The more senior you are and the more strategic your work product, the more you’ll get paid. The more execution/deliverable focused your services are (and the younger you are), the less you’ll get paid. While that’s a somewhat simplistic explanation, it’s a fair way to estimate your consultant income in relation to your age and seniority. If you’re leaving a W2 job you should expect to make as much as you’re making now within your first year of business if you’re in a middle to senior role with at least 5-7 years experience in your industry. If you sell a retained service that’s not focused on creative deliverables then you can expect to sell a $3000/mo retainer to a few clients. Deliverable-based retainers can vary significantly with video being on the higher end and social media on the lower end. Very senior strategic consultants, like a Fractional CMO, can pull in up to $8k per month per client.

There are a lot of great jobs or swimlanes when it comes to being a marketing consultant. Ultimately, you need to think through if you are providing a strategic problem-solving product or series of ongoing creative deliverables. Then you need to determine if you are selling retained flat-rate work, project-based work, or hourly support. Then you need to decide if you are a fractional/outsourced leader or a bolt-on execution supplement to an existing team. There are a lot of different ways to slice it but overall, it’s about connecting your skills with the client’s needs… in both a hard cost and soft cost approach. My opinion? Nothing beats longer-term fixed monthly cost retainers with occasional project-based upsells.

As a consultant who knows marketing, you have to check all these boxes: 

Self-starter: You’re on your own so the business development, execution, follow up, accounting, and back office are all you.

Results-oriented: You have to know what’s important to your client and be focused on outcomes. This includes reporting on KPIs and metrics.

Balanced thinker: Sometimes you need to be fully analytical, sometimes fully creative. Most marketing roles require a balance of both and it sure helps to have experience in both sides. 

Over-deliverer: You have to deliver more than what your contract says. That could mean client services, relationship touchpoints, extra wow-factor, etc. You can’t just check the boxes and expect to become indispensable.

Speak C Suite: You have to speak and relate to the C Suite who doesn’t care about your Instagram filters and Pantone swatches. They’re about business-facing results and you have to have that mindset when you engage with them.

Long answer made short… a well-rounded and experienced marketing leader will usually bring the right skillsets to the table when becoming a Marketing Consultant. 

To get started with no experience I would first recommend not quitting your day job! What you need to do is spend some time after work setting up your consultancy as your side hustle and getting some quick win performance and experience with businesses you know (friends, family, etc). Even if it’s a food truck or friend’s daycare, get some low-risk performance under your belt to establish a working tempo and early stage testimonials. From there, build a financial buffer while you execute your side hustle along with your day job to ensure you have a 6 month runway of cash for when it does come time to launch.

You really don’t need a degree or certificate to become a marketing consultant. Most of the best client/consultant relationships come through your network and referrals, not just anonymous job boards, postings, or blanket social media posts. What your clients are really going to care about is this: Can you solve their problems and deliver outcomes while being fun to work with and not over-demanding on their time? Your certificates, degrees, and professional pedigree are all secondary to whether or not you can deliver results and have real world experience.

Do you need a license, certification, or approval from some governing body to become a marketing consultant? You’ll need to check with your state for the specifics around business licenses but generally, unless you’re in a high-risk or highly-regulated industry, you don’t need anything at all. A separate bank account and sole proprietorship status are enough to get going. At some point you probably want to set up an LLC but to get early stage momentum, just go.

Being a marketing consultant has different levels of difficulty. One of the challenges you’ll experience is determining just how much work you can do in a week without losing your mind and how far out of your comfort zone you’re willing to go to get new business. The more experience you’ve had in real world W2 contexts, the better- especially if you already know a specific vertical well (healthcare, construction, tax services, etc). Some of the hardest aspects of being a marketing consultant are when you have to produce new/more business and you’re stalled out, when you get bored providing the same types of services over and over, or you just get burned out from level of work x time.

The best way to get into consulting for marketing is to just start. This means free work or discount work through friends and family businesses to establish experience, case studies, and testimonials. Then you scale from there. This is the safest way to ease into it. The worst thing you can do is quit your job and decide you want to be a consultant and let your passion alone drive you. It’s about ensuring financial security while also not working yourself to death. You have to go back and ask yourself the big WHY behind your decision… why do you want to do this? What’s appealing about it? What’s your motivation to make this change? You need both passion and a plan.

Don’t put too much stock in degrees for generating work or confidence in your work product. In my experience, business owners care far less about your degrees and schools than they do the track record of your past work performance- especially in their space. You can get a Marketing Certificate or Marketing Degree or even an MBA if you want… but the on-ramp to becoming a consultant has very little to do with these degrees and certifications with most of them being very expensive and taking years to complete. Clients want to see that you are all about their success, you’re personable and easy to work with, you know their market, and ultimately can deliver measurable results while taking the time and energy burden off of their internal teams.

If you’re looking to be a specialist consultant (focused on one specific aspect of marketing) then you may want to pursue a certification or accreditation. For example, if you’re really focused on lead generation and martech then you may want some certs in Google Ads or HubSpot. If you’re a Marketing Operations person, fractional CMO, or outsourced Marketing Director, you’re going to need more of a generalist mindset and be able to speak fluently across almost all areas of marketing. It doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in every single thing but you need to be fluent with what’s in the toolbox and what each part does. Just remember: there is no greater certification than real-world experience where you have solved client problems and can show your process for achieving success.