TL;DR: The hardest part of moving from a corporate role into consulting is not finding clients. It is working out what you are actually selling, because it is almost never the job title you left behind. Remote Work Europe has watched experienced professionals make this move across Europe, and the ones who struggle are usually the ones who overindexed on their old salary rather than their expertise.
Most people arrive at consulting from the same place, and it is rarely a business plan. A restructure. A reorganisation that removed the interesting part of the job. The slow recognition that the next move inside the company does not actually exist. Somewhere in there the thought arrives: I could do this on my own.
And then almost everybody does the same thing next. They start looking for clients. It is the wrong first move, and it is wrong for a reason that takes most people a year to see.
Nobody buys a former Head of Operations. They buy the specific problem you can make go away.
In a corporate career your value is described by your position in a structure. As a consultant, it has to be described by an outcome, to somebody who has never met you and has a budget they are protective of. Everything else about going independent is logistics by comparison.
Remote work has changed this in a way that matters. Consulting used to be constrained by who you could reach and how far you could travel. It is now entirely normal to advise a company in Berlin from a desk in Malaga, which means your market is no longer the companies within commuting distance of where you happen to live. That is a genuine expansion of what is possible, and it also means more competition for the same work.
What does a remote consultant actually do?
A consultant is paid to apply expertise to somebody else’s problem, for a defined period, without becoming their employee. In practice this covers a wide range: diagnosing what is wrong, designing a fix, delivering a specific project, coaching an internal team through a change, or simply being available as an experienced pair of eyes on decisions that nobody inside the organisation has made before.
What distinguishes it from contracting or interim work is that you are engaged for judgement rather than for capacity. A contractor fills a gap on the org chart. A consultant is brought in because nobody on the org chart knows the answer. it’s also distinct from NED and advisory work too – consultants need to deliver specific results, usually within a fixed time frame, rather than provide ongoing support.
That distinction matters commercially, because it is the difference between being paid for your time and being paid for what you know. It is also the distinction most new consultants blur in their first year, usually by accident, usually by accepting work that is really a job in disguise.
Which corporate backgrounds translate into consulting?
The backgrounds that translate best are the ones where you repeatedly solved a problem that most organisations have and few solve well. That is a more useful test than seniority, sector or job title.
Some that translate readily:
- Operations and process. Every growing company reaches a point where what worked at thirty people breaks at eighty. Somebody who has been through that twice is genuinely valuable.
- Finance and commercial. Pricing, forecasting, and the unglamorous work of making the numbers legible to people who are not accountants.
- Data, analytics and research. Organisations are collecting more than they can interpret, and the gap between having data and knowing what it means is where the work sits.
- Change, transformation and programme delivery. Particularly where it involves getting people to adopt something they did not ask for.
- Regulatory, compliance and risk. Especially in sectors where rules have changed recently and internal teams have not caught up.
- People, hiring and organisational design. More so now that companies are hiring across borders and discovering what that involves.
And some that need more reshaping than people expect. Deep specialist expertise in one company’s proprietary systems does not travel. Neither does a role that was mostly about managing internal relationships, however senior. If your value was substantially about knowing how your organisation worked, the transferable part is smaller than it feels, and the honest move is to find the underlying capability rather than to market the job title.
That was true for me. The first thing anybody paid me for as a consultant was my experience and expertise with remote teams, and it had never appeared on any job description I held. I had grown it for myself, as a byproduct of life choices rather than as a plan. Recognising it as expertise, rather than as simply how I happened to work, was the step that took time.
What skills are actually in demand?
Two kinds, and people consistently over-invest in the first.
The first is the domain expertise itself, which is what you already have and what you will be tempted to spend your energy polishing. The second is the set of skills that turn expertise into a business, which most corporate careers never require you to develop:
- Scoping. Defining what is and is not included, before the work starts, in writing. The single most common cause of an unprofitable engagement is a scope nobody rewrote.
