On June 1, 2016, I became a full time consultant after nearly 6 years at my old job.

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 I’ve learned from ten years of full-time consulting: