The biggest mistake I see people make in their first 30 days of going independent is that they don’t follow a structured set of steps. They spend far too much time on things like building their website or obsessing over packaging, which aren’t the best routes to getting a paid gig.
The problem isn’t that people build a website at all, it’s that they do it first. That means they’re usually behind on the most important things they need to be doing initially, like contacting their network, setting up meetings and building a potential referral pipeline.
They also tend to skip thinking about what success actually looks like for them. They start doing some of these things in the bid to just get going and get their presence out into the public.
I spent a good few years operating as a fractional exec myself, so this is the order I’d do it in, from setting goals right through to the feast and famine cycle that catches most independents out sooner or later.
Set SMART goals before anything else
Before the website and before the packaging, work out what success looks like for you and set those SMART goals, making them specific, measurable, achievable and so on.
That doesn’t just mean financially, although it’s also important to know what your target annual earnings are and then work back from there. It also means working out what professional success looks like for you.
There are a few key goal questions here that often get skipped:
→ What are your target annual earnings?
→ Do you want to always work remotely? If you can only win in-office gigs, that’s not success for you.
→ Do you want to work 3 days a week and have 2 days off?
→ Or do you want to work 5 days a week, intensely, for 6 months, and then take 6 months off and go and live in Bali?
The answers change a lot downstream, from the clients you go after to the day rate you need.
The backwards maths
Here’s a worked example, with illustrative numbers you should swap for your own.
Say your target is £120k a year, and you work out a day rate of roughly £900 (there’s a worked version of that in the commercials section below). That means you need about 160 billable days across the year.
If a typical engagement for you is 2 days a week for 6 months, that’s around 50 days. So you need 3 to 4 clients over the year once you allow for ramp-up and the gaps between them.
If roughly 1 in 4 proper sales conversations turns into a signed engagement, you need something like 12 to 16 of those conversations a year, which is only 1 or 2 a month.
But to get those you probably need to be having 4 to 6 catch-ups with your network every month, whether you’ve got work on or not.
Positioning: should you niche down from day one?
It’s a bit more nuanced than yes or no, and it largely depends on your starting point.
If you’re already quite specialist in what you do, it doesn’t make sense to go and try to broaden out that offering, at least to begin with. Let’s say you’re a data protection officer for highly regulated industries, or just the finance sector. Stick to your lane, because that’s where you have the most credibility. You’ll find it easier to land gigs with other financial institutions that need a fractional DPO, or fintech organisations perhaps, so very closely adjacent to your previous experience.
However, if you’ve been a bit of a generalist within your industry and career so far, I don’t think it makes sense to arbitrarily pick your lane and niche down right from the start. Maybe you’ve done every different marketing role there is, working your way up the ladder into senior leadership. Or perhaps you’ve done stints in sales, then moved to chief of staff, then operations, and then become a GM within an expanding company.
The exception is if you have a very, very strong view of the work you want to do versus the work you don’t want to do, which is why it’s important to set your goals first. But unless you’re sure you only ever want to do one type of work, you shouldn’t narrow your scope too early on.
Starting out as a fractional, solopreneur or independent expert often takes a bit of discovery. You’re working out what will work for you as well as what will work for your clients. It’s that overlap between your expertise and passions and what the market is needing and willing to pay for. So it makes sense to remain a bit broad and allow yourself that exploratory first 6 months, or first year or so.
Targeting the right clients
The right clients, to begin with, are the ones who already know you and who fit the goals you set in step 1. So start with your existing network, where there’s already warmth, trust and credibility built in.
However, most newly minted fractionals leave building and expanding that network far too late. It’s usually only after they’ve completely exhausted it that they start to think about cold outreach, and cold outreach is famously ineffective and difficult.
What they really should be doing is the middle ground. That means building an expanded warm network, where they start to build trust and credibility, or at the very least awareness, with a wider group of potential clients.
Not cultivating that from day one is a huge mistake, because at some point you will exhaust your network, almost definitely. (That’s where another part of the feast and famine comes in, but more on that at the end.)