- Pricing. Not what you charge, but how you structure it. Day rates, project fees, retainers and value-based pricing all behave differently and suit different work.
- Business development that is not selling. Most consulting work comes through people who already know you. The skill is staying visible and legible to your network without becoming a nuisance.
- Saying no. Particularly to work that is adjacent to your expertise but not actually it, and particularly in the first year when everything looks like a lifeline.
- Writing. Proposals, reports and recommendations are the product as far as the client is concerned. A brilliant analysis presented badly does not get implemented, and does not get you rehired.
The second list is where the difficulty actually is. It is also the list that a corporate career does not teach, because in a corporate career somebody else was doing all five.
How is remote consulting different from consulting locally?
The work is the same. Trust, pricing and admin all get harder, and reach gets much easier.
Trust takes longer to build. In-person consulting borrows credibility from the room. Remote engagements do not, so credibility has to be established through evidence in advance: things you have written, people who will vouch for you, a clear account of work you have done. This is why consultants who write tend to win better work than consultants who do not, and it has nothing to do with being a good writer.
Pricing gets complicated across borders. Clients in different European markets have different expectations about day rates for the same work, and you will be competing against local norms you cannot see. Charging Berlin rates from Spain is entirely legitimate, and you need to be able to say why your price is your price without reference to where you live.
The admin is real and it is yours. Invoicing across borders, VAT treatment that varies with the client’s status and location, and social security obligations in your country of residence rather than your client’s. None of it is difficult once it is set up. All of it is your problem, and it is the part people most often leave until it becomes urgent.
But the reach is transformative. A specialist in something narrow may have five potential clients within driving distance and five hundred across Europe. Remote work is what makes a narrow specialism commercially viable, and narrow specialisms are the ones that command the best rates.
What should you charge as a new consultant?
Not your old salary divided by working days. That calculation is the most expensive mistake in the transition.
Here is why it fails. Your salary was paid for roughly 220 working days, with holiday, sick pay, pension contributions, equipment, training and an employer’s social security contributions on top, all invisible to you. As a consultant you cover all of that yourself, you will not bill anything like 220 days, and a meaningful share of your working time goes on finding the next engagement rather than doing the current one.
More importantly, day rates anchor the conversation to your time, which is the one thing you cannot scale. A client comparing day rates is shopping. A client considering what a problem is costing them is buying.
So the more useful questions are: what does this problem cost the client if it stays unsolved, how long will it take me, and what is the smallest engagement that would genuinely help them? Answering those gets you to a defensible number and, more usefully, to a conversation about outcomes.
Two practical notes. Set your rate before you are desperate, because a rate set under financial pressure is nearly impossible to raise later with the same client. And expect to undercharge for the first two or three engagements. Almost everybody does, and it is survivable as long as you treat it as a starting position rather than a ceiling.
How do you get your first consulting clients?
Through people who already know your work, in almost every case.
The first engagement rarely comes from marketing. It comes from a former colleague, a supplier, a client of your old employer, or somebody who watched you work three jobs ago. This is genuinely good news, because it means the asset you need already exists and does not have to be built from nothing.
What it does need is to be activated deliberately:
- Tell people specifically. “I’ve gone independent” produces sympathy. “I’m helping mid-size companies fix their reporting before they raise” produces referrals, because it can be matched to a problem somebody has heard about.
- Start with the people who have seen you deliver, not the most senior people you know. Somebody who watched you work will vouch for you. Somebody impressive who barely knows you will not.
- Make the first engagement small and finite. A defined piece of work with a clear end is much easier to say yes to than an open-ended relationship, and it is how the open-ended relationship usually begins anyway.
- Then write about the work. Not a case study with the client named, necessarily, but the thinking behind it. This is what generates enquiries from people who did not already know you, and it takes months to compound, which is why starting it in month one matters.
