The Most Profitable Business to Start in 2021

The Most Profitable Business

What is the most profitable business model? One of the first things I like to take people through is the criteria with which to judge a “good business model.” Not all businesses are equal. What I hope to do in this article is show you why they are unequal, and why consulting qualifies as one of the best models around.

There are three main criteria we use to judge the operating performance of the most profitable business model: 

1. Effort: how much work, time, etcetera does it take to operate? 
2. Profit: once running, how efficient is monetization of the business?
3. Fragility: how easy or hard is it to be disrupted by competitors, economic recessions, etcetera? 

These three pillars give you a good idea into how well a business will perform and (perhaps MORE importantly): for how long it will perform. Our main consultancy here at Traffic and Funnels services hundreds of thousands of customers and clients each year, many of whom are brand new to consulting.

• Agency owners looking to decrease the “done for you” or “one-on-one” work
• Doctors & medical practitioners wanting to use their expertise in new ways
• Retired athletes trying to create new revenue streams in fields they care about
• Moms and dads who want to build part time income without sacrificing pace of life
• Trainers & coaches who are tired of the 9-5 grind and want life & wealth on their terms

These are people from all over the world, incredibly diverse in age, talent, backgrounds & skillsets… but the good news is: consulting can work for everyone.

As a professional consultant who trains other consultants, I can tell you without a doubt that when you set it up properly, a good consulting model will shine in all of the criteria I showed you. 

EFFORT

Leveraged effort, so you don’t have to work any more than you want to work… with the right model, you can go from me in 2014 ($30,000 per year salary working 40 hours per week) to me in 2020 (several million per month working 20-30 hours per week). As you can see, with “leverage,” the effort does not necessarily need to increase in proportion to our income. 

PROFIT AND MARGINS

Second, a good consulting business produces absolutely stunning margins, so you are always keeping more money than you are spending month after month. The key to a great business is not just toppling revenue, as you can imagine. Earning $100,000 per year with an expense budget of $120,000 per year is not profitable and you will not improve your lifestyle that way.

LOW FRAGILITY

Third, if done correctly, consulting carries LOW fragility, meaning: you can easily weather any storm – be it economic downturns, disrupting technology, increased competition, etcetera.

Before we get into how to select your specific consulting model, let’s debrief together on why consulting is so powerful. While I outline these key reasons, I’ll show you a few downsides to the consulting model as well. Nothing is 100% perfect, so as you build your consulting business, you’ll want to stay alert to avoid some of the pitfalls outline below. 

Pros & Cons of Consulting

Whether you enjoy a good stroll through memory lane or not, learning history has profitable, long-lasting benefits. People misunderstand me on this all the time. They think, somehow, that I was born with an inherited enjoyment for reading history & biographies. That isn’t true, as I was far more into baseball and Royal Rangers growing up than I was reading. 

When I got my first degree in college, I was still thinking I would work full time in the ministry for the rest of my life, as a pastor. Indeed, I got my wish, and served on staff at a church for several years. 

I didn’t develop this passion for learning until I got into the ministry, and realized it isn’t what I wanted to be doing full time! 

I had a new wife who had always been entrepreneurial. She was stocked with clients as a hair stylist for many years, but when we moved to Memphis, TN for a new staff position – her clientele disappeared. All of the sudden, she was dependent on ME to pay for things that are quite important (like food, shelter, you know the basics). 

The problem was, I did not earn enough money from the church to pay for these things to the level she was used to. And I became ravenous. Anything I could learn about business, psychology, and history — I devoured. 

In hindsight, I think I was just looking to make sense of how I had gotten so poor, while working harder than almost anyone I knew. I always believed that if I worked hard and was diligent with the money I made, we’d be okay. But we were not okay! I was working 80 hours most weeks, and earning less than $30k per year.  

My Life Changed

One day I heard John Maxwell talk about how reading can change your life, and I started diving in. 

In a recent interview, the legendary hall of fame basketball player Kobe Bryant said, “When you know what you want, the world becomes your library.” All of the sudden, I had a NEW target (to not be poor), and the world truly became my library. 

I believe that a big part of the reason people fail in business today, is simply because they do not know what they even want. Consulting is but ONE path to abundance, ONE path to surplus, ONE path to freedom. 

It is not “THE ONLY” way. Once you finish this article you will understand why I believe it is the best and fastest way to create the most profitable business, and why my clients like it so much. But the key in this game is first of all, KNOWING: what are you after?