Building pipeline beyond your network
So how do you expand that warm network? All of the above, really, and ideally at the same time.
→ Post regularly on LinkedIn, and potentially on other platforms as well, like X, Reddit or Instagram. It does depend on who you’re trying to sell to, but I’d say LinkedIn is primary and X is probably secondary, with the others some way behind.
→ Reach out directly to folks who’ve shown some interest. If they’ve liked or engaged with your content, it’s worth getting in touch.
→ Ask for second-degree introductions. They’re a really powerful way into people you’d otherwise have no reason to be talking to.
→ Go to events. This is 100% a critical way of shortcutting some of that trust and credibility. People tend to trust folks they’ve met in person faster, and more, than they would if it was purely via a sort of digital avatar.
Ideally you’ll also start producing thought leadership, so not just social posts but long-form articles, newsletters, frameworks, downloadable resources, that type of thing. They help build you up as an expert, and potentially as a community leader. You become someone who adds value to the conversation and provides net new assets to the community you’re trying to cultivate.
That will also help drive organic traffic from SEO, AEO and GEO. They’re not the first order of work to go after. But they’re definitely key mechanisms for building brand awareness and driving consideration of you over other options, and they help convert some of that interest into real pipeline and conversations.
Initial commercials and offerings
Most newly independent folks get pricing wrong in one of two directions, and a lot of them are too rigid about how they structure it on top.
Getting the price right
Often people will start with a list price that’s too ambitious, because they obviously want to hit their financial goal with the fewest booked-in clients possible. They’re probably thinking about the freedom of only working 3 or 4 days a week. But they don’t have the traction or proof points as a fractional behind them to justify the price tag yet.
What typically happens then is initial sticker shock, and the deal doesn’t close because of it. Or they end up compromising significantly on the list price with a big discount, which reduces some credibility as well.
So there’s a Goldilocks price in there somewhere, and it also isn’t too cheap. Some people, particularly if they really need the work, will be tempted to undercut the market rate. Others with a sparkling career behind them might set those initial prices too high, given the reframe of what they’re now doing.
A pretty good way of setting your price is to start with the annual salary you’re on, or the one you’re targeting. You then have to assume you’ll only be employed somewhere between 60% and 80% of the time. You’ve also got none of the benefits you had at work, no paid holiday and so on, so you need to add all of that together.
Your target earnings, plus what you need to cover benefits, insurance and holidays, divided by the days you’re likely to actually be working through the year, should give you a rough price to aim for.
Using the same illustrative numbers as before:
→ Start with target earnings of £120,000.
→ Add roughly 20% for the pension, insurance and other benefits you no longer get, which takes you to £144,000.
→ Take out 25 days’ holiday and 8 bank holidays, which leaves 227 working days.
→ At 70% utilisation, the middle of that 60 to 80% range, you’re billing roughly 159 of them.
→ £144,000 divided by 159 is roughly £900 a day.
Now run the same sums for a 3-day week. You’d have about 95 billable days, so you’d need something like £1,500 a day to hit the same number, and that’s a big ask before you’ve got any proof points as a fractional.
It might surprise you that you need to work more days than you originally anticipated. Hopefully that’s just the first year, or even the first 6 months, while you get your legs under the table and build some traction, and then you can start to think about your prices again.
Don’t package too cleverly
The other mistake I see people make is being too rigid, or trying to package too cleverly and too specifically what they’re going to charge. What you really need is just to know, in the back of your head, what you need to earn out of an engagement and what your typical day rate needs to look like. You don’t need to publish it on a website, and you don’t necessarily need it in a deck.
The most important thing is what happens when you’re having those conversations with clients. You need to get them excited, do the discovery, and establish that there really is a pain you can uniquely solve. Then you can move on to the commercials and make them a discussion with your prospective client.
