Why belief, not a marketing system, is the real constraint on your practice

Most experienced professionals who can't grow a consulting practice assume they have a marketing problem. Michael Zipursky's evidence points somewhere else.

Across 1300 coaching engagements at Consulting Success, over 75 industries and 17 years, the pattern he keeps meeting is that the real constraint is rarely a missing tactic.

It's what an experienced professional believes about their own worth, about promoting their work, and about what clients actually need. This piece is about that constraint, and why the way through it is a different kind of conversation rather than a better funnel.

The block is rarely the marketing

When a practice isn't growing, the instinct is to reach for a tool. A new website, a sharper message, another channel. Zipursky's work with early-stage consultants suggests the tool is seldom the thing that's stuck.

They generally are not very clear about who their ideal client actually is, he told me. They're communicating what they think the market wants to hear, but it's actually not what the market wants to hear.

That's a diagnosis to think about, because it moves the problem upstream. The single thing holding a practice back is usually one constraint, and most of us misread which one it is. We treat it as marketing when it's actually positioning, or treat it as positioning when it's actually a belief about our own value that we haven't examined. Fix the wrong one and the effort disappears. Name the real one and a lot of the busywork falls away.

Why capable people stay quiet

There's a particular discomfort that arrives when you leave an organisation. Inside a company, the thing being sold is the company. On your own, the thing being offered is you, and a lot of experienced people were taught that promoting yourself is not something you do.

Zipursky puts the reframe like this:

Look at things like marketing and promotion as not something that you do to somebody, but something that you do for somebody. If you feel confident that you can create value and help people solve problems, you're actually doing a disservice to the people you could help by staying quiet.

We'd add the harder half of the problem, which is that the discomfort is not only about self-promotion. It's about articulation. After decades of work, many people still struggle to put words to what they actually do for a client, the reframing question they ask, the pattern they catch, the two problems the client thought were separate that turn out to be one. That's the recognition problem, and it's where the work of positioning a practice really starts.

Conversations are the practice, not the funnel

Long before Consulting Success, Zipursky was a young Canadian in Osaka trying to reach companies that had no reason to take his call. What worked was not a campaign. He sent twenty or thirty cold emails to design and branding firms, two or three replied, and one of them, a man named Shinsaku, became a friend.

He introduced me to another person. That person introduced me to somebody else. And that's relationships. It was all based on conversations.

He kept the idea in the open. There's a Japanese word, kankei, that means relationship, and Zipursky and his cousin liked it enough to name an early company after it. The point for an independent practice is not the anecdote, it's the mechanism. Clients come from people who already know you, then from the people those people introduce. A practice is built one conversation at a time, and the marketing engine is what you add later to make the conversations more regular, not the thing that starts them.

Imperfect action beats a finished website

Here's the trap that catches thoughtful people. Building feels productive. You can shape a website, a plan, a set of materials, entirely on your own, with no one to tell you it's wrong. So that's where the hours go.

Imperfect action is much more powerful than perfect inaction, Zipursky said. So much of what leads to inaction is the concern of what if, and that's based on what you don't know. The way you find out whether any of it works is to put it to the marketplace and start having conversations. You need to get out of the building. He names the sting directly: Productive does not equal effective.

He also names something most of us have watched happen. People with fewer credentials, none of the letters after the name, often build more than people who have all of them.

It's because they take a lot more action. They know they don't know everything, but they know they'll learn a lot more by getting out there and having conversations. For an experienced professional who has spent a career being the most prepared person in the room, that's an uncomfortable and useful thing to hear.

What only you can do, and what a coach is for

There's a part of the work no one can take from you. Knowing which of the options in front of a client is the one worth taking, because you've watched similar calls play out before, is the thing they're paying for. It's also the thing that's hardest to hand off, and it should be. Around it, though, sits a set of things that other people can carry, and one of them is your own learning.

Zipursky is blunt about this, and it costs him nothing to admit it:

We eat our own dog food. We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million at this point, on our own coaches and programs, because there's always more to learn. His test for a client is simple. Find someone at the top of any field who got there without a coach, a mentor, or someone who had already walked the path. They're very hard to find.

I made a decision of my own after this conversation, and after talking with the consultant Melisa Liberman. I took coaching off my website, because it isn't the work I want to do. What I won't do is work with someone who has no coach at all.

When I left teaching I had no idea about business, and I had the luck of working alongside a former Hewlett-Packard marketing manager for twenty years who taught me the frameworks until they were second nature. That grounding is what lets a partnership start in the middle of the conversation rather than at the beginning. A coach or an experienced partner is not an extra. For an independent professional, it's part of the structure that holds the practice up.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn't

Zipursky isn't cautious about AI.

AI is not going to replace consulting, he said. AI will replace the consultants who don't use AI. For the ones who know how to use it well, it's amplifying their ability. 

His firm runs training on it and builds tools around it, and he pushes clients to look at it from three sides: how it can grow the practice, how it can run the practice, and what it means for the clients they serve.

The last of those is where an experienced professional earns their place. AI is very good at producing options quickly. What it can't do is tell a specific client which option is right for their situation, with what they stand to lose in view and what worked the last three times a similar call came up. That discernment under abundance is the part that appreciates as everything around it gets cheaper. Used well, AI clears the routine work so there's more room for it. Used carelessly, it quietly erodes the very reading of a situation it depends on.

The one move this week

If the argument holds, the next step isn't a project. It's a conversation. Pick one person who already knows your work, and have a real conversation with them this week, the kind where you ask what they're wrestling with and listen rather than pitch. That single act does more than another month of building, and it's the honest test of whether the block was ever really the marketing.

If this way of thinking about an independent practice is useful, The Wisepreneur newsletter carries one idea like it each week, written for experienced professionals building practice on their own terms. You can read the full conversation with Michael Zipursky on the Wisepreneurs Podcast.

References

Michael Zipursky - Wisepreneurs Podcast, episode 86 (March 2026). Co-founder of Consulting Success, who has coached more than 1,300 consulting businesses across 75 industries. His observation that the constraint on growth is rarely tactical, and his concepts of kankei and imperfect action, ground this article's central argument.

Michael Zipursky Consulting Success: Why Conversations Beat Marketing Systems for Consultants

Melisa Liberman - Wisepreneurs Podcast, business development for experienced consultants. Her practice of hiring coaches across several areas of her own business informed the section on coaching as infrastructure.
Melisa Liberman Business Development: Building a Sustainable Consulting Practice Without Employees

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