When I started out on my brand new portfolio career, I’d already had twenty years as a founder and CEO. And the last thing I wanted, ever again, was to have to lead. Nirvana for me would be tons of income and no responsibilities. So that’s what I set out to achieve.

Way back in the day I started one of the world’s first web design agencies. 1994 was a heady time to break new ground, be subversive, build something brand new, and do it all with blue hair. I had a blast.

Those early days of digital marketing were so, so exciting. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just got on with doing what I thought was right. Eventually I founded six agencies, and sold four of them for actual money. My second agency (I’d sold my first to my partner when we found our values diverging) ended up as the digital arm of Lowe. We won every accolade in the book, and it was fun.

Eventually I started learning how to run a business, rather than just trying to bluster my way through. I joined Vistage – which for me was a fantastic move. Four years of learning from much more experienced CEOs and under the careful mentoring of the wonderful Charles Llewellyn, I became a pretty good CEO, a very good leader, and I realized just how bad a manager I really was. All this gave me the knowledge and confidence to do better and better work. My agencies flourished, we won some of the world’s biggest brands as clients, we did groundbreaking, award-winning work, and I grew up.

My career lasted twenty-one years. I’d appeared on hundreds of stages, become an Adjunct Professor on Hult International Business School’s MBA programs, and even had a BBC documentary made about our firm. I was running the world’s leading eCRM strategy consultancy and had been recruited to be CEO of a new agency network.

At this point I started to realize I was getting bored. Not just bored, to be honest; I was getting stressed. And I didn’t enjoy it one bit.

When you stop enjoying what you’re doing, it takes a while – or it did for me at least – to recognise it. It starts manifesting in your outlook. I became cynical. I started disliking clients. I found myself looking for problems, and then blaming others. I began to resent the fact that it was always me who had to take responsibility for all flaws and faults. All the things that had made it so exciting and on which I had thrived became slowly, almost imperceptibly, the things I hated.

My time was clearly running out.

So I decided to put into practise every single thing I had learned in nearly twenty years. I created a framework that empowered people within my businesses to take responsibility for growth and improvement. I hired an experienced managing director to run my main agency and coached the founders of my group agencies so they could implement the framework for their own teams. I stepped back as my agency’s CEO and became its chair. My framework started to work – in fact revenue in my own agency doubled in the year it was implemented. And when everything was in place I sold everything and resigned from my various roles.

Phew. I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally be free – of the stress, of the clients, of all the responsibility!

Now I could focus on nirvana.

Like you, I imagine, my first tentative steps into the world of consulting were frustrating. Actually quite demoralizing. First though I met with others doing what I aspired to do. I went on the coffee circuit. I probably met fifteen people who were happily plying their trade as non-executive directors, board advisors, chairs and consultants. They were universally generous with their advice. A few of them made introductions.

And so I started to meet with one or two potential clients. Agency owners who needed advice, or more accurately, needed someone to listen to their problems. I knew I could do it, but it didn’t feel like I’d be doing anything really constructive or productive. I was looking at thirty years of listening to other peoples’ stresses, crises and griping about unwanted responsibilities. Depressing.

Not only that, but my peers, the other consultants, weren’t being paid very much. The standard day rate wasn’t any more than I’d been getting as a salaried CEO. And worse, much worse, they were all competing with each other. I discovered that for every single board advisory or mentoring position I went for there were a hundred others also in lukewarm pursuit.

This then was the dismal reality of my hoped-for nirvana.

Here’s what I did about it.

First I sat myself down and gave myself a good talking to. Then I asked myself five questions:

• What do you not want?
• How much time do you really want to spend working?
• What money do you need?
• What do you know that is different to what everyone else knows?
• What can you promise that no-one else promises?

What do you not want?

This one was easy. I didn’t want stress. (It’s interesting, here I am eight years later writing this and this is still my touchstone – whenever I sense stress, I change things to remove it.)

For me stress comes from anything I feel strongly about that is outside my control. Employees, clients, and billing all fall into this category.

I didn’t want a boss. I didn’t want to have to justify myself to anyone else. I didn’t want to have to slave away delivering anything. I didn’t, really, want to have any responsibility. I wanted to direct, not do.

How much time do you really want to spend working?

At the time I started I had just met the person I would go on to marry. She didn’t live in the same country as me so I wanted to spend as much time together as possible. This meant, ideally, a couple of weeks a month traveling. That leaves two weeks for work. Maybe 10-20% of my time would have to be spent on finding customers and doing admin. So I had eight days a month to sell.

So whatever I was going to do would have to be part-time, ideally long-term (so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time having to find new customers), and ideally so productive that my results would speak for me and marketing would therefore be much easier.

What money do you need?

Enough to spend half my time traveling. Enough to live nicely. More than I needed, ideally.

When I added it up, it turned out to be quite a bit. The same roughly as I’d make if I went out and got a full-time leadership role.

When I divided what I wanted to make by the number of days I had available I got an answer about what my day rate had to be. And that was quite a bit more than anyone else was making on the advisor circuit.

I would need to differentiate myself.

What do you know that is different to what everyone else knows?

Not very much, it turned out after an hour of honest self-examination. I had been one of the world’s leading authorities on several things, when they were novel. I’d won some awards. I knew how to carry off blue hair (vaguely unique, but no longer possible) and how to captivate an audience (not much use) and how to be a founder and a CEO (just like everyone I would be selling to).

What can you promise that no-one else promises?

Ah, finally one that I could answer in a way that was actually positive. I had a framework. I knew how to get a team to take responsibility, in fact I knew how to get teams in several agencies at once to take responsibility for driving growth.

I had my own case studies.

I could promise to release the bottleneck founders always face: when they are responsible for everything, their bandwidth is limited to their own capacity. By using my framework they could break this bottleneck and hopefully start to scale.

And I was the only one qualified to implement the framework for them. I had my differentiation.

And if I could deliver the value in practice, I could justify my fees.

So I set out to try it. I found a company run by someone who knew this was their problem and I started working for them as a consultant. I realized quite quickly that I needed some authority. I had two potential routes for this: become an agency chair for hire, to help hold the founder to account, or increase my price so that my perceived value would rise.

So I doubled my price. And became an agency chair. Very successfully I might add. I actually found my sweet spot was having six clients to chair. My framework became a program. And a side note: on my journey around the world of management consultants I had seen numerous folks who had outstayed their usefulness and in some cases their welcome. This felt wrong to me, either unself-aware, or in some cases downright unethical. My program became a two-year program, no more, no less. In doing so that solved the revenue predictability problem and made the sales and marketing requirement much easier to fulfill.

Eventually I decided I needed company, so I took on a business partner. Today I have two business partners in what’s now called the 2Y3X program (two years, 3x revenue). We have several consultants of our own (all of whom, like me, ran their own companies and exited). 2Y3X works with service businesses and marketing agencies of between $2-8 million in revenue, all over the US and Europe. We guarantee results, because we have an eight-year track record of delivering what we promise.

And that’s my story. I hope it’s useful to you and inspires you. Maybe one day you’ll want to join our crew of amazing consultants. I hope, perhaps, that it’s also useful for some of the people you know who run their own businesses, who have recognised they are the bottleneck and need a program to get them where they too have always wanted to go – to their own nirvana.