GoKawiilThis story appears in the July 2026 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
When my third consulting client paid me $12,250 for a three-page document, I almost felt guilty taking the money.
It was a vendor recommendation list for a seed-stage fintech startup — something I could produce in a few hours after years of working at Stripe, Plaid, Gusto, and Mercury. But this client wasn’t paying for how long it took me to create this particular document. They were paying for the decade of expertise I’d developed as a risk and compliance leader at some of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. My judgment would help them skip months of research and costly mistakes in a space they didn’t understand.
In two years, working an average of three days a week, I’ve built a $2 million consulting business. But my path was far from a straight shot. I sent hundreds of cold emails without getting a single lead in the first three months. It took me four months to figure out my pricing.
Early on, I desperately wished there was a roadmap to follow. Now, I feel equipped to create one for others. So here’s the six-week plan I wish someone had given me.
Week 1: Stop selling everything you know.
When I started my company in October 2023, I was pitching all of it: a decade-plus of experience across compliance, risk, and fintech operations, expertise in anti-money laundering, the Bank Secrecy Act, fraud, credit risk, customer support, growth strategies, automating operations. Nobody knew what to do with me.
The shift came when I got specific. The consulting world rewards specialists, not generalists. So I forced myself to answer one question: What’s the single problem I’ve solved more times than most people on the planet?
I challenged myself to write the answer as a single sentence. Here’s what I put in my notebook: “I help early-stage fintech companies navigate risk and compliance challenges before they scale, so they can avoid the costly mistakes I’ve seen derail companies at this stage.”
The sentence didn’t need to be perfect. But it needed to be specific enough that someone could immediately know whether they needed me. And it would become the foundation for everything else. If you want to do this for your own business, follow my simple formula: “I help [type of company] solve [specific problem] over [timeframe].”
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