Why being good at the work does not fill the pipeline: the four areas of a consultancy

Four clients and no visibility into next quarter

The consultant I worked with this week has everything the textbooks say you need, except predictable revenue. She is a former newspaper editor who recently set up her own communications consultancy after returning to Malaysia, her first time building a business as her main occupation. She already holds four regional clients, one in India, one in Cambodia and two at home.

All four are projects. She is trying to convert one into a retainer without knowing whether the client will accept, which means her income visibility runs a few weeks deep. Nothing in that problem is about the quality of her work, which is what makes it hard to see.

The four areas a consultancy runs on, and why the gap hides

A consultancy of any size runs on four areas of work, and most owners spend nearly all their time in just one of them. Here is the full set, with where she stood on each.

A newsroom career builds the scarce skills: sharpening a story, translating complicated material, knowing what a journalist will actually run. It doesn't build any of the commercial ones, because a newsroom (usually) never asks its journalists to drive sales. The desk supplies the work, and editors are promoted for judgment, never for prospecting.

The gap hides because the strong area keeps rewarding her. Client servicing produces praise, referrals and renewals, so every free hour flows back into the area she has already mastered, and the empty areas stay empty. Your firm runs the same loop: the strongest area generates the most demands on your time, so it keeps getting the time.

Her earlier outreach shows how an empty marketing area bites. She had written to prospects in Thailand and heard nothing back, which reads as rejection but is really a targeting error. Her bylines, market knowledge and professional story are credible in Malaysia first, and a buyer who has never read her work is being asked to take her on faith.

Filling the empty areas: four steps in a fixed order

The rebuild ran as four steps, in this order, because outreach built on weak positioning wastes prospects you only get to approach once. Step one fills the marketing area. The other three build business development.

Step one, position. One person cannot be a full-service agency, so she does not claim to be. The offer is senior editorial and media relations support built on the one thing a good copywriter cannot copy: she knows how a journalist reads a pitch, because she was the journalist reading it.

Step two, target. Established PR and public affairs agencies in Malaysia first, then Singapore. Agencies before direct corporate clients, because an agency already knows what a former journalist is worth and can engage a freelancer this month, while a corporation routes a small consultancy through procurement.

Government-linked companies, which she asked about, are better reached as the writing partner of an agency that already holds the relationship than through direct outreach. And size runs against instinct: established PR firms usually understand what external expertise is for, while the smallest ones keep everything in-house despite the strain.

Step three, cadence. Ten to fifteen customised emails a week from two fixed appointments in the calendar. Tuesday is for new prospects: research the firms worth writing to, then send the first touches. Thursday is for everyone already in play: value-touch follow-ups to the prospects who have not answered, sent on a set cadence, then the week's numbers updated.

The two appointments are named in the calendar because that is what turns advice into habit. A lull in outreach surfaces as an income hole roughly two months later, long after cause and effect have separated. The famine is caused during the feast.

Step four, record. One spreadsheet, where every prospect carries a status, a next action and a date. Follow-ups matter as much as new names, because the agency with no need in September may lose a senior writer in January, and the consultant still in polite contact gets the call. The record is also what makes Thursday's numbers honest.

What the numbers are for

Those numbers start as working assumptions rather than promises. Roughly ten customised emails produce one or two replies. Roughly ten real conversations produce one client. Winning one client can therefore take one hundred to one hundred and fifty approaches, and the point of the Thursday numbers is to replace those assumptions with her own rates.

The destination is recurring revenue underneath the project work. Even a modest agency retainer, with the scope tightly defined, changes the shape of a year once it repeats across a few clients.

The numbers also protect her morale. Silence, declines and the occasional rude reply are part of the arithmetic, so a quiet fortnight is expected behaviour of the funnel, never proof the service lacks value.

Score your own firm on the four areas

Run the four areas on your own operation this week, whether you are one person or forty. Client servicing, business development, marketing and branding, learning and development: name the strongest, then name the one nobody has touched this quarter.

The empty area is where next quarter's problem is already forming. The two-month lag means you will not feel it yet, which is why the check is worth thirty minutes this week.

Gabriel Tan is the founder of Mekong Bridge Advisory, the lean consultancy for PR and IR agencies.

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