When I was a solopreneur, it always nagged at me that I was never able to solve the classic consultant’s dilemma: how to balance selling my services with actually delivering them to paying clients. I have read and heard suggestions that independent consultants should follow the 3-1-1 rule, which I first came across in this article about technology consulting. A consultant’s week should be made up of three days of client work, one day of selling and marketing activities and one day of professional development, to keep the skills sharp. It’s a great theory, but hard to put into practice:

1. Client work rarely fits into discrete three day chunks. What if the clients needs you on-site all week, for many weeks in a row?
2. Marketing and sales can rarely be neatly sectioned off into a day a week of activity. Follow up phones calls and emails, client meetings, etc. need to happen any day of the week.
3. There is always something more urgent to do than work on your own skills. And if some urgent matter pops up, then these activities are the easiest to cut, as there is no immediate return on the time invested.

 The 3-1-1 model assumes that you can keep your rates high enough to support the two non-billable days. If you have 248 working days in a year after weekends and statutory holidays, then take 18 days for vacation and personal emergencies, then you have 230 consulting days. (Yes, you could work on weekends and holidays, but that is not sustainable over the long term, and it gives you a buffer if you need extra days for travel or for meeting deadlines.) Following the 3-1-1 formula, that gives you 46 days for marketing, 46 days for professional development and 138 days for billable client work. How much do you need to charge per day so that 138 billable days brings home a reasonable living for you, after taxes and expenses? The amount is probably high enough that your skills and your marketing would have to be top notch: would that take more than the one day a week allotted for each?

My solution to the consultant’s dilemma was to sub-contract through a larger firm. The advantage of this approach was that I only had to market myself to a handful of people, which amounted to some periodic phones calls and coffee meetings. It remained a partial solution though, as this model ultimately left me dissatisfied on several fronts:

1. It locked me into long engagements that requried me to be on-site 5 days a week.
2. It was nearly impossible to take on work for other clients.
3. The rates were locked in by the company holding the contract. Negotiation was basically, “here is the rate after we take our cut, take it or leave it.”
4. I could not move into higher value consulting engagements for the same client.
5. I was never able to achieve the control over my career that I set out to obtain when I left my corporate job.

 I, like most consultants, focused on maximizing the billable client work. My sales and marketing efforts were haphazard and professional development was continually postponed. The effort made in these areas was insufficient to reap any reward. As a result, I was always at the mercy of prevailing local market forces: I had no control over my rates (which were declining), and my choice of client engagements was limited.

So, what would I do different now?

I don’t think that there is a real solution for the consultant’s dilemma. Perhaps the 3-1-1 model is utopian, but the time split seems to be about right if you want to focus on higher value consulting work, rather than “grinding it out” type contracting work. If I were to go back to consulting, this is what I would do differently from the start:

1. Avoid sub-contracting. Control as much of the relationship with the client as possible.
2. Focus sales and marketing efforts on building a pipeline of work, not just “the next gig.”
3. Use value based pricing for projects, or at the least, charge in time increments greater than a day.
4. Make the effort to leverage content marketing and social media to generate sales leads.
5. Commit to professional development and creating my own intellectual property (blog articles, methodologies, etc.).

 The path to sustainable revenue would potentially be longer but ultimately it would provide options for becoming a better consultant, increasing my income and expanding my discretionary time.