David A. Fields Consulting Group How to Ensure Your Consulting Firm is Blasting Off Instead of Bouncing Around
Building a consulting firm can be thrilling, rewarding and wealth-building. In fact, it should be.
If that’s not where you find yourself, I’m about to show you why and offer directions to the promised land.
First up, let’s talk about days-flying-by, can’t-wait-to-jump-in, sense-of-pride-and-accomplishment joy in your consulting work.
When does that happen?
When your work aligns with your innate genius.
As an individual, your innate genius is where you feel like work is play.
As a consulting firm, your innate genius is where you perform exceptionally well, you enjoy delivery, engagements are aligned with your culture, and the work feels on-mission and energizing.
Achieving that Nirvana, “we love our work” state is great… but your firm also needs to generate revenue.
Where are the consulting dollars?
The rich oil fields in the consulting profession are wherever there’s an urgent, unsolved market need.
AI strategy is, at the moment, a bubbling, frothing geyser of consulting opportunity because new, innovative solutions are emerging every week while the average executive is still befuddled by his iPhone.
Cool, let’s combine innate genius and market need into a single model.
Four Consulting Firm Flight Paths
Grounded
Consulting firms (and individuals) that are Grounded have crashed into hard financial and happiness walls.
They’re not serving an urgent market need and any projects they can scrounge up feel off-strategy or misaligned with their capabilities.
As a result, revenue is choppy, morale is low, and the question of, “Should we just hang this up?” is probably floating around.
ACTION STEPS:
If your consulting firm is Grounded, shut it down or steel yourself for a full-scale reinvention.
If you’re a solo consultant that’s Grounded, get a corporate job, join a thriving firm, or, like larger consultancies in your position, prepare yourself for wholesale change.
Puddle Jumping
A consulting firm that prioritizes its own vision over market needs never flies high or far.
Consulting engagements are inconsistent, short hops. Rainmaking is a brutal struggle and rarely expands beyond the founder.
Puddle Jumping consulting firms sometimes reach low-seven-figure revenue if they’re working on the fringes of a market need, but rarely grow past that.
Solo Puddle Jumpers scratch and scrape to collect low six-figures. It’s exhausting.
ACTION STEPS:
To upgrade your firm’s flight path, you have to let go of your definition of what you do.
Resist starting from what you love, what you’re good at and what you’ve done in the past.
Instead, ruthlessly point your consulting firm toward a market need. (You’ll find the “Problemeter” exercise explained in this book to be helpful.)
Crop Dusting
Extreme flexibility and the willingness to take on all potential engagements can sound like a smart path to building a consulting firm.
And it can be, to a point.
Few generalist firms break through the mid-seven-figure ceiling.
Plus, that flight path can result in dreary, grueling, unsatisfying, low-margin work.
Extremely bright alumni of big-name consulting houses often end up trapped in Crop Dusting. They leverage their big brains, but not their innate genius.
In contrast, virtually every consulting firm that’s more successful than yours has also done a better job solidifying its positioning, its work, its clients and its culture around its innate genius.
Ironically, even though working in your innate genius is central to growth, it’s also difficult to avoid dropping into Crop Dusting mode as growth pushes your firm in many directions.
ACTION STEPS:
The fix to Crop Dusting is two parts:
1) Find (or reconnect with) your firm’s innate genius while continuing to listen to the market;
2) Learn to say “No” to projects that are not aligned with your firm’s innate genius.
Blasting Off
Where innate genius meets market need, the sky’s the limit.
This is where consulting is fun and lucrative.
Where the firm has clear positioning, a strong pipeline, and high team engagement.
Work at Blasting Off firms is both energizing and profitable—and clients come looking for exactly what the firm delivers best.
It’s where a passion for improving public education intersects with states’ need to propagate best practices.
It’s where the enthusiasm for injecting AI into supply chains intersects with manufacturers’ needs to quickly rethink their sourcing.
It’s where the thrill of teasing insights from data intersects with healthcare providers’ desire to understand the subtleties of their customers’ thinking.
All of those intersections are real examples of firms we work with that are Blasting Off because they’ve married their innate genius to a focused, burning, pervasive market need.
What about your consulting firm? How can you connect your innate genius to market needs?
Text and images are © 2026 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
I love this concept and it’s great to keep top of mind. I am a few months into my new role as an independent consultant and, although I just started focusing on business development, I do think I am well positioned to Blast Off.
When planning to leave my corporate job I asked myself three questions: What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? I know the answer is supporting independent primary care practices improve their operations, but my challenge is HOW to convince those physicians they need my help.
Once I get past that barrier I will fly into the stratosphere 🙂
Congratulations on your entry into consulting, Lisa. That’s very exciting.
One gentle piece of pushback for you: If you have to convince your prospects that they need your help, you’re not Fishing Where the Fish Are, and you’re in for a difficult slog. The three questions you asked yourself are all good, they’re just in the wrong order. The most important question is, “What does the world Need (and Want).”
Thanks for sharing where you are and how you’re putting the idea into practice, Lisa!
Love the read, David. The examples are great. It does feel like consultants are operating at only the very fringes of AI when Oracle jumps a few hundred billion dollars in value in a day.
Also, these animations… I don’t know how you get the inspiration and design together so well.
The world around consulting is changing at a breakneck pace–makes you wonder about our industry, right?
Thanks for the feedback on the illustrations. I have a lot tracing paper. ????
I appreciate your jumping in with you reaction, Steven!
David — This was a great analogy and really resonated with me. I started my consultancy ~5 years ago and have vascillated between Grounded and Puddle Jumping. I found more market need and let go of what I thought I did. Now I feel like I’m in the Crop Dusting world as I am CONSTANTLY delivering on projects while also trying to do BD and sell. It’s exhausting and not sustainable.
I continually am looking for higher value problems to align with what the market needs, but a question I’ve recently struggled with is really where is my innate genius? I wish I could say it’s easy to identify, but for whatever reason, it’s not for me. What advice might you have on figuring out what that is (without getting too cerebral or overthinking the question)?
Thank you!
Terry, you’ve asked a great question! I’m sorry your first five years in this wonderful profession have been a bit rocky. That’s not unusual, and you’re definitely not the only one to wonder, “Hold on… where exactly is this Blasting Off quadrant? Because I don’t see it!”
Ironically, we’re often not aware of our own innate genius because the associated behaviors and thinking come so easily and naturally to us that we assume they must be easy for everyone. Fortunately, clients and coworkers who know us well can often point out what we’re surprisingly good at. To uncover that, you’ll need to dig in with them—pushing three layers past the obvious, generic feedback like, “You’re a great problem solver,” “You bring clarity to complexity,” or “You’re a terrific listener.”
Ask people for specific instances when they were impressed or inspired by you.
In the meantime, keep scanning the market for high-value problems. That’s always the place to start. Since you’re already doing that, you’re actually ahead of the game.
Thanks for the deep question, Terry, and for the opportunity to spotlight an important, related topic!
Good response, David, to Terry’s question. The search for what one’s innate genius may also lead to the search for whether consulting (individual/join an established firm) is the right choice over joining a company/corporate.
Absolutely right, Sonit. Consulting isn’t for everyone, and leading a small firm definitely is not well suited for every individual. You’re smart to call that out.
This is a great question Terry! What is my innate genius?
Sonit, if you don’t know what sort of wind fills your sails, you’ll find yourself frequently in a lull.