On June 1, 2016, I left my full-time job to run my consulting practice full-time.
At the time, I asked myself: Can I really do this? The answer wasn’t found in a single leap of faith. It came from years of relationship-building, preparation, and learning to trust that I could create opportunities for myself. A year later, that question had shifted to How do I survive and grow? My biggest lesson was that success required far more than technical expertise. It required adaptability, resilience, continuous learning, and a willingness to navigate uncertainty.
By my third year, I found myself asking a different question: How do I play bigger? I had proven that I could build a consulting practice. The challenge became expanding my vision, taking bigger risks, and pursuing opportunities that felt beyond my comfort zone. At the five-year mark, my attention shifted again. Instead of focusing on growth, I asked: What actually drives success? The answer surprised me. It wasn’t marketing, proposals, or business development strategies. It was relationships. The community I built over time led to many of the opportunities, referrals, collaborations, and growth I experienced.
When I reflected on eight years of consulting, the question became more personal: What kind of life am I building? By then, I had started thinking less about sustaining a business and more about ensuring the business aligned with my values, priorities, and the life I wanted to create.
Now, ten years in, I find myself asking an entirely different set of questions. I’m thinking less about how to build a consulting practice and more about how consulting fits into a larger vision for my work, my contributions to my professional fields and to reproductive justice, and the impact I hope to have over the next decade. I’m thinking about systems, organizational change, partnerships, legacy, and what it means to move from delivering services to building something that extends beyond billable hours.
The first decade of consulting was largely about proving to myself that I could build a successful practice. The next decade, I suspect, will be about deciding what I want that practice to become.
What happens when a social worker spends 10 years consulting and arrives at a different set of questions than the ones she started with? Here are ten reflections from ten years of full-time consulting:
Organizations are funded for their mission, not their vision
One of the biggest shifts in my thinking over the past decade has been recognizing the difference between an organization’s mission and its vision.
The vision is the future the organization hopes to create. The mission outlines the work organizations must do to reach their vision. Yet many organizations find themselves funded primarily for activities, outputs, and short-term metrics rather than the mechanisms needed to achieve lasting change.
Oganizations spend years documenting problems and evaluating solutions that already exist, while struggling to secure funding for the infrastructure, systems, and long-term investments needed to make those solutions sustainable.
As consultants, we’re not exempt from this dynamic. Every consulting proposal we submit and every project we accept operates within these systems. Over time, I’ve become more aware of how consulting can either reinforce the gap between mission and vision or help organizations close it.
After spending 10 years helping clients move toward their vision, it’s time to move toward mine
For much of my consulting career, my focus has been helping organizations clarify goals, make decisions, strengthen programs, and move toward their vision.
Lately, however, I’ve found myself asking a different question: What does it look like for me to move toward my own?
Part of this reflection comes from noticing what energizes me most. While I still enjoy consulting, I’ve become increasingly interested in helping organizations build their own capacity to think critically about data, learning, and decision-making. The greatest compliment a client can give me is telling me they tested a recommendation, learned something from it, and reached their own conclusions.
That shift has me thinking more about teaching, training, and creating opportunities to help people develop skills they can carry with them long after a project ends.
Long-term projects are only sustainable when the work matters (to me)
For years, I assumed that long-term projects were inherently better than short-term engagements. They provide predictable revenue, deeper relationships, and the opportunity to see work unfold over time.
What I’ve learned is that sustainability depends on more than duration.
The topic also has to matter to me, the cadence has to make sense, and the work has to feel meaningful.
A project can be financially stable and still leave you feeling disconnected from the work. Likewise, a shorter engagement can feel energizing because it aligns with your interests and strengths.
As I’ve thought about the next decade of my consulting practice, I’ve become more intentional about not just pursuing work that pays well, but work that keeps me intellectually engaged and excited to contribute.
Who you partner with is just as important as the clients you work with
When people talk about consulting partnerships, they often focus on complementary expertise.
This is only part of the equation.
Over time, I’ve learned that successful partnerships depend on communication styles, work rhythms, availability, decision-making approaches, technology preferences, and shared values.
