From Referrals to a Real Pipeline: Daniel’s Story of Escaping Feast or Famine

Speaker A: This is the niche consulting growth podcast for consultants who want to become the obvious choice and move beyond feast or famine. I'm Michelle Sara and in these short episodes we'll look at the positioning, trust and demand building work that helps consultants grow more steadily. Welcome. I want to share a specific story. This is about Daniel and his consulting business. Let me know if you see yourself here anywhere. For the first year, it looked like Daniel's consulting business was going to work. By the number of referrals that he started, uh, getting almost immediately, he was very optimistic. He believed that he had made the right move. Daniel had spent nearly 18 years working around HR transformation, employee experience, manager enablement and internal change. He had been inside organizations during messy policy rollouts, performance management redesigns, HRIS implementations, engagement initiatives, restructuring efforts, and those simple people changes that somehow became anything but simple once managers and employees had to live with them. So he understood the gap between the announcement and the adoption. He knew what happened when HR launched a new initiative with good intentions, strong slides and a clean rollout plan, only to watch the whole thing get stuck in the middle. Executive team approved the change. HR built the process. The email went out. Then managers were left to explain it, defend it, interpret it, and make it real with teams who were already tired of one more change. This is the world that Daniel knew really well. So when he left his full time role and started consulting, the first few projects came through people who already trusted him. A former colleague brought him in to help a new performance management process. Another contact referred him to a mid sized company rolling out a hybrid work policy. Then an HR leader he had worked with years earlier asked him to support manager communication during an internal restructuring. For a while, it felt like momentum. For sure, the projects weren't huge, but they, they were enough. You know, he'd have $5,000 here, $12,000 here, a $15,000 engagement. It felt like proof. He wasn't exactly booked out for the year, but he had work. And when you're coming out of corporate, that can feel like confirmation. The second half of the year was especially strong. He had client work on the calendar, he had money coming in and a few warm conversations that seemed like they were probably going to turn into something. And then the holidays came. Things naturally slowed down. And after the holidays, everything continued to slow. By mid January, the conversations had gone quiet. By February, the let's revisit this soon prospects weren't responding. And by March, Daniel was staring at his revenue and trying to make peace with the fact that his business had gone from promising to very fragile. In what felt like a matter of weeks. This is that feast or famine. Some months he brought in 15,000, other months barely 5,000. And a few months looked dangerously close to nothing. At first, Daniel explained it in a way that made sense. Companies are overwhelmed. You know, HR teams are buried. Nobody has budget right now. People are too busy putting out fires or to look for outside help. And honestly, you know, some of that is was true. HR leaders were overwhelmed. Budgets were being scrutinized. People were tired. But that's not the whole truth. The harder truth was that Daniel had never really built a pipeline. He, uh, had built a business on proximity. People who already knew him, trusted him. People who had worked with him would refer him. People who remembered him from corporate were willing to take his call. But outside of that circle, the market really didn't know what to do with him. His LinkedIn profile said he was a change management consultant. His website talked about helping organizations navigate people centered change. His posts were smart but broad. One week he would write about communication planning. The next week he wrote about change fatigue. Then something about employee engagement or leadership alignment. And none of it was wrong. It just disappeared into the sea of sameness. Daniel felt like a small fish in a very big ocean. Everywhere he looked, other consultants were talking about change, transformation, culture, adoption, alignment, engagement and resilience. The red ocean was very crowded. And the more that he tried to sound credible, the more he sounded like everyone else. So he did what we do, which is start grasping. You take any work that comes your way. He reached out to old contacts, but his messages felt stiff. He tried to post more consistently on LinkedIn, but when client work picked up, marketing just disappeared. He hired a freelance marketer to help him create content. But without clear positioning, his content got cleaner, but it didn't get any more effective. He accepted projects that were not a great fit because, well, revenue is revenue. One client needed help rewriting employee handbook language. Another wanted a one off manager workshop with no real implementation plan behind it. Another pulled him into a messy internal communications project where he was mostly editing emails and chasing approvals. The work paid, which was good, but it also created a new problem. The more bad fit projects Daniel accepted, the less time and energy he had to build the business that he actually wanted. And more importantly, the less clear his work became, the more the market didn't know