What I Learned From 2 Paying Consulting Clients
We have two clients right now. Both are IT companies breaking into EU/US markets. Both followed the same path: got stuck on the same blockers, figured out workarounds, now they're growing. Here's what they taught me: The bottleneck isn't lead gen. It's qualification. Both clients could generate leads. They had agencies, they had networks. But they couldn't tell which leads were real. They'd spend weeks pursuing deals that had no budget, no decision-maker, no timeline. Same problem, different companies, different industries. That's when you know it's a framework problem, not a luck problem. The second insight: personality matters more than pitch. The clients who've closed deals fastest are the ones who admitted what they don't know. Instead of faking expertise, they said: "We're a dev team, not sales experts. Help us understand if this makes sense." Western buyers respect honesty. They're skeptical of pitch-perfection anyway. The third insight: process beats effort. The consultant who closes most deals doesn't work 60-hour weeks. She has a repeatable process. Qualification call: 20 min. Proposal: standard template, 2 hours. Close: 15-min call. She turns around deals in 2 weeks. The others take 2 months. Process isn't lazy. It's the opposite. It's so disciplined that effort becomes efficient. These aren't groundbreaking insights. But they only matter because I saw them work twice. That's why we're building this community around frameworks that work, not theories. What do you know from your own experience that other people should know?