If you want structure around this rather than working it out alone, this is exactly what our partner Lesley Elder-Aznar does. She is a practising management consultant and an ICF-accredited coach who built her own consulting business while living in Spain, and her programme takes people from corporate expertise to paying clients in twelve weeks. She has a particularly strong record with people leaving long corporate careers, and a notable one with women making that move, though the programme and her workshops are open to anyone.
She’s The Consultant – Get Your First Clients
A twelve-week programme for turning corporate expertise into a consulting business, taught by somebody who did it herself and still consults.
There is a free guide, 100 Ways to Monetise your Expertise, if you want to see how she thinks before committing to anything.
Lesley is a Remote Work Europe partner and we may earn a commission if you join her programme. We recommend her because Maya knows her work, not because of the commission.
What has to be in place before you start consulting?
Less than people fear, but the parts that matter are not optional.
You need a legal structure to invoice through, registered in your country of residence. You need to understand how VAT applies to your clients, which in the EU depends on whether they are a business and where they are established. You need to know what your social security obligations are, because in most European countries they begin when you register rather than when you start earning. And you need a written agreement for every engagement, even with people you trust, because the agreement is what you both refer to when the scope moves.
The specifics vary enormously by country and this is not the article to settle them in. If you are in Spain, our guide to registering as autónomo covers the process and what falls due once you are registered. Elsewhere in Europe the shape is similar and the details are not, so take local advice before you invoice anybody.
Disclaimer: This article provides general information only and does not constitute tax, legal or financial advice. Individual circumstances vary. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on this information.
When does consulting not work?
When what you are really selling is availability rather than expertise.
There is a version of independent consulting that is just a worse job: one client, most of your income, work defined by them, with none of the security and all of the uncertainty. It usually arrives gradually, and the warning sign is that the engagement has no end date and no defined deliverable.
It also does not work for everybody temperamentally, and that is worth saying without judgement. Irregular income is genuinely hard to live with. So is the absence of colleagues, which people underestimate until about month four. For me, what replaced them was a network of collaborators and clients, many of whom became friends. That is genuinely what happens, and it is worth knowing it is there to be built. It accumulates rather than arrives, though, which might not be much comfort when you are just getting started. Make yourself vulnerable, ask for help, ask for referrals. It is bloody awkward, and anybody who tells you otherwise has forgotten what the first year felt like. Do it anyway, and the reassurance will grow over time.
And it works badly as an escape route. Consulting rewards people who left a corporate career because they had something specific to sell, more than it rewards people who left because they could not stand another Monday. Both are valid reasons to leave. Only one of them tells you what to do next.
For most people, consulting ends up as one strand rather than the whole thing, sitting alongside advisory work, a fractional role, or writing and teaching. That structure has its own logic and its own failure modes, which we cover in what a portfolio career actually is. If you are weighing this up as part of a corporate exit later in your career, our guide to remote work over 50 in Europe covers the second-career routes specifically, and if you are still deciding between consulting and a role, what ‘remote’ actually means on a job advert is worth reading before you apply for anything.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be an expert to become a consultant? You need to be more expert than your client in the specific thing they are buying. That is a much lower bar than being the best in your field, and it is the bar that actually matters commercially.
How long does it take to replace a corporate salary? Most people take longer than they plan for, and somewhere between one and two years is common. The variable is rarely capability. It is usually how developed the network was before leaving, and whether the first engagements were priced sustainably.
Can I start consulting while still employed? Often, but check your contract first for exclusivity and conflict-of-interest clauses, and check the tax and social security position in your country, because registering as self-employed alongside employment changes it in most of Europe.
Is consulting the same as freelancing? Not quite. Freelancing usually means being paid to do defined work. Consulting usually means being paid for judgement about what work should be done. In practice many independent careers include both.
Do I need a website? Not to start, and not to get your first clients, which come through your network. You do need to be findable and to have something that demonstrates how you think. For many consultants that is LinkedIn plus a body of writing, and a website comes later.
