Going solo in HR consultancy: why I stopped trying to do it all alone

When I left employment and set up my own HR consultancy, I honestly believed I could do the whole thing on my own. Over ten years scaling People functions, a head full of employment law, a decent track record behind me. How hard could it be?

Reader, I was wrong.

Not about the work. The work I love, and I know it well. What caught me out was everything around the work. Going out on your own as an HR consultant is a strange kind of freedom. No manager, no team, no one to turn to when a case lands on your desk that you have never seen before. It is just you, your laptop, and a client who assumes you have the answer to everything. It also means it is up to you to feed yourself in more ways than one. If you do not go and get the work, you do not make any money.

The part nobody warns you about

That is one of the things nobody tells you about running an HR consultancy on your own: the breadth, and the race for clients, is relentless. One day it is a tricky redundancy, the next a TUPE question, then a grievance that does not fit any template, then a piece of advice that hinges on whether the startup gets their Series B on time. You need to get all of it exactly right while also finding the next client, writing the proposal, and keeping your own lights on. Nobody hands you work when you go solo. You are expected to be current on all of it, all at once, with no one behind you to sanity-check your thinking.

For a while I told myself that asking for help would look like I did not know my job. That is the trap. The truth is the opposite. The best People professionals I know are not the ones who carry every answer in their own head. They are the ones who know where to go to find it, and who to ask.

So I stopped trying to be an island.

What actually changed

One of the things that shifted it for me was joining the HR Inner Circle. It is a community of HR professionals who genuinely help each other, led by employment law barrister Daniel Barnett, with lawyers you can put a live question to, a library of templates and guidance, and a group of peers who have almost certainly handled the very thing you are wrestling with this week. When a knotty question comes in, I am no longer working it out entirely alone. I have somewhere to test my thinking before it reaches a client.

That has made me a better consultant, not a lesser one. My clients get more considered advice, and they get it faster, because I am not the only brain on the problem.

Going solo does not mean going it alone

If you are building your own HR consultancy, or thinking about it, here is what I would tell my earlier self. Going solo does not mean going it alone. The strongest thing you can do for your clients is to plug yourself into a network that keeps you sharp, current and supported. Independence and isolation are not the same thing, and the day I understood that is the day the work got easier.

My goal is always to make myself redundant inside the companies I work with as a fractional People leader. I just stopped trying to be a one-woman band behind the scenes. If I do not know something, I admit I do not know it!

If you are a founder or a growing business that needs senior People support without a full-time hire, that is what I do. And if you are a fellow HR consultant still trying to carry it all on your own: you do not have to.