This is a translation of a post I wrote in Swedish, by December 2025.
To explain what strategy work can be, I thought I would take myself as an example.
Ever since I started my own consulting company, I have mostly done what you do as an employee in a company or organization. I have answered advertised requests with applications, hoping to be accepted for assignments that fit my experience and abilities, in competition with many others who also consider themselves qualified.
Over time there have been more and more of us fighting over a pie that shrinks and grows with the swings of the economy, politics, and the world around us. The fundamental rules of a market economy say that on that playing field, with a slowing economy, prices fall while the chances of being accepted shrink further.
That is the moment when you owe it to yourself to ask whether it is time to change something, to start working on your strategy.
Said and done. I have concluded that I should move from being an hourly-billed resource to being a supplier of proven value. (It is of course possible to prove value creation under hourly billing, and it should be, but in the traditional resource-consulting deal the value creation tends to be overshadowed by the work of “filling gaps.”)
What I deliver should be clearly packaged, so that you can know the scope, cost, and effect in advance.
As a consequence, I have had to unlearn and learn anew. I need to start selling, and by that I mean selling in the professional sense: giving advice and recommendations that give the customer proven value.
The challenge I have taken on is so much bigger than I could have imagined, and it creates a mostly unpleasant feeling of uncertainty. But perhaps, in the long run, that uncertainty gives back more than the false security of a permanent position or long, hard-to-work assignments. You never know in advance when it will suddenly be time to pack up and go home, and you don’t always learn the reason why.
Here begins my journey toward… well, something other than what came before, at least. Things I have done so far to improve my chances:
- Taken a course on how to book meetings through cold calling
- Straightened out a very unruly website that never had sensible content for marketing me (MUCH remains to be done, but at least it now says what I do, or want to do)
What remains:
- Learning the basics of prospecting (a very challenging area)
- Turning the above into action, i.e. identifying target groups and, from them, so-called suspects: people presumed to be interested in my offer
- Creating and building my target list, i.e. a list of the people I think are interesting to contact
- Increasing my presence on social media, with LinkedIn as the priority
- Figuring out how the algorithms can work for me instead of against me
- Posting and, above all, interacting
- PRIORITY 1, but not really: starting to make cold calls
- The target list needs to be ready first
- Social media needs to be able to confirm the picture of me (well, but…)
- IN THE MEANTIME: creating concepts, descriptions, and material for my products
- Presentations
- Info on the website
- Material for social media
- EVERYTHING ELSE:
- The time I need to manage responsibly. Far more of my working time is now “my time” instead of “the customer’s time”
- All the demons sitting on my shoulders and shouting in chorus: “YOU WILL FAIL, YOU ARE NOBODY, YOU ARE TOO OLD!” And so on. They need to be dealt with, for real, with a firm hand and a big dose of energy and stubbornness. The question is just (again): how?