The State of Consulting – Where to Focus if You Want to Win

How Much of the Pie Do You Want?

In 2024, the global consulting industry grew by almost 2% – with a final estimated worth of $392 billion… Also known as a freaking boatload of money.

If you own a coaching, consulting, training, or expert practice, here’s a question we can all but guarantee you aren’t pausing and asking yourself enough:

“How much of that $392B do I personally need to ‘grab’ to be a truly wealthy consultant?”

Really stop and consider it. The math is simple.

• If you captured .001%, that would be $3,920,000.
• If you captured .01%, that would be $39,200,000.
• If you captured .1%, that would be $392,000,000.
• If you captured 1%, that would be $3,920,000,000.

Hmmmm. Feeling wealthy yet?

Okay – obviously when you start getting into numbers on the larger end of that spectrum, it starts to feel a little “abstract.” So let’s pull it back into reality.

Is capturing those percentages actually possible? And how?

Now that we’re a full week into 2025, we want to take some time to talk you through what we’re seeing (from our vantage point on the front lines helping hundreds of consulting business capture their fair share), and give you a few areas where the data is telling us you SHOULD be investing your time, money, and energy if you want to get your hands on those coveted percentages above.

Expansion Through Fractionalization

The OG model of consulting growth had a heavy focus on singularization – condensing your offerings down into one high-ticket program fed by several lead “sources” (or front end offers).

This model hit its stride in the late 2010s, as the rise of online marketing gave consultants the ability to uniquely cater to the top 3-5% of their audience that was ready to buy right now, and use front end products to monetize the remaining 90+% and incubate them until they were ready for that high ticket program or mastermind.

It’s not a bad model, by any stretch – however, in 2024, the limits began to show. Higher acquisition costs, fed by a healthy dose of market “nervousness” (because of economic strain, political and social uncertainty, etc) led to it being far more difficult to exclusively market to only that top percentage of the market.

Our approach (which we started in 2023 and are capitalizing on right up through 2025) is fractionalization.

• Tiered offers aimed at 2-3 different segments of the market, with multiple ways for people to invest in themselves through your programs based on what level they are currently at and what makes the most sense for them.
• 1-2 “feeder” offers on the front end – either direct offers (like VSLs, webinars, or masterclasses), books, low & midticket products, private communities, events, or content. Each of the program “tiers” should have their own ICPs that inform the marketing approach you take when filling them.
• Natural ascension opportunities from the lower tier offers to the higher tier offers (bonus points if the higher tier offers have a “revolving” component like we teach in the Revolving Price Method… allowing you to extract larger LTVs, and making the offers more profitable over time).

This isn’t drastically different from the original model – just a slight tweak that allows you to grab more of the market’s money in multiple different ways by always having something to sell them.

Looking for a little more insights on how to do this well? Check this out.

Paid Sponsorships as a Hedge Against Online Advertising

We teach that there are 4 primary attention pathways for consulting businesses:

• Paid Media
• Partnerships
• Organic
• Outbound

The preferred pathway (historically at least) when starting a brand new offer is to whip up organic and referral traffic, get the first batch of clients through the door, use the data to refine the program, and then build authority into the marketing through the results that are generated for those clients.

Once that groundwork has been laid, the next natural “accelerant” to grow the business is paid media – running ads and purchasing impressions on platforms like Meta, Instagram, Google (including Youtube), LinkedIn, etc.

The benefit here is that you’re not only putting money behind making sure that you’re getting your marketing in front of more people, but more of the RIGHT people. The targeting abilities of these platforms makes them potent in the hands of a talented marketer.

However, anyone who has run ads on a paid platform lately will tell you that the landscape for coaches and consultants is changing pretty quickly. The cost of traffic on most of these platforms is only heading upward, meaning that your cost to acquire new clients from them (CAC – or client acquisition cost) is going up as well.

For this very reason, we at the Wealthy Consultant, have started taking a percentage of our ad spend each month away from our paid media channels, and have instead started investing it in paid sponsorships (specifically podcasts, newsletters, and content creators on platforms like Youtube).

These are a type of partnership (going back to the 4 attention pathways), in which we pay content creators that we believe have a congruent audience to our typical buyers to run ads for us directly in their content. It’s very similar to paid media, with the exception that we have way more control over exactly the type of person whose eyeballs we are paying to acquire.

Whereas a paid media channel like Meta will take your advertising dollars and use their algorithm to try and determine (based on behavior, common interests, and other points of data they’ve collected) exactly who to show your ads to… a paid sponsorship is you paying a content creator to directly access an audience that they have EARNED through their content.

This makes it a fantastic hedge against the volatility of paid advertising.

Retention – It’s More Important Now Than Ever

We’ve been banging this drum for 3 straight years now.

Acquiring new clients does you NO good if you suck at retaining them.

If you fancy yourself the slickest and most technically gifted marketer on the planet, but your client experience is a dumpster fire that churns people out the back door as quickly as you’re bringing them in – YOU LOSE in the end.

The quality of your program and your ability to deliver a consistently positive journey for each client is going to be paramount if you intend to capture your slice of the consulting pie in 2025.

Mind and measure the following KPIs (key performance indicators):

• TTV – Time to Value – The measure of time between when a client joins your program and has their first major win (the moment they feel made the entire investment worth it). This will be unique for each client based on the gameplan you design with them during onboarding.
• NPS – Net Promoter Score – A measure of how likely a client is to recommend or refer a friend to the program. This is gathered by regularly surveying your client base, and should be recorded and analyzed regularly.
• CES – Client Effort Score – A metric tracking how easy it is for a client to access and use the features of your program. Measured by dividing positive responses to end of month client surveys by total number of survey results. This is a great indicator of customer sentiment and overall loyalty.

The magic of a 10/10 client experience is in the details. It’s in the way progressing through your program or interacting with your service makes them feel.

Measure the data, analyze and extract the lessons. Then make improvements to bring your client churn down.

It’s About to Get Harder – And That’s Good

Based on what we’re seeing, 2025 will be a year of separating the sheep from goats.

But that’s a good thing for legitimate experts like you. If you are world-class at what you do, and you actually give a crap about your clients and their results, you will put the right pieces in place and thrive.

If you don’t, you’ll find yourself in a race to the bottom that you do NOT want to win.

The choice is yours. Let’s see what you’ve got!