9 Steps to Starting Your Consulting Business & Landing Your First Freelance Client

At 23, I landed my dream job with a Fortune 500 company. I worked hard, advanced quickly and I made more and more money.

I had all the outward appearances of success, but inside, my soul was dying.

I hated getting up for work in the mornings, I dreaded every meeting, I started spending half my day looking forward to happy hour, usually while eating some sort of microwave meal at my desk.

I resented my boss, my coworkers and exhaustion of the burnout made even the best parts of my job — the stuff I liked to do — feel more painful than a root canal.

Eventually, I realized I had to make a change and quit without a plan, later starting my first business.

My journey wasn’t an easy one — my first freelance job netted me about $0.50 an hour — but I’ve never looked back from that decision to quit.

If I’d stayed in that job, I’d probably have a nice, fat 401K right now and still be praying that someday things would get better while slogging through TPS reports and crying myself to sleep at night.

Instead, I gave up what wasn’t working for me — the job, the drinking, the stress-related health problems — and embarked on redesigning my life.

I earned my MBA and spent 10 years helping entrepreneurs build businesses in one form or…