What are your goals here? 

Do you have a target? 

I will help you set those up later if you don’t. In my journey from freelancing to drop shipping to e-commerce to several other business models in between, I discovered that there are four main reasons I love consulting as the most profitable business more than anything else. 

Let’s go through them now. 

BARRIER OF ENTRY

You can describe “barrier of entry” easily by asking:“How hard is it to get started?” If the answer is, “VERY HARD!” Then you have a high barrier of entry. Historically, the barrier of entry for most business models would actually be quite high. 

There’s a very interesting book, called “Breaking Rockefeller,” about how John D Rockefeller’s “Standard Oil” monopoly was broken up. Many people believe it was all big government (partially true), but the story is more nuanced than that. 

Several business owners got together to join forces, and ultimately unlocked a certain mode of transportation that was previously inaccessible to the Rockefellers. They went all in on this new transportation and ended up cutting costs further than what Standard Oil could do in the markets they were doing them… 

Sounds easy, right? 

Not even a little bit! There were around thirty bankruptcies along the way to this finally being able to take place. You might read this and think, “Bankruptcy… no big deal.” But back then, failing to pay back your loans was a death sentence to your family for three generations. 

Here is why:

If your last name (let’s say ‘Smith’) borrowed money and didn’t pay it back, banks would not loan to your great grandchildren if their last name was ‘Smith.’ This is how they tracked it back then. It all worked based on your last name. Your mistakes & the punishment from them were inflicted on your kids, your kids’ kids, and ultimately everything was a much bigger deal. 

They didn’t have Equifax and the other credit bureaus we have today. Just your last name… on top of that, most of the models of business in the 1800s and even early 1900s had inherent risks built into them. Such as: poor communication, low accountability, difficulty in tracking books & money, etc. 

You could have a great idea, but to “try” it, you had to contact someone overseas where they could potentially get the supply. That process took 2 month to get across the ocean. Then they respond, another 2 months to get back. And you’re paying for communication which isn’t as cheap as it is today (which, actually, today it’s free). 

There are so many loopholes and errors it’s hard to count. People went bankrupt simply from the costs of communicating back and forth… 

Business was hard(er) back then. And starting a business was even harder. The two brothers who teamed up, and created the runway to dethrone Rockefeller, had a major falling out because one brother thought the other was being reckless with their credit. 

There was so much tension around whether or not borrowing money would ruin the family lineage, that they ultimately couldn’t even be in business as partners anymore. That is some serious pressure. 

You might ask,

“Well why did they need credit? Why not just start?”

Because in most businesses, starting requires “startup capital” or “funding.” You have to pay some money to make some money. You can’t develop a supplement without paying someone to research & develop it for you. You can’t sell a bicycle without paying someone (or at the very least paying for the parts) to put it together first. 

Good news: consulting doesn’t require this. In fact, most of our clients get started with just a couple hundred bucks or less. There’s no cost to build a product and most of the tools you can use to sell & perform consulting are either free or you already have & use them, like a cell phone, notebook, Facebook account, etc. 

(To be clear: in order to be a client, they end up investing more than a couple hundred bucks for our expertise — but that’s not an “expense,” it’s a textbook definition “investment” because they recoup that and then some, while saving their time). 

If you take the sum of your life experiences, you can derive EXPERTISE from those experiences, and THAT becomes your “startup capital.” You can be completely funded with expertise or “intellectual property,” rather than needing to invest in a team, special tools, material costs or tech. 

Which leads us to the next point…

COSTS OF DOING BUSINESS

You might be surprised by how much it costs to make money in a lot of business models. Let’s take the e-commerce giant, Amazon.com. You probably know this already, but as a reminder, did you know that Amazon.com lost money for years before becoming profitable? Imagine earning $1,000,000 but it cost you $1,500,000 to earn it! That’s the story of Amazon. 

You have to get by with investors lending & loaning you money, which means you have to give your equity away in exchange. Chris (my business partner) and I, in addition to running and growing Traffic And Funnels, also run two other sizable companies. Our sales consultancy & staffing company is approaching 8-figures in annual revenues. Our real estate investing firm has already passed 8-figures in annual revenues. 

BOTH were started and grown without borrowing money. The difference? The real estate money cost us almost a million dollars to start! We had to take money, invest it into purchasing the assets. We had to pay for the labor and the teams. We had to pay for materials. It took us 3 months from the time of investing the money to earning the money back + profit. 

