An independent consultant (IC) is just that; a one-off on his own. The list of the disadvantages of being an independent consultant always feels phenomenal if you are one of the ordinary rank-and-file who has to earn enough money to fund the work of the business (phone bills, stationery, postage, motor car bills) and support some kind of a family.

There is an endless challenge of being expected to keep coming up with new ideas, a new initiative, for achieving this or that breakthrough in promotion or business presentation or operating economies. You are often expected to know everything in your niche, or at least where and how you can research it. Thank goodness for the Internet and the likes of Google – except you must always keep in the back of your mind the likelihood that at least two of the bosses have young children who have already found for their father at least three definitive websites that you might have missed, and they will be waiting to trap you in the boardroom. Not always out of any intended personal malice I might add.

The big challenge can be the work-load. If successful, it can be busy and intense. You and your consulting business survive in the long term by taking on numerous clients at any one time, on the basis that if you lose one client you still have enough income to avoid going bust.

However as an independent consultant you cannot tell any of your clients that they will have to be priority two or three for your time and attention. They will all expect to be priority one – your most important client.

Hence working into the night and all through every weekend can quickly become the norm, And the very worst nightmare is the client who, on Wednesday, finally remembers to tell you that he and all his directors and managers will be going away on Friday night to stay at a seaside hotel for a two-day intensive review of company practice and „hope“ you will be able to be with them. And you had been planning to do so many other important things.

It is even likely that none of them are even aware of the others for whom you are working and, generally speaking, it is best kept that way.

You might be in a busy city, where there are many poential clients, and also probably many consultants competing for their business. But if you are in a small-town environment. where perhaps you get a better quality of life, you could be in trouble if Client A asks you to come to an important meeting to discuss how to combat the bright new initiatives that have been launched by rival Company B, completely unaware that Company B is indeed another one of your clients and his bright new initiative is part of a business plan which you had developed for them, and now you are under orders to find a way to sabotage it.

It is always good to read about Max Clifford and his adept handling of one of his high-profile celebrity cases for which he is getting a celebrity-level fee that will see him ‚OK at the bank‘ for some while to come. But for the ordinary independent consultant it can often feel there are more disadvantages to being an independent consultant than there are advantages.