As a consultancy founder, you naturally create valuable thinking.

You develop a better way to explain the client's problem, refine a workshop after running it several times, or build a process that makes an engagement run more smoothly.

Over time, solo and boutique consultancies can accumulate a surprising number of these assets.

The problem is that we tend to give far more attention to creating them than we do to leveraging them.

Creation gets our attention

Creating something new feels productive, whether it's a problem to solve, something to improve or an idea you want to develop. You put your experience and attention into it, create something useful and then apply it.

Once it has done its job, your attention naturally moves to whatever comes next. And when you’re running a consultancy, there is always something else competing for your attention.

It creates an interesting pattern.

You can become very good at continually adding assets to your consultancy without ever getting the full value from the ones you already have.

Addition isn’t leverage

Moving from client engagement to client engagement, you naturally create new thinking and ways of working. That makes your consultancy richer in intellectual property and experience.

But creating another asset is still addition.

Leverage begins when an existing asset starts creating more value than it did originally, either by becoming more valuable itself or by increasing the value of something else.

Leverage works in two directions

Some assets become more valuable through continued use. Frameworks improve each time they are applied in a slightly different situation. Relationships deepen through repeated valuable interactions. Reputations strengthen as more evidence accumulates behind them, and processes become easier to use as you notice and remove the friction.

The original asset hasn’t fundamentally changed, but its value has.

What you created last year can be more valuable this year because it has had another year of use, learning and refinement.

Some assets can also increase the value of other assets.

Take a new framework you develop that improves the quality of your delivery. It then gives you something distinctive to write about that strengthens your reputation for understanding a particular problem.

Your reputation makes the next sales conversation easier, and the client you win produces a case study which adds proof to the original idea.

These assets don’t have to operate independently. Used together, they can make each other more valuable. The more deliberately you connect them, the greater the leverage becomes.

This matters even more when your consultancy depends on you

There is a limit to what you can keep adding. Continually creating becomes its own demand on your attention.

Leverage offers a different route.

Instead of asking what else you need to create, you can start by looking at what you have already built and where it could provide more value for you.

The leverage question

When you’ve created an asset, does it become more valuable over time? And where possible, does it increase the value of the other assets around it?

Because the real leverage in a founder-dependent consultancy isn’t simply having more assets.

It’s getting more value from the ones you already have.