Now, you might have an extra $1M laying around and can float that kind of money for 3 months, no problem. If you don’t, this is why I love consulting so much! SalesMentor (the sales consulting) was started with zero costs. Traffic and Funnels was started with zero costs. The consulting model has an extremely low “cost of doing business,” compared to every other model that exists in business. That’s why it’s the most profitable business model.

To give you perspective into just how much better the consulting model is, let me show you our real estate model. 

Every $30,000 in “profits,” costs us about $200,000 in capital. So we will put $200k into a deal, and when we’re done with it, after 2-3 months we will collect $230k for it. That’s $30k in profit (a 115% return on investment) in 60-90 days, so we’ll say an average of $10k per month in profits. 

ON TOP of that, we have legal fees, taxes, employment payroll, and several other line items that stack up for this business model that we simply cannot avoid. Contrast this with our consulting firm, Traffic And Funnels. 

Our First Month In Business

Our first month in business, we invested $0 and earned $15,000. Our second month we invested $5k (out of the $15k the month prior) and earned over $40k. By the time we were in the 6th month of business, we were taking $20-30k per month (invested out of the previous month’s profits) and bringing $250-300k per month back into the business (a 1,000% return on investment). 

If you read this and think, “Taylor, why in the world would you do real estate then? If consulting is so much better, why do anything else at all!” That’s a great question, and the answer comes down to this: different models do different things. 

For our real estate, we are building a fortress to store & protect capital. It is less about the ‘income’ we generate from it, and more about providing a place to store the income we are generating from our consulting businesses. 

Consulting is The Most Profitable Business

Needless to say, consulting is UBER PROFITABLE, you can run lean with it, and it requires very little to get started. I’d say the best things to invest in when starting up a consulting business are as follows: 

You have the expertise you’re going to be offering as consulting… now invest into the expertise specifically for building a consulting model! That’s part of why I’m writing this article, and why I wrote The Consultant Next Door. Of course, I want to make it a valuable asset and resource for you to get started, but I also want you to know that Traffic And Funnels is one of (if not THE) best in the world at this game of “building high-yield consulting & coaching businesses.” If you didn’t know, now you know! And when you finish reading this book – you should reach out to us! 

One last point on “profit margins,” which we’ll cover in greater detail later on. In Verne Harnish’ book “Scaling Up,” he says that if a business is profiting 15% they are at the top of the world in terms of business profitability & health. When Chris and I started Traffic And Funnels (our main consultancy), our profit margins were north of 80%. 

The cost of doing business as a consultant is almost nothing, which means your profits can be ridiculously high. Your time, a cell phone bill, something to take notes with, and as mentioned earlier — your life experience or “expertise.” 

This makes consulting one of THE most profitable business models you can deploy. You don’t have to lose money for years and years, or raise a ton of startup capital from investors. 

If you know the right recipe, you can monetize your expertise at almost ZERO costs, from day one. 

NECESSITY (AND VALUE) FOR THE END USER

Just the other day I was listening to an interview with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). Part of my typical routine on the way to the gym in the morning, is listening to interviews from business owners who are smarter than I am! 

Reed is definitely someone who’s built a tremendous culture, so I listen to what he has to say. During his interview, he said they hit a very pivotal moment around 2002. The “dot com bubble” had just hit — all of the big tech companies were losing their value, and many of them were even declaring bankruptcy. 

This happened RIGHT before Netflix was set to go public for a successful IPO event — but because of the crash, their funding was pulled. Reed says he was distraught. 

But rather than giving up, Reed and his team rolled up the sleeves and went to work. One of his quotes that came out of that time period, “Our only metric is customers. We have to make this [Netflix] so good, that people just cannot leave. Will not leave.”

They succeeded. And now Reed is a billionaire and everybody knows about Netflix.  

At one point, they had to lay off over 30% of their team and completely change their business model. Reed had to work nights, weekends, and overtime for many years to pull the company out of that gutter, and (back to previous point) they also lost money for many years before, finally, getting to go public… 

You might read that and think,

“Man… I’d work nights. And weekends. And overtime… and lay off a third of my staff… and XYZ XYZ if I was gonna be a billionaire.”

But I wouldn’t. And that’s a fundamental divergent for me and Chris. You know, there’s no guarantee that your tech company is going to “make it” to an IPO. Reed could have worked like a slave to his own goals for years – only to have some economic crisis throw him out of the ring. 