A partnership can look perfect on paper and still be difficult in practice.
I’ve worked on projects with multiple partners (both independent like me and one connected to larger organizations), and while I value the thought partnership that comes from collaboration, I’ve realized how fragmented that experience can feel. Increasingly, I’m interested in building relationships with people who share a similar philosophy about the work itself—not just a similar skill set.
I want to contribute more to my professional fields
Social work education teaches us to be in service of others.
Clients hire consultants to help them achieve their goals.
And reproductive justice activists see the bigger picture of how societal conditions impact how we access sexual and reproductive care.
All are important. But somewhere along the way, I realized I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how I wanted to contribute to these fields.
What ideas do I want to advance? Which frameworks do I want to create? And what are the conversations I want to shape?
My contributions have largely been delivered through client work. Looking ahead, I find myself increasingly interested in creating resources, writing, teaching, and sharing ideas that can reach people beyond a single project or contract.
You can’t control what clients do with your recommendations
This lesson took me the longest the learn.
When I provide recommendations, I genuinely hope clients will review them, discuss them, and test them.
What I’ve learned, however, is that recommendations don’t exist in a vacuum.
Organizations must balance competing priorities, limited resources, leadership preferences, timing considerations, funding realities, and countless other factors. A recommendation may be valuable, and an organization may still choose not to implement it.
Organizational decision-making is more complex than any single consultant’s perspective.
Micro level skills matter at the mezzo and macro levels, too
One of the themes I’ve returned to repeatedly throughout my career is that social work skills are remarkably transferable.
Whether you’re working with an individual, a team, an organization, or a larger system, the core process remains familiar:
- Engagement
- Assessment
- Planning
- Intervention
- Evaluation
- Termination
Both the context and the scale change. But the underlying approach often remains the same.
For social workers interested in consulting, this has become one of my strongest beliefs: You likely already possess more transferable skills than you realize.
Organizational dynamics matter more than we realize
One advantage of consulting is the opportunity to work across many organizations.
Over time, you notice patterns.
You see how capacity constraints shape decision-making, how organizational culture influences leaders’ priorities, and how power dynamics affect implementation.
Even the strongest recommendation must pass through an organization’s existing systems before it becomes reality.
Staff are often operating at or beyond capacity. Leaders are balancing competing demands. Organizations may genuinely want change while lacking the resources to pursue it.
Understanding these realities has made me more thoughtful about what I recommend and how I support implementation.
RFPs still aren’t useful for finding consulting projects
After ten years, my opinion on this hasn’t changed.
While RFPs remain a common pathway to consulting work, they often create unnecessary inefficiencies for both organizations and consultants.
I’ve seen organizations issue RFPs that leave fundamental questions unanswered. Consultants spend significant time preparing proposals with limited information. I’ve also seen FAQ documents become longer and more detailed than the original RFP itself.
At the same time, consultants are part of the problem. Every time we respond to an unclear RFP, we reinforce the idea that the process is acceptable.
I don’t have a perfect solution. But I continue to believe that greater transparency would benefit everyone involved.
Self-employment was never the end goal
One of the biggest misconceptions about consulting is that self-employment means freedom from bosses, schedules, or accountability.
In reality, consultants are accountable to multiple clients, partners, deadlines, and organizational cultures.
I left my old job because I wanted to build something. For a long time, that “something” was Nicole Clark Consulting.
Now, I want to spend more time doing deep, meaningful work and less time on administrative tasks that don’t move the needle. The prospect of creating intellectual contributions that extend beyond individual client projects is exciting, and building systems and structures that allow the work to have a broader reach than I could achieve on my own is also exciting.
This would require letting go of assumptions about what my business has to look like. And if I’m being honest, that’s both exciting and a little sad.
The version of Nicole Clark Consulting that got me through the first decade can’t be the version that carries me through the next.
After all, growth has always required letting go of one vision in order to make room for another.
Raise Your Voice: Looking back on your own career, what’s one belief you held that has completely changed, and how has that shift influenced your today? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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