Consulting Is Career Purgatory

You escaped employment, not dependence

You didn’t say it loud.

You said it quietly. Over coffee. In the DMs. On a call with an old colleague.

“Just consulting for now.”

And in that one phrase, you told the whole truth.

Not the one about your experience.
Not the one about your network.
Not even the one about your next opportunity.

The real truth:

You’re not building.
You’re buffering.

Let’s break this.

“Just consulting for now” is the most dangerous sentence in the post-org lexicon.
Because it sounds practical.
Reasonable.
Strategic.

It’s not.

It’s drift in disguise.

It’s a holding pattern.
A stalling loop.
A polite way of saying:

“I don’t know what I am without the org chart, so I’m renting out my identity until I figure it out.”

Here’s the punch:

Consulting isn’t an identity.
It’s a delay mechanism.

The longer you “just consult,” the further you drift from the power you left to claim.

Because consulting is reactive by nature.

It responds. It adapts. It pleases.
It keeps you sharp, but keeps you subservient.

You’re not sovereign. You’re serviceable.

And every time you close a deal, you tell yourself it’s momentum.

It’s not.
It’s another 3-month project that will vanish, with no leverage, no system, and no structure left behind.

Consulting is a symptom. Not a solution.

You escaped employment, but you didn’t escape dependence.

You still need the inbound.
Still pitch yourself in other people’s frames.
Still defer your direction to client scope.
Still one deal away from drought.

You traded a boss for a booking link.

And now you’re trapped between being too experienced to be junior, and too unstructured to be sovereign.

That’s not consulting.

That’s career purgatory.

Here’s what no one says:

Consulting can be architecture, but only if you structure it like an operator.

You must stop renting your expertise, and start productising your thinking.
You must move from reaction to installation.
From proposal to platform.
From “What do you need?” to “Here’s what I deploy.”

If you don’t make that shift, you’ll wake up five years later with a stack of decks and no direction.

“Just consulting for now” is not a phase.

It’s a trap.

And the market will let you stay there.
Busy. Respected. Drifting.

But you didn’t come this far to rent out your calendar.
You came to build something that no org chart could ever offer.

Power. Identity. Infrastructure.

Consulting won’t get you there.

You need architecture.

This is what I’m working on. Tell me what you think, I enjoy the conversation! Subscribe and follow the work in real time.

Thanks!

B

Proconsul 🇨🇦 (@proconsul.bsky.social)

Visionary Strategic Growth A guide for ambition, bridging strategy with implementation for modern business: clarity, structure, and sustainable impact. I listen. If it’s possible, I’ll show you how. proconsul.ghost.io

Bluesky Social

You’re not ‘just consulting for now’. You’re buffering. You didn’t escape the job, you just found a new boss.

PS -