He could have wasted years of time with the people he cares about – and it could've all just fizzled out… I care a lot about the people in my world. My daughter who is growing up and who notices when I am not there… Chris has four kids! 

We want to be present with our families, AND, we want to build a successful business that funds whatever our lifestyles require. BOTH/AND is our motto… too many entrepreneurs get caught thinking EITHER/OR. 

When you have the right playbook – you can have both. 

So, the question becomes,

“Is it possible to be highly valuable and create insane DEMAND for my product without going through a what Reed went through?”

Yes! 

Consulting is the most profitable business model.

I remember 2 years ago we had this awesome client, her name is Tasha. And she was an expert in helping women who were previously barren finally conceive. She had a 100% success rate! Quite rare…  

Her experience both in the medical world and as a naturopathic wellness expert enabled her to help couples experience the miracle of childbirth. Compare that to Netflix. 

No comparison. 

Another example. 

Aleric is a YouTube advertising expert. He goes into businesses who have a successful track record, but just cannot get enough traffic to their websites to make the money they want to make. 

Within 60-90 days he’s got them growing again using YouTube ads, which, using his model, is affordable, predictable, and profitable. Life changing! 

We have clients from all walks of life in all sorts of different niches & industries… 

The thing to remember is, as a consultant, IF you have a good offer (which we’ll talk about later in this book), you can have a PROFOUND impact on people's lives and businesses; and it does not have to require huge startup costs to do it.

The PROBLEM, and consequently, what a lot of this book is about, is isolating the highly valuable solutions into an offer your market needs you to solve for them. And then, delivering those solutions in a way that is lucrative for you.

This means, it can’t cost you $10,000 to make a $9,000 check – or else you will go bankrupt. Likewise, you cannot solve a $100,000 problem, and only charge $2,000 to do it – as you will burnout. People forget that when you get going, your time becomes an asset and you cannot spend too much for too little in return. 

SUSTAINABILITY OF PROCESS 

This might seem like an odd one, but it’s actually a very big thing to love about the consulting business and why it’s the most profitable business. There is a reason professional football players can only play 15 years. Most Silicon Valley tech founders exit after their first or second business, and never play the game of business again. The wear and tear on your body from football is real. The wear and tear on your body AND your mind from running a business – is also real.

I think, perhaps, one of my favorite things about consulting, is you can provide tremendous value and service to people all over the world without selling out your freedom. Simply put, when you practice consulting the right way, it is sustainable. 

You can do it for years, without burning out, wearing down, or backing yourself into a corner where you can’t keep it going but need the money (this is where the worst forms of burnout come from).

People say “I want more” and “I deserve more” all the time. They want more time with their family. More control over their schedule. More income (obviously!) and more money. Then they get into business and they get frustrated because, they realize all of the sudden, they have less of everything! Less time with family. Less control over their schedule. And oftentimes, even if the income is going up – the income just doesn’t justify it. 

Work Life Balance

You know where you will find Chris every Friday afternoon? On the lake with his family. You know where you will find me every Wednesday morning at 9am? At home playing with my daughter. We have bulletproof standards when it comes to creating sustainability. We refuse to work ourselves into the ground (although we’re willing to work hard). 

Part of the way we’re able to do this, is creating the right framework for our consulting companies. Consulting DONE THE RIGHT WAY is not a zero sum game or a “trade” of one good thing for another. It’s – here it is again – a both/and game. At least, that’s the way we teach it. One of my favorite role models for this is a guy named Jay Abraham. Jay has been a personal mentor of mine for some time now, and I have asked him question after question about how he is so sharp after being in this game for such a long time. 

Part of it is simply that he is a genius and a wizard. He will probably never die! He spends good money and a huge amount of time on protecting and optimizing his biology and his neurochemistry. 

But, I believe part of the reason why he’s still making moves and staying sharp – let’s face it, he made billions of dollars in high stakes, high pressure marketing roles back in the day – is simply because he derives a large chunk of his income still from consulting. Healthy, practical consulting, with clear boundaries, which enables him to contribute his best work without sacrificing his well being. 

Consulting allows you to essentially “rev high” (picture the RPMs on a vehicle) without taking the toll that a normal business model takes on your humanity. Imagine trying to get your vehicle to go 80 mph stuck in 1st gear. It would be loud, hot, and the car would probably explode! 

Cars have the ability built into them to “shift gears,” enabling higher speed, but lower RPMs and less work… sometimes I see entrepreneurs who do not know how to “shift gears,” so to speak. And consulting allows you to shift into higher gears early – so that you protect your greatest assets: your time, your energy, your excitement. 

