Starting and growing a consulting business doesn’t look heroic from the outside. It looks messy. Scary. Uncertain. It looks like betting on yourself when there’s no safety net. Like learning sales when you came from strategy. Like explaining your value before you fully believe it yourself. Like doing brave things quietly, over and over, while everyone else sees only the slightest progress.
That’s entrepreneurship. You don’t just launch a business; you become someone new in the process. As an English literature major, I can’t help but see this through the fictional lens of the hero’s journey described by Joseph Campbell.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus has to break away from expectation, tradition, and comfort to find his own voice. It’s isolating, but it’s necessary.
In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming learns that courage isn’t about dramatic moments; it’s about facing fear internally and choosing to move forward anyway.
Both are bildungsroman: stories of becoming. That’s consulting. You start with skills, but quickly learn that skills aren’t enough. You need resilience, perspective, boundaries, the ability to sit with uncertainty, the need to sell ideas before results exist. And, you need to absorb rejection without letting it rewrite your self-worth.
There are real hurdles:
- Leaving steady income
- Navigating imposter syndrome
- Building credibility from scratch
- Educating the market
- Managing feast-or-famine cycles
- Learning that momentum is fragile and must be protected
And there are real payoffs:
- Autonomy
- Purpose-driven work
- Clients who value your thinking
- The ability to choose alignment over volume
- Watching others succeed because of your guidance
A new family doctor just told me last week in these exact words: “Gina, you’re a f*ck!ng phoenix.” I looked at him, a smile spread across my face, and I said loudly, “I’m a f*ck!ng phoenix!!!!” (Coolest doctor EVER.)
And that landed. Because the phoenix doesn’t rise instead of burning. It rises because of it. Phoenix mythology isn’t about resilience in the polite, corporate sense. It’s about total collapse followed by conscious rebirth. The old identity has to die. Comfort has to be surrendered. Certainty has to be burned away. Only then does something stronger emerge.
That feels painfully accurate to entrepreneurship and, especially, consulting. You don’t just improve. You molt. You outgrow versions of yourself. You shed pricing models. You abandon strategies that once worked. You let go of clients who no longer fit. You rebuild confidence after setbacks. You reinvent your offer more than once.
That’s the fire. And each time, you come back clearer, sharper, and more aligned. I haven’t reached my denouement yet, but that’s the point. The phoenix doesn’t rise once. It rises repeatedly.