what to do with him. He was spinning plates. One plate was client delivery. One plate was business development. Another was cash flow. LinkedIn follow up. One plate was trying to sound calm, confident, while privately Worrying and wondering if his business was slipping away. That was where Daniel was. And honestly, he didn't think he had a positioning problem. He thought he had a market problem. I think companies are just not spending on this right now, he would say. But this brought certain questions to my mind. Who had hired Daniel in the past? What was happening inside the company before they brought him in? What did they think they needed? What did Daniel discover once he got inside the work? What changed when the project went well at M? First, Daniel answered the way most consultants answer. They needed change management support. But what kind of change? Who was carrying the burden? Where did things break down? What did HR struggle to get the business to understand? What did managers struggle to explain to the employees? Over M several conversations, a pattern started to emerge. Daniel was not being brought in for change management in general. He was being brought in when HR teams were rolling out people related changes and managers were becoming the weak link. They were simply under equipped. HR would design the initiative, leadership would approve it. The communication plan would be created. But the people expected to carry the message were the managers. They were the ones fielding questions. They were the ones absorbing frustration and trying to explain changes they had not fully processed themselves. They were the ones expected to turn policy into behavior. And when managers were unclear, employees became skeptical. And when employees became skeptical, adoption slowed. And when adoption slowed, HR got blamed. This was the gap. Daniel understood his best work was not simply helping HR departments manage change. His best work was helping HR leaders equip managers to carry people related change clearly, confidently and consistently. That became the beginning of his positioning shift. He was not a general change management consultant. He helped HR leaders roll out people related change without losing manager trust, employee buy in or implementation momentum. At first, he resisted the narrower messaging. It felt risky. You know, I'm going to be turning away all this other work. I'd be losing opportunities, he thought. And what about culture projects or engagement work or leadership development? What about communication strategy? But the thing is, his broad positioning, it wasn't creating more opportunity. It was just making him easier to ignore. There was nothing specific to really remember him by or make him stand out. The right people needed to recognize themselves in his work quickly. They needed to hear Daniel's message and think, that's exactly what's happening here. From there, Daniel began building his opportunity engine. And it wasn't a bunch of random marketing tasks. It wasn't like post more and hope, you know, uh, it wasn't outreach that sounded like every other consultant checking in. His opportunity engine was a focused system built around the specific problem Daniel wanted to be known for solving. This first piece was the hook. Daniel had been saying things like, I help organizations navigate change with clarity and confidence. Sounds professional. It also sounds invisible. So he worked toward sharper language. Something closer to your HR initiative is not failing because employees resist change. It's stalling because managers were never equipped to carry the message. That was different. It named the real tension. It challenged a common assumption. It spoke directly to HR leaders who had watched good initiatives lose traction after the launch. Then Daniel created a simple video. His first instinct, though, I have to say, was to make it polished. You know, he thought about hiring somebody to help with production, building a branded slide deck, and scripting every single word. But I say the more real the better, because the purpose is not to create a commercial, but to build a connection and some trust. So Daniel recorded a simple video from his office. It was just Daniel speaking clearly to a problem that he understood very well. He explained the pain points and the problem clearly. He showed that he knew his client well. Then he explained what he had seen happen inside organizations. He shared his unique point of view. He talked through three specific areas that he always looked at. And at the end, Daniel did not pitch a massive transformation engagement. He simply invited HR leaders to have a conversation if they were seeing signs that an important initiative was losing traction at the manager level. Now, the video was not perfect and, you know, it wasn't polished, but it was specific. It sounded like Daniel. And for the first time, it gave people a clear reason to connect him with a problem. They knew where to put him, what his work was. That video became part of a small, focused campaign. Now he could share a video with a short, relevant note. He had the beginnings of a system, the beginnings of an opportunity engine. He was no longer throwing irrelevant messages out there, waiting for a rejection or more common crickets. He was testing a clear point of view with a defined market. A few weeks in, a former colleague replied, this is exactly what we're dealing with right now. That was, uh, great confirmation. That message led to a conversation with the VP of people at a mid sized technology services company. They were