You can diagnose a business in one meeting and fix it in a quarter. The constraint is how many decision makers you get in front of each month, without cold outreach. We build and run the system that books them. No retainer. You pay only for booked calls that show up. You fund the ads.
Public numbers on the market, the median consultant, and the buyers nobody big is calling.
IBISWorld puts US management consulting revenue at $420.2 billion in 2026, growing at a 2.1% CAGR since 2021, while the number of consulting businesses grew 4.5% a year to 1,210,001 (IBISWorld, Management Consulting in the US; business count). More firms chasing slower revenue is the definition of a pipeline problem.
The median annual wage for management analysts was $101,860 in May 2025, across about 1.1 million jobs, with 14% self-employed and employment projected to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). That median is what an employer pays. An independent consultant's ceiling is set by how many buyers they meet.
There are 36,207,130 small businesses in the US, 6,395,635 with paid employees, employing 45.9% of private-sector workers and producing 43.5% of GDP (SBA Office of Advocacy, FAQs 2026, PDF). That is the buyer pool for a boutique consultancy, and almost none of it is reached by a big firm.
Consulting is sold as a project, a retainer or a fractional role, scoped to one problem for one kind of buyer. The credential exists: the CMC is “the professional mark offered through Institutes of Management Consulting & recognized by authorities globally” (ICMCI). Buyers rarely ask for it. They ask whether you have solved their exact problem before.
The boundary is blurring from the other side too: 59% of coaches also offered consulting in the ICF's 2023 study and 57% in 2025 (ICF 2023; ICF 2025), so the consultant who waits to be found is competing with everyone who can spell the word. We do not publish consulting price bands because no public source we trust does. Your project and retainer prices stay yours. What we fix is the number of qualified buyers who hear them.
Same eight steps as every partner. Four of them change when the buyer is a company.
Positioning: one problem, one buyer. “Strategy consulting” is a category. “Pricing for mid-market software companies” is a position. We narrow before we spend.
Targeting by intent and title. Paid search for the problem they are already typing, paid social to the titles that own it. No cold email, no scraped lists.
Qualification for fit. Company size, decision maker, budget owner and timeline, screened before a discovery call is offered, so you stop diagnosing for free.
Follow-up across a long cycle. Proposal to signature can take weeks. The CRM tracks every stage and the system keeps the thread warm until the decision, without you chasing.
You stay in your zone of genius, closing and delivering. We run steps 1 to 7, so the calendar fills itself.
No retainer. You pay only for booked calls that show up. You fund the ads.
We are paid only for booked calls that show up. Every lead is tracked from first click to the call itself in the CRM, so both sides see the same numbers. Ad spend runs through your own ad account and is separate from our fee. If nobody shows up in a month, there is nothing to pay.
You pay for the booked call that shows up, not for the deal, so a ninety-day cycle changes nothing on our side: the call happened, the fee applies, and the rest of the cycle is yours. What counts as a showed call is written down before we build.
No. The system runs on paid traffic and a qualifier, so every conversation starts with someone who raised their hand. No purchased lists, no cold sequences, nothing that puts your domain reputation at risk.
Both, if you can take the calls. A solo consultant needs a clear offer and room for more discovery calls a month. A small firm needs someone who owns the sales conversation. We check capacity on the first call.
You do. Ads run in your own ad account, so the spend and the history stay yours. Every lead, stage and outcome lives in the CRM where both sides see the same numbers.
Take the 60-second qualifier. If it is a fit, we map how the system reaches the buyers in your lane on a call. If not yet, The Coach Circle is where coaches and consultants trade the offers, funnels and referrals working right now.