quickly bonded over our love of Bon Jovi and our shared goal of growing thriving consulting businesses. We’ve had a front-row seat to each other’s businesses for almost 20 years.

And what a couple of decades they’ve been.

We started around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, there’s been a global pandemic, changing markets, the rise of AI, and plenty of business decisions and strategies that didn’t work exactly as planned.

Listen to or watch our conversation, or read the highlights below, to tap into real-world best practices for building a thriving business you’ll keep loving year after year.

At some point, you have to commit to becoming a business owner, not just a consultant or coach

Dan spent 16 years as an insurance agent before starting his consulting practice. When he made the leap, he called it “burning the boats.” There was no Plan B. As he put it, “I’m moving forward. I gotta make this work.”

I had my own version of that moment. When Dan and I met in 2009 through Alan Weiss’ consulting community, I was in what I call my “magical client fairy thinking” phase. If I just did great work and put good juju out there, clients would magically fall into my lap. And for a while, they did.

But I reached a point where I knew I had to be committed to the business and do what it took to make it succeed. Otherwise, I’d have to go back to corporate, and I didn’t want to.

That’s something I see with consultants and coaches who straddle the fence. Yeah, maybe I’ll start my consulting business, but Plan B is always there. I can always go get a job. At some level, you have to decide: I’m a business owner and I’m in this for the long haul.

You have to embrace marketing as part of the gig

But deciding you’re a business owner doesn’t mean you’ll love everything that comes with it.

As Dan put it, “Everybody likes the work part of it. Not everybody likes going out and acquiring clients.” And Alan told us from the beginning: You’re not in the consulting business. You’re in the marketing business. If you can’t figure out how to embrace marketing, you’ll struggle because you won’t have any clients.

That’s a big part of what separates being good at consulting or coaching from successfully owning a consulting or coaching business.

Dan came out of selling insurance, so he was already used to creating relationships and walking through the proverbial doors of business owners who didn’t necessarily want him walking in. But even he had to make a shift. He had to reframe selling as helping: I’m not selling. I’m helping. And if he wanted to help people, he had to tell them how he could help in a way that resonated with them.

I had my own learning curve. I didn’t know how to market. I didn’t know how to create content. I didn’t know how to price based on value. Those were skills I had to learn.

And somewhere along the way, Dan and I both fell in love with marketing. I could create content all day long. I love the sales process because, to me, helping someone frame up the right solution is the first part of the consulting or coaching engagement.

It’s not fun for everybody. But that’s the choice: marketing is part of business ownership, and you have to find a way to like it. You may have to learn it, create a process for it, and find the approach that works for you. But you can’t treat getting clients as something separate from the business.

Your best brand positioning may be hiding in plain sight

When I met Dan in 2009, he was struggling with his value proposition. He had this incredibly rich background in insurance and risk management, but he was also really interested in leadership. He had coached athletics, led nonprofit organizations and eventually moved into coaching and mentoring consultants.

For a long time, he tried to run those things together. And it got confusing.

Over the last few years, Dan has gone “back to the future.” His branding and marketing now revolve around insurance and risk management. That doesn’t mean he threw leadership away. He found the focal point that gives it direction.

We called it the “tip of the arrow.”

You don’t have to choose among every single thing you’re great at and throw the rest away. But you do need a focal point. If Dan talks about leadership in general, he gets lost in a sea of thousands of other consultants and coaches doing the same. But if he talks about leadership as a risk-management strategy, he has something different to say.

Here’s the thing: Dan didn’t need to get rid of his leadership expertise. He needed to connect it to the thing he wanted to be known for.

And the funny part is that it was sitting there all along.

There is no magic marketing strategy to get consulting and coaching clients

One of the questions I wanted Dan to answer was the really practical one: All this mindset stuff is great. Burn the boats. Trust yourself. Keep learning. But how do you consistently get clients for 21 years?

Dan’s answer was simple: referrals number one, speaking number two. He said if he pulled up his client list, it would probably look something like, “Referral, referral, referral, speaking, speaking, referral, speaking.”

