How to Scale Your Consulting Business Without Burning Out

Scaling your consulting business is an exciting yet challenging journey. While growth brings new opportunities, it can also lead to burnout if not managed carefully. To help you navigate this process and ensure you’re expanding your business in a sustainable way, I've put together some practical strategies. From effective time management to outsourcing tasks and refining your service offerings, these tips will help you grow your consultancy without sacrificing your well-being. 

Block out time in your diary to work on the business 

First things first, you’ll need to start by blocking out time in your diary to make a plan for your business and then implement the actions. 

A one hour block each day before you start working through client tasks is ideal, as it’s enough time to get your head down and focus on your plan. 

Stop here, go to your calendar, and create a recurring time block, so you can take that task of your list. This can be a daily time block, or a dedicated time slot on a day you prefer. 

Gain time back by outsourcing or automating. 

The next step would be to outsource or automate tasks in your business that don’t require your immediate input, so we can not only gain back time but start to expand too.  

Here’s an example of some of the roles you could start to outsource. 

Bookkeeping – you’ll most likely already have an accountant, so why not start outsourcing your bookkeeping too? This may only take a few hours each month, but that’s valuable time you could use to grow your business. 

Virtual Assistant/PA Services – whilst VA’s provide various services, a popular service that we provide is PA Services. This is not only an enormous time-saver, but also a great stress reliever too – not having to spend hours organising appointments or worry that you’ve missed a client’s email. 

Business Manager – a business manager often runs the day-to-day operation of your business, overseeing the team, client management, finances, HR etc and is ideal for consultants looking to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.  

If you’re unsure if this is needed right now, I have another task for you. Track your time for a month, (click here for my Clockify tutorial), and see how much time you spend on tasks like managing your diary, checking your emails, invoicing etc. Total up your hours and see how much money you're spending on these unbillable tasks. 

Make sure you have efficient business management systems in place before you begin scaling. It doesn't have to be overly complex - for example, I rave about Clickup as my go-to daily driver. 

Here are 5 free systems you can implement today: 

• Outlook or Google Calendar – Diary Management 

• Calendly - Appointment Scheduler 

• Zoho Invoicing – Invoicing System 

• Trello – Kanban style, Project Management System 

• ClickUp - Project Management System 

I delve in deeper to these apps in my LinkedIn newsletter here: 

5 Free Tools You Need to Launch and Grow Your Business 

I also frequently use AI, and was particularly impressed with Woodpecker and Fathom, AI notetaking apps that can be synced to Zoom and other video conferencing apps to take notes of your meetings, before preparing a written summary for you.  

Review your services 

Review your services: How many services do you currently offer? Will your current offering help your business to move forward and expand? Do they all require you to be there? 

For example, if you regularly sell 90-minute 1-1 coaching sessions, where the content and structure are the same for every session, why not turn this into an online coaching course instead? This way, new clients can enrol onto a training platform, where they’ll have access to your knowledge and skills (and you via email) whilst you work on your other services. You can then refresh your course content as and when, and also increase your rates for those who opt for further support from 1-1 coaching sessions.