That’s all part of building trust and credibility. Say “this is my day rate” and gauge their reaction. You can always say something like, “This is my day rate, but if you commit to X number of days, or X months over this time period, then for that stability I’m happy to offer Y discount. Does that work for you? What were you looking to anchor around?”
Some prospects will try to browbeat you down on price, and that’s where you have to be willing to walk away. Not every engagement is a fit, so sometimes you do have to hold the line.
So don’t be too rigid, at least up front, and don’t box yourself in. Make pricing part of the discussion rather than part of your public packaging, and don’t set it too high or too low.
Closing deals
If you don’t already have a methodology you want to work with, there are a couple I’d point you towards.
One qualification framework that’s very old school, and sniffed at by a lot of salespeople, is BANT, but it would probably still work pretty well for a fractional or consultant without a commercial background. Checking budget, authority, need and timing is a really good initial way to think about those early discovery calls, so you don’t end up wasting your time and getting led down the garden path.
For actually closing, the 3 Whys are a really nice one: why change, why now, why you. When you reflect on the conversations you’ve had with a prospect, can you articulate those 3 to yourself? If you can’t, there’s probably a gap in the deal that you’ll need to figure out and close. And it needs to be based on real evidence, i.e. the actual conversation, not your assumptions from filling in the gaps.
It’s strong enough to be helpful, but not so specific that you get lost in the weeds of something like MEDDPICC.
You don’t have to have a methodology, but it’s highly recommended. If you don’t, you should at least be keeping track of the deal, or multiple deals, and getting a sense of whether each one is progressing. Is the client just mining you for free information and free consulting calls, which can sometimes happen? Or is it moving towards genuine proposals, contracts and budget?
If the commercials don’t get discussed within those first 2 or 3 calls, ideally sooner, then there’s a reasonable chance you’re being strung along. So it’s important that you think of yourself as being in a position of selling, and not just offering free advice.
Setting up for success with clients
Once you’ve signed, you need to set clear, structured engagement and project plans, ideally with a pre-agreed set of check-ins. At the beginning that’s certainly weekly, if not even more frequent. It makes sure there’s a feeling that things are going well, and you get rapid feedback and course correction if needed.
Longer term, over that first month, 3 months and so on, you ideally want some clear, measurable goals. What I’ve been saying in my calls with potential clients is, “3 months from now, 6 months from now, what would success look like for you, and how would you know it’s being achieved?”
It’s a nice way of agreeing measurable, objective criteria that mean things are going well. And it’s often a really useful question for the prospect too, because they haven’t always given it the thought, or they don’t know, so it doubles as a great discovery question. Other times they’re very clear, and then it’s completely unambiguous.
When you get set up with a client, make sure you write a scope of work. Depending on the type of work you’re delivering, make it as unambiguous as you possibly can, with as little room for interpretation as possible. And make everything as objectively measurable as you can.
Then make sure you communicate, and over-communicate if possible. Send weekly reports, have weekly check-ins, and make sure the client knows what you’re doing and what you’re working on.
That client communication management is super important.
Avoiding the feast and famine
This is the one to see coming before you’ve even landed your first client.
It usually plays out something like this. You start with your existing network, it gives you your first engagement or two, and you get busy delivering. At some point you exhaust that network, almost definitely. And because you haven’t expanded, nurtured and cultivated the net new folks for when you need them, there are no more warm leads to call on when the engagement ends.
That’s when most people reach for cold outreach, which, as above, is famously ineffective and difficult, and the gap between engagements starts to stretch.
What breaks the cycle is being present in front of your market regardless of whether you have work on. So keep building that expanded warm network from day one. Keep posting, keep reaching out to the folks who engage with you, and keep asking for introductions and turning up at events. And keep an eye on the number of network conversations you worked out in step 1, especially in the months when you’re flat out and it feels like you don’t need them.
If this resonates, and you’re in your first year of going independent, it’s pretty much what we work through in our Inklined Pro Live Cohorts.
That covers positioning, content, building an audience and turning that audience into pipeline, with a follow-up session on sales and closing a month later.