BONUS: WHY I LOVE IT MOST

I originally didn’t have this section in here, but Chris (my business partner) read the original manuscript and reminded me, there is one more very important point to add to the consulting business model. We will dive deep into this throughout the book – but I need to list it here also: CASH! 

CASH

There might not be another model of business where someone can collect & stockpile sizable amounts of money (legally, that is!) as QUICKLY as one can with consulting. Often times the investment needed to make a consulting business work equals out to be the cost of a Dropbox account, a cell phone bill (which you’re already paying for), maybe a notebook and a pen (which anyone can afford), and if you want speed, the simple cost of paying for a mentor to show you the way. 

We remind our clients all the time: this is simple. You might not feel like earning a great living & helping people with your expertise is simple right now — but if you read The Consultant Next Door, you will. There are so many complex and confusing ways to make an income. Consulting is a rare breed of business model because it allows you to not only earn an income, but earn a LOT of income, and parlay that income into wealth building — all while doing something you’re already qualified and skilled at doing… all while (hopefully) having a blast. That last caveat (having a blast!) is important, and it’s one of the main reasons Chris and I created our business Traffic & Funnels. 

Too many people get into the game of business, they earn a little bit of money and realize, it sucks. They aren’t having fun. It’s too much work. There is too much stress, usually all because they are not doing something the right way OR — they don’t know what the right way even looks like! I don’t know about you, but my goal in life is not simply to get rich… I want to get rich, have fun, and positively impact millions of people in the process. If that resonates, you’re in the right place and you’re reading the right article. And you have the opportunity to read the right book, The Consultant Next Door. 

Benjamin Franklin, a wise and prudent entrepreneurial mind, said the following: 

“I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he forms a good plan, and then makes the execution of that plan his sole study and business.” 

My goal is for this article to be your plan. As you read, ideas will jump out at you… thoughts will come rushing in. Take note of them, and WRITE THEM DOWN. Your “cap” on life is not your natural abilities. If that were the case, all of us (except a small few) would be totally helpless! Your cap is your ability to build your plan and then execute on that plan. You will get even further if you recruit the help of those who have already done what you’re aiming to achieve… then you know the plan is PROVEN! Tested… and likely accurate. 

The aim of the book is to put you into a position to be able to capitalize on our current “information gold rush.” People are spending BILLIONS of dollars each year in the education and services workplace. 

Let me equip you to set up shop in that area, using the most profitable business model available to you: consulting. Next let’s get into some of the cons of a consulting business. It’s not all unicorns & rainbows, so take this next section seriously, as by the end of this chapter I want you to be fully committed to diving into the rest of the playbook. 

CONS OF CONSULTING

As with any good thing, there is likely an “upside,” and a “downside.” There are a few downsides when it comes to the consulting model: chief amongst them, YOU! The main problem with consulting is it requires a “consultant” to do the work in order to get paid. 

Duh! But let’s cover it… 

You might not see that as a downside, but I do. Business is about enriching the world and getting yourself rich in the process. IDEALLY this can happen without your constant involvement, or else you will become the “constraint” or the “cap” on how much you can earn. When you first start out, you are going to have to be involved. If you’re looking for a way to follow in Reed Hasting’s footsteps, create a big tech company, outsource it to middle layer management, go public then sell for billions… don’t do consulting.

Now, there are a few ways to mitigate this downside, but it goes without saying – to truly be a consultant you are going to be doing some work. You won’t be able to totally get away from your name and thus, your effort. In a later chapter we’ll talk about “LEVERAGE,” which is as close you can get to full on removal… 

TO be clear: I’m adding these downsides in so that you are aware of the potential problems you’ll need to overcome to enjoy a profitable, successful, long lasting consulting business. I’m not interested in selling our consulting business… it costs me several hours a week and makes me millions – why would I want to sell? 

Another downside to the consulting model, from my viewpoint, is “tangibility.” 

Consulting is intangible, which means you cannot touch it. If I go to someone and say,

“Hey, I have this widget or whatever, and you can look it up online this thing cost me $100 to make and they sell it for $150… I’ll give it to you for $110.”

That’s not a difficult sell, as long as it’s something that is functional. People can see, touch and feel the value for themselves.  

Or you could say,

“Hey I have this course, and it’s 5 videos and there’s a workbook included that I’ll mail to you and everything. It’s $500 and you can keep it forever.”

