She had spent fourteen years solving problems that nobody else in the room knew how to frame, let alone fix. Planning permissions that had stalled for months. Stakeholder relationships had fractured. Timelines that had become politically impossible. She walked into rooms, assessed the situation in under ten minutes, and produced a path forward that others took credit for.
When she left, her employer replaced her with two people. Neither of them could do what she did.
She spent the first three months of her post-corporate life wondering what to charge and to whom to charge it. She knew her expertise was real. She had no idea how to turn it into an offer that someone could buy.
This article is for her. And for everyone who recognises that story.
The problem is not your expertise. It is the translation.
The Excellence Tax research found that 86% of Black professionals always or often feel they must work harder than colleagues to be seen as equally competent. For years, you have delivered at a level that was deemed adequate. You have been overqualified for roles you were told you should be grateful for. You have produced results that were attributed to teams, to organisations, to leaders who had less to do with them than you did.
All of that expertise is real. All of that capability is yours. The problem is not that you lack what it takes to build a consulting business. The problem is that corporate environments are designed to extract your expertise without packaging it in a way that belongs to you.
When you leave, you take the expertise, but you do not automatically take the package. Building the package is the work.
One respondent in the Cost of Black Excellence research, an education director who had left corporate employment and started her own practice, described the realisation this way:
“We are conditioned from birth that we are going to have to work twice as hard in order to be recognised. Not realising that busyness does not equal success, effectiveness, and impact do. The twice-as-hard conditioning sets us up to not leverage our actual brilliance.”
Your consulting offer is not about working twice as hard. It is about finally letting your actual brilliance be the product.
What a consulting offer actually is
Before building one, it helps to be precise about what a consulting offer is and what it is not.
A consulting offer is a defined, packaged solution to a specific problem that a specific type of client pays you to solve. It has four components: a clear problem, a clear outcome, a clear format, and a clear price. When all four are present, someone can read a description of your offer and immediately know whether it is for them.
Most professionals leaving corporate skip two or three of those four components without realising it. They know they want to consult.
They know their area. They have no idea how to describe the specific problem they solve, the specific outcome the client receives, or what any of it should cost. So they either price too low, describe too vaguely, or build something too broad to communicate clearly.
The rest of this article walks through each component and how to build it from what you already know.
Step 1: Name the problem you actually solve
This is the step that stops most people cold, because corporate environments train you to describe what you do by your function or your title rather than by the problem you solve.
You are not a project manager. You are not a DEI lead. You are not a finance director. Those are roles. Consulting clients do not buy roles. They buy solutions to problems that are costing them something significant.
The question to ask yourself is: what was the specific, recurring problem that kept landing on my desk because nobody else could handle it?
Not your full job description. Not everything you were responsible for. The specific thing that people came to you for when the stakes were high. The conversation that started with someone saying, “I need your help with this because…”
That problem is the foundation of your offer.
Some examples of how this translation works in practice:
A HR director who spent ten years navigating complex disciplinary processes might translate that into: “I help organisations manage high-risk employment disputes without triggering tribunals or reputational damage.”
A communications manager who built stakeholder relationships in hostile policy environments might translate that into: “I help public sector organisations build community trust in projects that communities have historically resisted.”
A senior social worker who built trauma-informed practice frameworks might translate that into: “I help local authorities design child protection systems that reduce caseworker burnout and improve family outcomes.”
None of those descriptions mention the job title. All of them name a specific problem that a specific type of organisation has and will pay to solve.
Write down the problem you solve in one sentence. It does not need to be perfect. It needs to be specific. If it is still describing your function rather than the problem, keep going.
Step 2: Define the outcome, not the process
Once you know the problem, the instinct is to describe what you will do to solve it. The number of sessions. The workshops you will deliver. The documents you will produce. The methodology you will apply.
Resist that instinct.
Clients do not buy your process. They buy the result your process produces. When someone pays a consultant, they are paying to arrive at a different place from where they are now. The outcome is what they are buying. The process is what you use to get them there.
