How Do You Leave Corporate and Start Consulting? A 90-Day Plan for Executives

I have made this move myself, from executive roles through Buddy Media’s $689 million acquisition by Salesforce to founding Silverback Social and later Torque AI, and I have coached many executives through it. The pattern that works is unglamorous. The people who build a durable practice treat the first 90 days as a sales process with one product, and they start it before they hand in notice. Here is how to run it.

What should you decide before you resign?

Three decisions, in writing, before anything else. Each one takes an evening. Together they save a year.

1. The offer. One sentence: I help who do what in how long. “I help regional insurance agencies cut quote turnaround from days to hours” is an offer. “Strategy and transformation consulting” is a category. Buyers hire offers.
2. The runway. A common planning figure is six months of household expenses in cash, separate from retirement accounts, plus the real monthly cost of health coverage once the employer stops paying. This is general planning guidance, not personal financial advice; a fee-only planner can set the right figure for you.
3. The decision rule. What happens at day 90 if you have fewer than two paying clients? Write the answer now, while you are calm and employed. A rule written in advance is the difference between a test and a gamble.

If you want a structured way to pressure-test these three decisions, run the career premortem: assume the practice has failed eighteen months from now, and write down why. The list becomes your risk plan.

How do you land the first client while you still have a job?

Check your employment agreement first. Most allow outside work that does not compete with your employer or use its time and resources. If yours is restrictive, your conversations are still allowed; you simply sign the engagement on your first day out.

Then run twenty conversations over four to six weeks. Not twenty emails. Twenty scheduled calls or coffees with people who already trust your judgment: former bosses, peers who moved to other companies, customers, vendors and the two or three people who have asked you for advice over the years. Ask each one three questions.

• What is the problem that keeps landing on your desk this quarter?
• If I were helping companies with your offer, who should I be talking to?
• Is there a version of that you would want help with in the next 90 days?

The third question is how engagements begin. Expect most people to say no and refer you to someone else. That is a yes to the second question, and it is how a twenty-person list becomes a forty-person list. When a five-person team I worked with generated $32 million in revenue, the method was exactly this: every conversation had a next step, and someone reviewed the list every week. Your search for a first client is the same system with one product.

How do you price and scope the first engagement?

Price the outcome and fix the scope. Executives coming out of corporate default to an hourly rate because it feels fair. Buyers find hourly hard to approve and consultants find it hard to stop delivering. A fixed fee for a defined result with a defined end date is easier for everyone.

A simple starting price: take your fully loaded corporate compensation, divide by roughly 1,000 working hours a year (because about half of a consultant’s time is selling and administration), and apply that figure to the hours the project will take. Round up to a clean number. Raise it after the third client. Most executives underprice their first engagement by half, and the buyer rarely notices either way.

When should you actually hand in notice?

When the first engagement is signed and two more are in serious discussion. That is the simplest rule I know, and it holds up because it removes the hardest problem, selling under financial pressure, before it starts.

If you have already left, through a layoff or by choice, the rule reverses but the work is identical: the first client comes before the website. The administrative setup, an LLC, a bank account, a one-page site, a simple contract template and liability insurance, takes about a week and under a few thousand dollars in most states. Do it in the same week you sign the first client, not the month before.

Give notice well. Offer a clean transition, do not pitch your former employer on the way out, and leave a door open. In my experience a surprising share of first-year consulting revenue comes from the company you just left, usually six to twelve months later, once they have discovered what you were quietly handling.

What does the 90-day test look like?

Ninety days is long enough to learn whether the offer sells and short enough to limit the cost of being wrong. Track four numbers every week.

• Conversations held. Target twenty in the first month, then ten a month.
• Proposals sent. Expect roughly one for every five conversations.
• Engagements signed. One in the first 30 days, two by day 90.
• Cash collected. Invoice half up front. If you cannot, the client is not ready.

At day 90, apply the decision rule you wrote before resigning. If the numbers are there, raise the price and keep going. If they are not, the data usually says one of two things: the offer is too broad, or the people you are talking to do not have the budget for it. Both are fixable in another 90 days. Returning to a corporate role is also a legitimate outcome, and a far better one than drifting for a year without a rule. I wrote about how to make that kind of choice deliberately in How Do Executives Over 40 Reinvent Themselves?

What do executives get wrong in the transition?

The same five mistakes show up again and again, and none of them is about talent.

1. Building before selling. Months on the website, the deck and the methodology, and no one who could buy has heard from you.
2. Offering everything. “I can help with strategy, operations, sales and technology” is true for most senior executives and sells to none of them. Narrow until ten people would recognize the problem as theirs.
3. Billing by the hour. It caps your income at your calendar and makes every engagement harder to close.
4. Working for free to prove yourself. A discounted paid diagnostic proves the same thing and sets a price anchor. Free work sets a different one.
5. Hiding the move. If only your spouse knows, you have no referral network. Tell people. The network you built over 25 years is the single most valuable asset you are bringing, and it only works if it knows what you are doing.

I wrote There Is No Tomorrow for executives standing at this exact decision, and the message has not changed: the transition is a project with a start date, a plan and a test, not a leap. Run it that way and the odds move in your favor. If you want help choosing the offer or setting the decision rule, that is what the coaching work is for.