Again, there are some tangible elements to that… 

Consulting? Is a process or an engagement for solving problems. It is very intangible. I’ll teach you how to mitigate this downside in the book, when you’re selling it, but it’s important to know that you are selling something that is invisible for most people. 

What I tell our clients when they’re taking their first few calls is this: your prospects who will become your clients, they are investing in a BELIEF, not a “think.” They are investing in the belief they have that you can either fix a problem they’re dealing with right now, or that you can deliver a result that they’ve always wanted but don’t know how to get. 

Belief is invisible. So is the wind. Visibility doesn’t make something “more real” and invisibility doesn’t make it “less real,” just a different style of business and a very different style of selling. 

So downside #2: tangibility. Here’s another downside that you could run into but I’d like to show you how to avoid: bandwidth. 

A lot of our clientele earn significantly more money than the average neuroscientist. We have 8-figure business clients, 7-figure business clients, and many 6-figure business clients who could do more but are happy where they’re at. But, while it’s true that you can apply leverage to decrease your time investment – you are going to invest a good amount of “bandwidth” to get this thing off the ground.  

Imagine a Neurosurgeon…

they are exerting great mental bandwidth. But imagine the consultant who comes into a team of 1,000 people to fix faulty leadership, or design management systems for 150 auto dealers. Or the consultant who is brought into a high stakes negotiation situation to improve the win percentage of the negotiators.  

Even SIMPLE consulting models, such as helping someone lose weight in exchange for money, can require a lot of creative thinking and bandwidth to perform the job well – and oftentimes you are unable to disconnect until the job is done. Remember, after all, that as consultants we are solving problems literally all day long. 

You can take great strides towards offsetting downside #3 by using “models,” which I can’t wait to get into! I will show you how to use plug & play models to get going quickly with your consulting business – but there is a fourth downside I’d like to tackle right now… and this is, perhaps, the biggest downside. 

In fairness, though, I see this point as both a downside, as well as an incredible upside. You might laugh, because I’m talking about clients! 

Consulting works because you work with clients. Those clients pay you for an outcome and then you have to deal with them until they get the outcome! This can be incredibly rewarding (in ways that go far beyond money), but it can also be a huge pain in the neck. 

Sometimes you will get clients who are idiots (oops, my editor was supposed to take that out). Sometimes you will get clients who don’t follow your advice… imagine that! They pay you, then don’t do anything you tell them to do, then blame their results (or lack of results) on you! 

I’m not being mean, I’m telling you the truth. You won’t be able to avoid it completely, the truth is some people are not smart and they’re not going to be great clients… The reason for this is that clients are oftentimes PEOPLE – so it stands to reason that some clients are just going to be people and those people are going to give you grief. It’s math. 

You will have people for whom you fix their situation and then they ask you for a refund. You will get people who are obstinate and deaf to anything that you’re saying and then request a refund even though you delivered. 

To be successful over a LONG period of time as a consultant, you have to develop a bit of a protective “citadel” around your confidence, your identity, and you self worth… because no matter how good you get at SELECTION, some clients will make it their entire mission to fail and then, they will blame their life’s choices on you. 

That is a huge downside. 

The flip side of that is this: some people will come to you as a last resort, and they will WIN because of you. They will have had no other option – you were the last option! And they will see turnarounds in their lives & businesses and that is all because of you. They will receive transformational, life altering results as a byproduct of whatever you do for them. They will be grateful, thankful, and you will know that you had a part to play in their legacy, forever. 

If you’re asking me, I say that the upside outweighs the downsides 10 times to 1. One of my personal mentors told me early on: the bad clients are just the price you pay to reach the good clients. 

When we get into the marketing topics of the book, The Consultant Next Door, you will get a playbook designed to help you avoid poor client selection – but I think the greatest long term FIX for this is to just be realistic. The best way to prepare for problems, is first to see them coming… to expect them… and to have solutions ready before they get to you. 

I hope this article has helped you understand why consulting is the most profitable business model. Grab a copy of The Consultant Next Door if you’re ready to cover all the bases of starting your own profitable business.

In your service,

 -Taylor Welch

There’s no way we can cover all the basics and nuances of developing a successful consulting business in one article. If you want to accelerate your journey, after reading this article you need to talk to us about becoming a client and we can partner with you (with our templates, infrastructure, coaches, and support) to hit your targets faster than you ever thought possible!