rolling out a new performance management process after years of inconsistent reviews, unclear expectations, and uneven manager follow through. So the rollout was getting shaky. Managers were asking different questions in different departments, and some leaders were supportive in public, but skeptical in private. Employees were worried with the new process, and they thought it might just be a way to justify promotions for some people and deny them to others. HR was trying to keep everyone aligned. But the more questions came in, the more obvious it became that the managers were were not ready to carry the change. So Daniel went into the call very differently than he would have six months earlier. Before he would have tried to prove himself, he would have talked about his background, described his services and hoped that something landed. This time though, he treated the conversation as a diagnostic. As we say at uh, niche consulting growth, the job is not to sell, it's to diagnose. Daniel's job was to understand. So he opened with simple questions. At first, the VP talked about process adoption. Managers needed to complete reviews on time and employees needed to understand the new expectations. Leaders needed consistency across departments. Daniel listened. Then he asked what would happen if the process technically launched but managers did not trust it or explain it well. The VP paused and then she said, you know, honestly, HR will take the blame. It'll become another HR thing people roll their eyes at. That was the real conversation. Not forms or timelines or training attendance, but instead credibility, trust, manager consistency and employee belief. Daniel kept asking questions. He asked how managers had been involved so far. He what concerns they were raising. He asked what employees were likely to misunderstand. And he asked what would make the VP feel confident 90 days after launch. By the end of the conversation, Daniel summarized what he had heard and named the real risk. The VP got real quiet. Then she said, yes, that is exactly what I'm worried about. That moment was so crucial because Daniel had not pushed or pitched. He had helped her see the problem more clearly. And once she saw the problem clearly, the next step made perfect sense. It was logical. They scheduled a follow up conversation with two senior HR leaders and a business unit leader. That second conversation led to a paid engagement. It was not the biggest project Daniel had ever sold, but it was the clearest. The client understood the problem. They understood why it mattered. They understood why Daniel was the right person to help them. And Daniel understood how it had all happened. And it was not luck. It was not a random referral. It was the result of clearer positioning, a ah focused opportunity engine and a diagnostic conversation that built trust instead of pressure. Over the next few months, Daniel repeated the process. Now, not perfectly, mind you. You know, some weeks deliveries still tried to take over. Some messages went nowhere. And some prospects were interested but not ready. That's where we need the slow lane. But we'll talk more about that later. Some calls revealed a bad fit. And there were still moments when Daniel wanted to broaden the message and say yes to anything with a budget attached. But now he had a new filter. Was this the Kind of problem he wanted to be known for solving. Was this HR team rolling out a, uh, people related change that managers had to carry. Would this work strengthen his position in the market or pull him back into the red ocean? By the fourth month, his pipeline looked completely different. He had several slow lane prospects engaging with his content. He had two active diagnostic conversations. He had one new paid project underway. And he had a clearer way to talk about his work than he had ever had before. The biggest change was not only in revenue, though that mattered. The bigger change was in posture. Daniel no longer felt like he was waiting for the market to remember he existed or to magically understand what he did. He was showing up with a point of view. He was speaking to a problem HR leaders recognized. And he was building trust before the first call. And when he got on that call, he was no longer trying to convince someone to buy consulting. He was helping them understand the cost of a problem they were already living with. And that is the difference between chasing and guiding. Chasing feels like trying to convince people that they need you. Guiding feels like meeting the right people at the right moment with language that helps them see their situation clearly. All right, let's wrap this up so you can get on with your day. I know this one was a little longer than usual. Daniel's business did not become perfectly predictable overnight. No real consulting business does. But the feast or famine, um, cycle began to lose its grip. Because for the first time, Daniel had more than referrals. He had a system. He had a message that made sense to the market. And he had a way to create conversations instead of waiting for them. He had the confidence that comes from knowing he was not just another HR consultant. He was the advisor HR leaders called when important people related change was at risk. This is a great example of the work we do inside niche consulting growth. Whether it's through one to one work or our weekly advisory call in the roundtable. You can check the notes for details. Till next time. If you've enjoyed this episode and want to know more about how we can help, schedule a conversation. The link is in the notes.