I used to think that working harder and being smarter was enough to scale my consulting business – but I was dead wrong. After watching countless brilliant consultants hit the same revenue ceiling around $500K-$1M, I discovered the brutal truth: most consulting businesses will never scale to the level their founders dream of, and it has nothing to do with intelligence or effort. The real problem? We're trying to scale chaos – doing different work for different clients with no clear focus, making it nearly impossible to hire talent or attract new clients beyond our warm network. But here's the solution that's helping consultants break through to $2M+ revenue: scale requires simplification, and growth means removing things before you add them.
Show Notes:
- Why most consulting businesses fail to scale despite having smart, hardworking founders (and it's not what you think)
- The "dog's breakfast portfolio" problem: How doing great work for random clients actually prevents you from growing
- Why hiring becomes nearly impossible when you need "rockstar" consultants who can handle infinite variability
- The identity crisis that kills growth: How being like Procter & Gamble instead of Tesla destroys your market positioning
- The traditional consulting growth model (do good work → get busy → hire more people) and why it's fundamentally flawed
- Real case study: How a $750K consulting firm is restructuring to hit $2M by identifying their most scalable 20-30% of work
- The "scale requires simplification" framework: Why you must remove services before you can multiply revenue
- How to overcome the fear of focus and find abundant opportunity within a narrow specialty
- Why saying no to profitable work feels counterintuitive but creates the foundation for breakthrough growth
- Practical steps to identify which of your current services are truly scalable versus which ones are growth killers