Can you build and sell?
Welcome to the Dojo!
I recently read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and several of Naval’s ideas stayed with me.
They reinforced lessons I have learned throughout more than 20 years of building consulting businesses: learn to build and sell and choose the difficult actions that strengthen your business.
On the Mat
- Let’s Train: Learn to build and sell
- Ask Feras: “Should I wait until my consulting offer is fully developed before approaching prospective clients?”
- Sharpen the Blade: [Video] Ultimate Guide to Sales for Consultants Without Feeling Salesy
Let's Train
Learn to build and sell
Naval talks about the value of learning to build and sell and says “if you can do both you'll be unstoppable.”
For consultants, building usually means developing the ability to solve a valuable problem repeatedly.
You may build an assessment, a methodology, a workshop, a service package, or a delivery process. Your expertise becomes more valuable when clients can understand what you offer, how it works, and what result they should expect.
Many experienced professionals know how to improve operations, manage projects, analyze data, or design systems. Years inside established companies helped them develop valuable skills.
Then they enter entrepreneurship and discover that expertise alone does not create a pipeline.
You also have to identify potential clients, start conversations, communicate value, handle objections, follow up, and ask for the business.
These sales activities often feel uncomfortable because they are new. Many professionals respond by spending more time “strategizing,” refining their materials, or learning one more technical skill.
The stronger move is to begin selling.
Client conversations will show you which problems buyers care about, how they describe those problems, and what they are willing to pay to solve them. That information will improve your offer faster than another month of private preparation.
Choose the hard action
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
Consulting founders face these choices constantly.
It may be easier to keep the offer broad, because narrowing it feels like turning away opportunity.
It may be easier to avoid outreach, because rejection is uncomfortable.
Those choices usually create more difficulty.
A broad offer becomes harder to explain. Avoiding outreach leaves the pipeline empty. Weak boundaries lead to scope creep, frustration, and poor margins.
The difficult action often builds the capability that makes the next stage easier.
Pick one action you have been postponing: clarify your offer, contact a former colleague, follow up with a prospect, raise your price, or say no to work that does not fit.
Then complete it.
Ask Feras Recap
The Challenge
“Should I wait until my consulting offer is fully developed before approaching prospective clients?”
What I Told Them
You need enough clarity to explain the problem you solve and the type of client you help. Client conversations should help you shape the rest. Early feedback will reveal what buyers value, which language they use, and what parts of the offer need work. Preparation matters, but selling is also part of the preparation.
Sharpen the Blade
If selling is the part of consulting you keep avoiding, this video will help.
I break down a simple, practical system for getting clients consistently, structuring sales conversations, building confidence, and closing deals without pressure. These are the principles I used when I started with zero sales experience and later built an 8-figure consulting firm.
Sales is a skill. And if you want to build a sustainable consulting business, it’s one worth developing.
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