She called it running with scissors

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #21

It was almost 4 o'clock.

We'd been at it since 8 that morning. Eight hours, across from one another at the conference table. Building out a complete business development infrastructure. Positioning. Networking talk tracks. Target lists. A sequenced outreach strategy. The whole thing, piece by piece, from scratch.

When we finally reached the end, I asked her a simple question.

"What are your takeaways from today?"

She paused for a moment. Then she started talking. And what she said next is the reason I'm writing this issue.

"I would have definitely approached this wrong... the sequencing is important. I mean, this is like super more clear and defined, and something I can wrap my mind around, and actually do without feeling like you're boiling the ocean."

Then she said something.

"Doing this myself would have been literally kind of like running with scissors."

Let me tell you a little more about this client.

She's a retired Navy admiral and senior executive. Brilliant. Decades of leadership at the highest level. The kind of person who could walk into any boardroom in the country and command the room.

She could have Googled "how to build a consulting practice" and gotten a thousand answers. She could have bought a course, downloaded a framework, or asked an AI to build her a business development strategy.

She'd probably already tried some version of that.

And yet, when she walked out of that meeting room at the end of the day to drive back to Iowa, she had something she'd never been able to build on her own. Not because she wasn't capable. But because capability and having someone in the room with you while you build it are two very different things.

The plan isn't the product.

Anyone can hand someone a plan. The internet is drowning in plans. You and I are gagging on plans.

Step-by-step frameworks. Business development blueprints. Twelve-part courses on how to build your consulting practice.

But knowing the steps is not the same as having someone build it with you.

That distinction... that's where the real value lives.

When she said she would have been "running with scissors," she wasn't saying she lacked intelligence. She was saying something much more specific.

She would have gotten the sequencing wrong. She would have approached warm contacts and cold contacts the same way. She would have tried to build for four markets instead of one. She would have spent 18 months learning, the hard way, what someone who'd done this before could have walked her through in an afternoon.

That's not a failure of effort or intelligence. That's a failure of architecture.

And you can't fix an architecture problem with more information.

She said something else that stuck with me.

"It's really hard to try and produce tangible products to reach out to people swimming in like four different lanes... you'll never build, build, build, and become better and better. You're just shotgunning. So this, you can very much see where you can get started, learn, refine, go. Learn, refine, go. Each time will be an opportunity to build, build, build, and get smarter and smarter."

I've watched this happen to smart, talented consultants more times than I can count.

They try to build for multiple markets at once. Multiple offers. Multiple outreach campaigns running in parallel. And they end up building nothing... not because they're not capable, but because focus is the prerequisite for momentum.

What we built that day gave her a single lane. A clear starting point. A sequenced path she could actually follow without burning out in week two.

Now she can do something she couldn't before. Learn, refine, go. Each conversation builds on the last. Each iteration makes her sharper. That's how mastery compounds. And you can't get there while swimming in four lanes.

Here's the part that surprised even me.

She brought up something I hear from senior professionals more often than they'll usually admit out loud.

There's a psychological difference, she said, between being sought out and being the one who initiates. When someone stops you at a conference and says "hey, could you come help us?" that feels natural. You're the expert they came looking for. But reaching out first? Selling your own talent? That feels different.

"If someone were to just stop me at a conference and say, hey, could you come help us... oh yeah, sure, I can do that. But for some reason, that's different than me reaching out, trying to sell your talent. The psychology of it is different."

She's right. And it's not a character flaw. It's one of the most common and least discussed challenges in professional services.

When you've spent a career being the expert people call, reversing that current takes more than tactics. It takes the right sequencing, the right language, and the right mental model for what you're actually doing.

The frame that's helped me most, in my own practice and with every client I've worked with on this:

I don't see myself in the convincing business at all.

I see myself as a leader and a decision facilitator. My job is to find people who have the very painful problem that I'm the very best at solving. And then help them see clearly enough to make a decision.

That's not selling. That's service. And it becomes a lot more natural when someone has built the infrastructure with you, piece by piece, so you can feel the difference.

I want to be transparent about something.

I use AI extensively in my practice. It helps me do in hours what used to take days. Some of what we built in that VIP Day, the research, the document production, parts of the framework... AI helped.

But the VIP Day wasn't AI doing the work.

It was me sitting across the table from another human being. Reading her energy when she was getting overwhelmed. Adjusting the plan in real time when a sequence wasn't landing. Building talk tracks in her language, not a template's. Knowing when to push and when to stop.

AI helped prepare. But the calibration to this specific person... her story, her market, her natural way of communicating, the exact moment I could tell she'd hit a wall and we needed to back up...

That was human. That will always be human.

Near the end of the day, after we'd been through everything, she said this:

"This is very exciting, because I can see it now, I can see it. I just have to go put a bunch of work in and make it happen."

That moment is the deliverable.

Not the binder. Not the toolkit. Not the document count.

The moment when a capable person goes from "this is overwhelming and I don't know where to start" to... I can see it. I can do this.

You cannot deliver that moment through a pre-recorded video. You cannot manufacture it in a course portal. You cannot get there by handing someone a framework and wishing them luck.

It requires presence. It requires someone who has built this before, sitting with you, so that by the time you leave the room... it's yours.

P.S. Running with scissors is a useful image. Think about what it really means. You're not running because you're reckless. You're running because you're capable, and you have things to do, and you know how to move fast.

The scissors are dangerous not because you're moving... but because nobody told you how to get results with them quickly, safely, and effectively.

That's what a guide is for.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #20
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #19

You might also find these interesting:

🔎 The Trust Reckoning: The Shadow Side of Force 1
🔎 Client Value Journey: Stage 1 – Aware

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...