If you can manage to get things up and running, as outlined in Part 1, and can avoid or work around the challenges acknowledged in Part 2, there are a number of great upsides that await you:

Choose Your Own Career Path

In most full-time employment roles your growth opportunities are limited by the needs of your role and of the organization. As a senior software engineer, your company is more likely to support you in developing further technical skills than in learning entry level marketing skills. Similarly, if your organization exclusively uses Ruby and has no plans to change this, you may get pushback if you ask the company to send you to a conference for an unrelated language. While some companies are more willing to support employees in building a diverse set of professional experiences, at some point the needs of the business have the potential to conflict with your personal interests and you will reach an impasse.

Growth opportunities for consultants are not bound by the needs of their current clients. In fact a consulting business often benefits from individuals cultivating a more diverse range of skills. This broadens the set services that can be offered, providing a wider net for attracting new clients. Additionally, as technologies move through their natural lifecycle, this flexibility allows you to stay on the leading edge of this curve, learning new skills and positioning yourself to consistently offer high-value services to a wider range of clients. Those limited to a single technology may find themselves stuck maintaining outdated systems that are becoming obsolete.

Consultants can bring value to client organizations in a wide range of manners. Some choose to keep their skills focused very narrowly, building deep expertise on a very limited set of topics. Others offer a much wider range of services, bridging gaps and improving the operational efficiency of a client by bringing a broad set of experiences and skills to the table. Neither of these approaches is objectively better or worse than the other, but rather are a good fit or bad fit for a particular team. The important thing is to choose a strategy that works well for your interests and objectives.

The Joy of Swinging a Hammer

For those of us who are lucky enough to find a job that fits perfectly with our interests and passions, there are few things worse than being promoted into a managerial position that involves a lot of paper pushing and leaves no time to tackle the tasks that bring deep joy and satisfaction. For me, building software systems, and particularly the technical design and coding activities involved in this, are what I love to do. In reality, work ends up feeling a lot like a game that consists of a series of puzzles or challenges, where the medium for this game just happens to be a programming language or system design components.

Consulting not only offers an alternative career path, avoiding the "management trap" by continuing to build and use expertise in your field of choice, but it also incentives clients to task you with their most challenging activities. This forms a virtuous cycle where your joy and expertise grow as you work through the increasingly challenging problems brought your way, creating a win-win situation for both you and your clients.

Building Deep Relationships

There are few better ways to build a high trust relationship than repeatedly delivering high quality, on-time results. As a consultant these high trust relationships form the life blood of your business, but even more than that they enhance your sense of satisfaction from the work you do. After deploying a complex new feature, you not only get the professional satisfaction of having solved the set of challenges that initially stood in the way of this project but you also get the relational satisfaction of having meaningfully supported the goals/needs of your counterpart within the client organization.

While client relationships can grow very strong and last the course of your entire career, they will never be quite the same as the bonds formed with the people you have chosen to build your business with. This was one of the main reasons I sought out partners to form a small consulting company after running a freelance consulting business for five years. Through the ups and downs of landing new clients, building the business's reputation, establishing an audience, perhaps launching and pivoting side products, and the countless other activities involved in running a successful consulting business, you get to know your partners at a level that simply doesn't compare to any other coworker relationship. You learn about the ins and outs of their lives, you take opportunities to support them and be supported by them, you celebrate their victories, and you offer a shoulder during challenging seasons. These experiences form the basis for not only a committed business partnership but a lifelong friendship.

Part Time and Overtime Work Opportunities

As a consultant you are directly in control of your workload and, with sufficient advance planning and communication, can generally dial this capacity up or down to align with your current needs and desires. If you want to pursue a passion project, take a set of courses to learn a new skill, or simply have more time to relax an enjoy the company of your friends and family, you have the ability to adjust your commitments to free up time in your schedule for these activities. On the other hand, if you are about to take a large block of time off (e.g. for a sabbatical or as your welcome a new child into your family), you may feel the need to build up reserves to support yourself during this upcoming period of decreased income.

The ability to fine tune your workload in this manner is something that few other professional, full-time roles afford. When leveraged in a wise manner, this provides opportunities that you would never be able to consider in a full-time employee role (e.g. going back to school part-time, extended traveling, caring for a parent or loved one, etc). In all of these scenarios, it is particularly important to stay in close communication with your clients, giving them enough lead time to adjust plans without impacting the commitments they have related to your work.

Less Corporate BS

Are annual performance reviews, corporate handbook trainings, and tedious office politics the most exciting aspects of your job? If so, I'm sure you'll enjoy twiddling your thumbs in that cozy cubicle for many years to come. However if you wouldn't mind never having to bother with these tasks again, a consulting role is a great way to sidestep these time consuming and often soul-sucking activities.

As a consultant, you will almost exclusively be evaluated based on the impact of your work and the resulting value delivered to your client, not based on the whims of the person currently positioned above you in the org chart. Additionally, in this role you're free to share your thoughts and advice in a direct, unapologetic manner without being overly invested in the resulting decision made by your client. If they choose to ignore your advice, that is fully within their rights to do. As discussed in Part 2 of this series, this will require you to respect their decision while still finding productive ways to support the team throughout its execution. However, in most cases this is much easier than the political tightrope of either gaining relational capital by allowing another employee to "be right" versus ensuring the best possible decision is made to set the business up for continued success.

It is worth acknowledging that running a business comes with its own forms of overhead, such as financial bookkeeping, annual business filings, tax returns, legal contract reviews, etc. However as the business owner you can choose which of these tasks you appreciate handling yourself and which you'd prefer to outsource to qualified professionals with the experience needed to keep your business running smoothly.

While this is not an exhaustive list, these are a few aspects of running a freelance or small team consulting business that we've found most rewarding. What benefits of consulting do you find most appealing? Are there other perks we've missed? Let us know at hello@gobetweenlab.com. Thanks so much for reading this series. If you missed the first two posts on tips for launching your consulting business and challenges you will face operating it, be sure to check them out.