Five years, marked honestly
I signed my first client in January 2021. That's five years this month, which is long enough to have patterns rather than anecdotes — and long enough that I've started to notice myself smoothing the story.
So before that sets, here's the version with the lumpy parts left in.
What the shape of five years actually was
Not a line going up. Roughly:
Year one (2021): underpriced, over-delivered, said yes too often. Learned an enormous amount, earned less than my last salary.
Year two (2022): started an MBA in the second half of year one, so this year was flat. Revenue barely moved. In hindsight the most expensive decision I've made, and I'd still make it — just at a different time.
Year three (2023): the compounding year. Work from 2021 produced referrals, writing from 2021–22 produced inbound. Almost nothing I did in 2023 caused 2023's results.
Year four (2024): first genuine capacity ceiling. Fully booked, turning down work, and no obvious way to grow without hiring or changing the model.
Year five (2025): raised rates, narrowed scope, worked with fewer clients on longer engagements. Revenue up, hours down. The first year that felt deliberate rather than reactive.
The lag between effort and result is the thing I'd emphasise to anyone starting. It's roughly 9–18 months, consistently, and it means your first two years feel much worse than they are.
What actually generated business
I've kept records, so this isn't a guess. Across five years:
Referrals from past clients — the largest single source by a distance, and heavily concentrated. A small number of people have sent me a disproportionate share of everything.
Writing — second, with a long delay. Enquiries routinely reference posts from 18 months to three years earlier. Every time I've evaluated writing on a quarterly return I've concluded it wasn't working, and every time I've been wrong.
Network from before consulting — meaningful in year one, negligible by year three. It gets you started and it doesn't sustain you.
Cold outreach — almost nothing, despite meaningful effort in years one and two.
Social media — almost nothing directly, though it makes the writing findable, so the attribution here is genuinely unclear.
The five things I'd tell myself in January 2021
1. Price with arithmetic, not intuition. Annual need divided by realistically billable days — which is 130–150, not 220. I underpriced year one by roughly 40% and it took two years to correct.
2. Narrow faster. The single best decision I made was specialising in B2B SaaS demand generation for early-stage companies. I made it partly by accident and resisted broadening twice when work was thin. Both times were right.
3. Say no earlier. Not just to bad-fit clients — to good-fit clients with no internal owner of the outcome. That was the pattern I took longest to see.
4. Write the narrow, practical thing. The posts that generate business are checklists and diagnostics, not essays. I still find this mildly disappointing and it's been true for five years.
5. Assume nine months of lag on everything. Plan the runway accordingly, and don't judge any channel on a quarter.
What I still haven't solved
The capacity ceiling. Consulting income scales with hours until it doesn't. I've raised rates three times, which works and doesn't extend indefinitely. Productising, hiring, or accepting a ceiling — I've been circling these for two years without committing, and that indecision is itself a decision I keep making by default.
Consistency of income. Better than year one, still lumpy. A good quarter and a bad quarter can differ by a factor I'd rather not print.
Working alone. Five years in, the absence of colleagues is the cost I've adapted to rather than fixed. The MBA cohort helped enormously for two years, and I underestimated how much I'd miss it afterwards.
Would I do it again
Yes, and not with the confidence that implies.
Independence suited me more than I expected — the autonomy is real, the work is more interesting, and the relationship between effort and outcome is clearer than it ever was in a job. But five years is also long enough to know how much of this was timing, market conditions, and a handful of people who vouched for me before they had much reason to.
That last part isn't false modesty. It's the most reliable finding in five years of records: the work matters, and who happens to see it matters roughly as much.
Hilal Tasdan
B2B SaaS Growth Marketing Consultant & Fractional CMO. Partner in Growth.