If I pulled up mine? Content, content, content. My YouTube channel. My blog. Then my podcast.

And that right there tells you something important. No one magic marketing strategy works for all consultants and coaches.

The strategy is understanding how your buyers actually find someone like you, being intentional about that path, and taking responsibility for proactively getting your own clients.

And then do stuff you like to get in front of them, and minimize the stuff you don’t.

Achieving sustainable consulting and coaching success ultimately is an inside job

As Dan and I kept talking, I realized no single tactic explained why we’ve both lasted more than 20 years. It was more of an inner game.

You need a reason why you want to make this business work. You have to be willing to tolerate risk and the ups and downs that come with it. You have to embrace marketing. You have to think like a business owner. And you have to keep learning.

Dan shared something he learned from Roger Federer that I love. After a bad shot, Federer would give himself a certain amount of time to be mad about it. Then he had to recover and focus on the next shot.

Business ownership requires the same thing. Something doesn’t work? You can be mad about it. Then you have to recover and ask: What did I learn? What’s next?

But resilience doesn’t mean refusing to let go

Sometimes people give up way too quickly. They invest in their brand or website, put it out there and think, Okay, where are my clients? Well, you have to do something with it. You have to give a strategy enough time to work.

But there are other times when we keep trying to make something work because we’re so invested in it.

Dan used New Coke as the example. Coca-Cola spent a ton of money on it. It flopped. Eventually, you have to listen to the data and say, This isn’t working.

Dan had to do that with his own podcast. He hosted it for seven years. He loved it. He met people. He even got a few clients from it. But the podcast wasn’t about what he actually did, and eventually he had to look at the time, effort, and money he was investing and say, Yeah, no more.

Was doing the podcast for seven years a mistake? No. It made him a really good virtual speaker and facilitator, and he uses those skills today. The experience was incredibly valuable. He just didn’t need to keep doing it.

There’s a lot of pruning that happens as your business grows. You try things. You pay attention. You keep what’s working and let go of what isn’t.

Twenty years later, sustainable consulting and coaching success still comes back to trusting yourself

At the end of our conversation, I asked Dan what he would tell his younger self after 21 years in business.

His answer wasn’t some brilliant marketing tactic. It was to have fun. Trust yourself. Trust your instincts. Try things. Meet people. Be genuine. Throw things away. And if something doesn’t work, be ready to pivot.

I love that because it brings us right back to where we started.

Building a consulting or coaching business that lasts doesn’t mean you finally get to a place where you know exactly what you’re doing. Dan and I are still learning. We’re still trying things. We’re still inventing and growing.

You’ll make the right decision sometimes, and you’ll make the wrong decision sometimes. And sometimes the wrong decision might be on the path to the right one.

You just have to trust yourself enough to keep going.

About Dan Weedin

Dan Weedin is an insurance and risk management consultant who works with small to medium-sized businesses and organizations as what he calls an “insurance brain.” He helps clients make sure they have the right insurance programming, helps with risk management issues, serves as a fractional risk manager and works with some clients on retainer when insurance questions or issues come up.

Before starting his consulting practice in 2005, Dan spent 16 years as an insurance agent and also worked on the insurance company side as an underwriter.

You can find Dan, his Substack, and LinkedIn through danweedin.com.

If You’re Ready to Get Serious About Building Your Consulting or Coaching Business for the Long Haul…

Maybe you’re already really good at what you do as a consultant or coach, but have you built the business around your expertise? Because these are two very different things.

And it starts with clarity in who you help, the problems you solve, what you uniquely do, and why working with you is so valuable, and then being able to express all this in words that resonate.

This is exactly what my VIP brand positioning and messaging programs and partnership are here to do. If you’re ready to turn your career into a thriving business of your own, pivot your focus, or elevate your brand, I’d love to help.

Click here to learn how I can help you convert your complex ideas into clear, compelling, client-converting messages and strategies.