Last weekend, I was trading emails back and forth with a friend from high school who is looking to start her own consulting firm in a rather obscure academic field. She was writing to ask if I would be willing to advise and mentor her during the process. I said I’d help where I could, but one thing she said kinda bothered me from the outset.
I have the idea to start a consulting firm within the next five years.
Why wait five years? My first piece of advice to her was to start building her consulting practice now, not later. Five years from now, someone else may have cornered the market for that very obscure thing you want to do. Five years from now, you could find yourself in a job that pays well, yet sucks the entrepreneurial life out of you. Five years from now, you could have three more kids and considerably less flexibility to juggle a day job and a side hustle.
Even if you don’t feel like you’re “ready” to announce your big consulting plans to the world, there are still some things you can do right now to move them forward.
Ideally, your first clients should come to you before you even hang your shingle. That’s the only way you know if you have a viable service, anyway. Yes, things will be messy in the beginning, but when you actually get ready to do a full “launch” of your full-time business, you will have already worked out many of the kinks.
But whatever you do, don’t let time be an arbitrary excuse for not rolling up your sleeves today. What does five years represent anyway? It’s just a moment in time that is not now. Don’t be one of those people who say now it’s not the right time. You don’t have enough time. Maybe next time. The timing is off. You’re too young. You’re too old. You missed your time.
Or maybe you don’t have enough information. You can’t afford the seminars or the books that will give you the information. You have too much information. You need better information. The person with the information won’t get back to you.
There will always be an excuse not to do the thing you’ve always wanted to do. It’s so much easier to sit around talking about that Big Awesome Idea we never seem to be able get off the ground. But at some point you need to either jump off the damn cliff or just stop talking about that thing you know you’re never gonna do. We all have good ideas, but they’re pretty much useless if we don’t implement them.
Because when you do make the jump? Well, it’s like Sarah Susanka said in her fantastic book, The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters
“Once you make the unequivocal internal commitment to do something – when you absolutely know this is the time and the place to act – the world around you will shift in all sorts of apparently miraculous ways to make it happen.”
The commitment comes first. But please, do it now, not five years from now.
Related Posts
-
Derek
-
Rosetta Thurman
-
Nicole Moore
-
Rosetta Thurman
-
Nicole Moore
-
Kristen @nonprofitsos
-
Rosetta Thurman
Cozality on 
bsaunders on 