This distinction matters for two reasons. First, it changes how you communicate your offer, making it immediately legible to a potential client. Second, it changes how you price it. Process-based pricing anchors your fee to your time. Outcome-based pricing anchors your fee to the value of the result. One produces day rates. The other produces value-based pricing that is significantly more lucrative.
Ask yourself: What is the client’s situation six weeks, three months, or six months after working with me? What is different? What can they do that they could not do before? What problem no longer exists?
Write that down as specifically as you can. If your outcome statement could apply to any consultant in any field, it is not specific enough.
“Your organisation will be in a better position” is not an outcome. “Your safeguarding framework will meet CQC inspection standards without requiring a team restructure” is an outcome.
Step 3: Choose a format that matches what you are selling
The format of your offer is how the client receives your expertise. There are several main formats available to consultants, and the right one depends on the nature of the problem you solve and the type of client you work with.
Retained advisory — you are available to the client on an ongoing basis, typically monthly, for a fixed fee. This works when the client needs access to your thinking and judgment regularly, rather than a defined deliverable. It suits senior professionals whose value lies in their perspective and network as much as in their output.
Project-based consulting — you are engaged to solve a specific problem or deliver a specific outcome over a defined period. This works when there is a clear beginning and end to the engagement, a tangible deliverable, and a client who can define what done looks like.
Training and workshops — you deliver your expertise in a facilitated format to a group. This works when the problem is systemic across a team or organisation rather than confined to a specific project, and when the solution is knowledge and skill transfer rather than direct delivery.
Coaching or advisory for individuals — you work one-to-one with a professional to help them navigate a specific challenge or develop a specific capability. This works when your expertise is most valuable at the individual level rather than the organisational level.
Productised consulting — you package a specific, repeatable process into a fixed-scope, fixed-price offer that is delivered the same way each time. This works when the problem you solve is consistent enough across clients that the same approach works each time, and it scales significantly better than bespoke project work.
Most professionals starting out in consulting choose project-based work or retained advisory because it mirrors what they are used to from employment. Both are strong starting points. The format you choose should match the nature of your expertise and the type of client who has the problem.
Step 4: Identify who specifically has this problem and can pay for the solution
Your ideal client is not “organisations,” “businesses,” or “the public sector.” Those are categories too broad to market to, position for, or reach effectively.
Your ideal client is specific. They have a specific problem, a specific level of seniority, a specific type of organisation, and a specific set of circumstances that make solving the problem urgent for them right now.
The Excellence Tax research found that one of the most consistent barriers Black professionals face when translating corporate expertise into consulting is not knowing how to make what they do visible to the people who need it. The expertise is clear. The client is not.
To identify your specific client, work through three questions.
Who was the person who brought problems to you in the corporate world? Not your manager. The person whose problem you were actually solving. What was their title, their level, their organisation type, their budget responsibility? That person is your starting point.
What was happening in their world that made your involvement necessary? What was the pressure, the deadline, the risk, the stakeholder relationship, the regulatory requirement that created the need for your expertise? That context is what you need to name in your marketing.
Who has that same problem in the market right now and has the budget to pay a consultant to solve it?
This might be the same type of organisation you came from. It might be a sector adjacent to your own. It might be organisations in a sector that is just beginning to face a challenge your sector has been navigating for years.
When you can describe your ideal client in one paragraph, including their role, their organisation type, the problem they have, and what solving it would mean for them, you have something specific enough to market and sell.
Step 5: Price it based on value, not your day rate
This is where most professionals leaving corporate significantly undercharge, and it is worth being direct about why.
Years of being assessed against a salary band that was determined by someone else, in an organisation that benefited more from your work than you did, does not give you an accurate read of what your expertise is worth in the open market. The salary you received was not the value of your contribution. It was the minimum the organisation could pay you whilst retaining you. Those are not the same number.
When you build a consulting offer, you price based on the value the client receives from the outcome, not on the time it takes you to produce it. A consultant who helps an organisation avoid a £200,000 employment tribunal is not worth £500 per day. A consultant who helps a housing association secure planning approval for a stalled £50 million development is not worth £800 per day. The value of the outcome determines the price. Your time is the vehicle, not the product.
