Any successful and experienced independent expert already knows they are too close to their own business to see the hidden obstacles holding them back.
But they can see the hidden obstacles of clients very easily. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
The Founder’s Blind Spot
When you built your practice, you made hundreds of small decisions – about who to take on as a client, how to price your work, how to describe what you do, which engagements to pursue and which to decline. Most of those decisions were good ones.
By the time a practice is four or five years old, most consultants, trainers, speakers, people who sell expertise, run into a number of predictable problems – some of which are invisible to them.
If you are still doing the same things you did to run and grow your practice before 2020 think about this for a moment.
Literally everything in the market has changed.
Buyer behavior, the media landscape, the Zoom call, the competitive landscape, the economy – every single variable you based your business on years ago changed – except how you run the business.
But you are unlikely to figure out what you need to change by yourself.
Why Smart People Stay Stuck
Independent experts are, by definition, very smart people. That competence can work against them when it comes to evaluating their own business. The skills that make someone effective at solving client problems do not automatically transfer to diagnosing the structural problems inside their own practice.
Enter confirmation bias. When you have been running a practice for several years (or decades), you have a significant investment – financial, professional, and psychological – in the decisions you have made. That investment makes it genuinely difficult to examine those decisions with the same rigor you would apply to a client’s situation.
This is why peer groups are becoming increasingly popular again. Growth minded consultants, coaches and experts are turning to peers – people who are building similar but non-competing businesses to significantly accelerate their own practice.
What Changes When Someone Else Is in the Room
The value of an outside perspective is not that other people will tell you what to do. It is that they will ask questions you have stopped asking yourself. They will notice the thing you described in passing – the client you mentioned almost as an aside, the engagement you declined without much explanation, the pricing exception you made three times last year – and they will surface it as something worth examining.
They will push back on bad decisions or confirmation bias precisely because they are detached.
That kind of observation does not happen in a coaching relationship, where the dynamic runs from one person to another. It happens in a room full of people who are all close enough to your situation to recognize the pattern, and all far enough outside it to name it without flinching.
The problems that get solved in that environment are not always the problems that get put on the table. Often the most useful work happens when someone in the room says, quietly, that the problem being described is not actually the problem.
