There’s no shortage of theory on how to grow a consulting firm. So why do so many founders still struggle to grow their business?
Here’s my thesis. This (and variations of this) is what I’ve seen over and over.
A client of mine never had to sell.
His work was excellent. Referrals kept coming. Margins were healthy. He had a junior marketing hire who posted content, and that was the whole strategy.
Then one client left. Not his fault. Not a quality issue. Just a decision made somewhere else.
That one account was 60% of his revenue.
He couldn’t afford to lose key people either. They’d take too long to replace when the business needed them most. So he was stuck rebuilding revenue while protecting the team that had carried him this far.
Here’s what that loss exposed. He had never learned to sell. He had never learned to market. He had outsourced the one function that actually protects a business when luck runs out.
That’s the real difference I see between founders.
🚩 Delivery-led founders skip learning sales and marketing. They focus on the work and wait for the market to find them.
🪴 Growth-led founders learn the foundations first: how do firms grow, what actually works, why it works, and how to make it their own.
Ignore that step and you either wing it yourself or hand it to a marketer or salesperson who will never understand your business the way you do.
Four things changed for him after that year:
👉 He picked a specialization instead of taking any client that called.
👉 He redesigned his offer around a transformation, not a deliverable.
👉 He learned to sell himself, not hand it to a junior hire.
👉 He built the discipline to work on the business weekly, not just in it.
None of this means doing everything yourself forever. It means knowing the mechanics well enough that luck stops being your growth plan.
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