One respondent in the Excellence Tax research, a finance professional who had left a senior role, named the dynamic plainly:
“We often have to choose our well-being over continuing in roles we are overqualified for due to the harm and abuse we encounter when people inevitably become threatened by our brilliance in the workplace.”
You were overqualified and undercompensated in employment. Do not replicate that structure in your own business.
A starting framework for pricing: identify what the problem costs the client if it remains unsolved. The lost revenue, the regulatory risk, the reputational damage, the staff attrition, and the delayed project. Your fee should be a fraction of that cost, one that the client readily accepts, because the alternative is significantly more expensive. An unsolved problem that costs £500,000 can support a consulting fee of £50,000. An unsolved problem that costs £50,000 can support a fee of £10,000 to £15,000.
If you do not yet have enough data on what your clients will pay, start at the top of what feels uncomfortable and work from there. The instinct to price low is trained into Black professionals by corporate environments that systematically undervalued their contribution. Name that dynamic and move past it.
Step 6: Write your offer description
Once you have all four components, you can write a clear, specific description of your offer that a potential client can read and immediately understand.
The structure is straightforward:
Who you work with — the specific type of client.
The problem they have — what is costing them, what is not working, what they need to solve.
What you do — the format and approach at a high level, without jargon or methodology names.
What they leave with — the specific outcome.
What it costs — the price or a price range.
Here is an example of that structure applied:
I work with housing associations and local authorities who are under pressure to improve their safeguarding practice ahead of regulatory inspection, but do not have the internal capacity to lead the review. Over twelve weeks, I conduct a full safeguarding audit, work with your leadership team to redesign the framework, and deliver a practice improvement plan that your team can implement and sustain. By the end of the engagement, you will have an inspection-ready safeguarding framework and a leadership team that knows how to maintain it. The investment for this programme is £18,000, payable in three monthly instalments.
That description is six sentences. It contains a specific client, a specific problem, a specific format, a specific outcome, and a specific price. A housing association safeguarding director reading it either immediately sees themselves in it or immediately knows it is not for them. Both outcomes are good. Vague offers waste everyone’s time. Specific offers convert.
What stops people at this stage
Two things consistently prevent professionals from completing this process and getting to a finished offer.
The first is the belief that their expertise is not specific enough, or not expert enough, or too obvious to charge for. This is the Excellence Tax at work in a new context. Years of having your contribution minimised, your ideas attributed elsewhere, and your competence questioned before you open your mouth produce a distorted reading of what you actually know and what it is worth. The test is not whether you believe your expertise is valuable. The test is whether clients will pay for the outcome it produces. They will, more readily than you think, once the offer is specific enough for them to understand what they are buying.
The second is the fear of getting it wrong. Of pricing incorrectly, positioning poorly, attracting the wrong client, or building something that does not work. These are real risks, and they are also the cost of building something. The offer you build today will not be the offer you have in twelve months. It will evolve with feedback from real clients, real conversations, and real market signals. The goal at this stage is not a perfect offer. It is a specific enough offer to start a real conversation with a potential client.
The next step
If you have worked through the six steps in this article, you have the foundation of a consulting offer. A specific problem, a specific outcome, a format, a client profile, a price, and a description. That is further than most people get.
The next step is to take that offer into a real conversation. Not a pitch. A conversation with someone in your network who has the problem you solve, to test whether your description of the problem resonates, whether the outcome is something they would value, and whether the price is in a range they could consider.
That conversation will teach you more about your offer than any amount of refinement done in private.
If you want a structured environment to build, test, and refine your offer alongside a cohort of Black professionals doing the same work, the Corporate Exodus Programme Collective was built for exactly this stage. Six weeks. A peer cohort. Offer design, financial planning, positioning, and a complete 90-day plan by week six.
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Apply for the Corporate Exodus Programme →
The Cost of Black Excellence research is based on survey data from 1,039 Black professionals across the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. All respondent testimony is anonymised and attributed only by industry and level. The Excellence Tax™ is a registered trademark of The Cost of Black Excellence Research Institute.
Natasha Williams