How to Start a Consulting Business with No Money

Starting a consulting business is a shock—especially if you’ve spent the last 20 years believing the lie that your job is secure if you work hard, deliver results, and don’t show up to work drunk. When you’re self-employed, you no longer have the false sense of security that comes from someone else’s payroll—and now you’re staring down 1,937 tiny decisions that directly affect your income with no way to know what’s right.

Being an independent consultant means being comfortable with uncertainty. 

Some months you’ll bring in $41,783. Other months you’ll bring in zero—and still have to pay all those little recurring charges for your accounting software, website, email provider, CRM, and that cute little calendar booking app that inexplicably costs more per month than Microsoft Office.

But what if you’re starting out and you have no money? Do you need to sell your bitcoin or borrow from grandma so you can:

• Form a LLC to protect your personal assets?
• Subscribe to an email marketing platform and set up an email list you’re not sure anyone will subscribe to?
• Hire a designer to create a logo that doesn’t look like it came from a free WordPress theme?
• Hire a designer to build you a website that doesn’t look like a Geocities page from 1997?
• Subscribe to a web hosting platform so you can serve that delicious new site?
• Subscribe to accounting software to track all these tax-deductible expenses?
• Subscribe to Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace so you can do client work…when it comes?

Eventually, yes, you’ll need all those things. And it feels productive to get your LLC certificate or configure your CRM. But in reality, this set-up and configuration just offers another false sense of security: mistaking busyness for momentum.

So if you’re starting a consulting business—especially without an initial investment—you need to focus on the essential activities to onboard your first client and get paid.

These steps are:

1. Create an offer. You need something to sell. It’s possible to find work as a "handyman" consultant, but everything becomes simpler when you design an offer—one repeatable service to consistently provide value for clients. What is the problem you solve? What do you do to solve it? What do they get at the end? How much does it cost?
2. Have 1-to-1 conversations with people about your offer. Make a list of 100 people—former coworkers, LinkedIn contacts, other consultants—who could become your clients or refer you to them. Meet with them. Learn about their problems. Share your offer. Get feedback. If no one buys it, go back to step 1 and create a new offer based on what you’ve learned.
3. Get money up-front. Ask for half of your project fee before you begin, or if you must bill by the hour, ask for a deposit. Nothing’s worse than doing the work and waiting 60 days to get paid for it. Pro tip: Clients take you more seriously when you ask for money up front.

Now you’ve got some cash to finally invest in the essentials—like your LLC, accounting software, and yes, that absurdly overpriced calendar app.