You’ve decided.
Maybe the decision was made for you. Either way, you’re going independent, and now you have to say what you do. On a website. In a LinkedIn post. Out loud, to a former colleague who asks what you’re up to.
You’ve been staring at the blank page for a week. Twenty years of work, and you can’t write three sentences about what you do. Not because you don’t know your craft. Because everyone you’ve ever worked with is going to read them.
And you keep studying the people a few years ahead of you. The clean site, the named offers, the prices that don’t flinch. You’re wondering if they’re different from you. Smarter, better connected, more capable. Or if they’ve just been at it longer.
Here’s what’s actually happening. You’re an expert at the work. What you’ve never had to own is the work around the work: positioning, pricing, proposals, pipeline. You’ve spent your career inside companies. You shipped. The company sold. The machinery between the two belonged to departments you could see but never had to run.
Now the machinery is you.
You don’t fix that with mindset work. You fix it with artifacts: a positioning statement you believe, a price you can say out loud, a proposal that gets signed.
I coach people through the first lap: one full revolution of the consulting cycle.
Each stage produces something real: the positioning, the price, the signed proposal, the wrapped project that produces the next one. The finish line isn’t your first completed engagement. It’s that you can run the next lap without me.
Here’s what I’ve found about the people a few years ahead: they’re rarely a different species. Look closely and you’ll almost always find a prior lap. An agency stint where they wrote the proposals, not just delivered the work. A side practice. A business before this one. Their confidence is compound interest on laps you haven’t run yet.
Could you run those laps alone? Probably. Most people do, eventually.
Eventually is the problem.
The self-taught first lap usually runs twelve to twenty-four months, and it includes the expensive lessons: the underpriced first project, the hourly-rate trap, the pipeline gap after your first engagement wraps. Time to your first signed proposal is a runway problem, not an ego problem.
The First Lap compresses that to about four months.
Same lessons. Without paying full tuition.
I’ve run this lap and kept going. Twenty years ago I co-founded DesignMap, a design strategy consultancy, and operated it from two people to fifty. I still do the work today, for real clients: positioning, pricing, proposals, all of it.
I’m not a coach who retired into coaching.
I’m the person a few years ahead who still does the work.
This will fit if:
- You’ve decided to go independent, or already are. Not still weighing whether.
- Your craft isn’t the question. You’re roughly director or VP level, fifteen-plus years in. The gap is the commercial side, not the work itself.
- You’re inside the first lap: pre-launch through the first year or two. You haven’t yet positioned, priced, sold, run, and wrapped an engagement you originated yourself.
- You can commit to about four months of steady work. You don’t have to arrive ready to go public. Building that readiness is most of what we do.
It’s probably not a fit if you’ve run this cycle before. If you’ve originated and closed your own engagements, even years ago, even under a different shingle, you don’t need a first-lap coach. You might like the newsletter, though. It’s written for the longer arc, and it’s where I think out loud. I’d genuinely be glad to have you as a reader.
Start with an intro call.
Thirty minutes, free, and honestly framed: the job is finding out whether this is a fit, and pointing you somewhere useful if it isn’t. If it is, the next step is usually the First Lap Diagnostic: a working session plus a written plan, sequenced against your actual runway.
Prefer email? Drop me a note at hello@gregobaker.com.