Our mission:
We help professionals
change the fortunes of organizations and their own careers
by building thriving consulting practices.
Everything we do is about helping you plan and launch your practice and accelerate it to the next level of business success.
If you’re brand-new to consulting, we’ll use our 40+ years of experience (plus tons of research) to help you get a head start on setting up your consulting practice and ensuring that your first years are successful.
If you’ve been consulting for a while, we’ll help you explore how to propel your practice to a new level of success.
Where your consulting path takes you is up to you, but we’re here to get you started and keep you going. To get launched and accelerate your journey!
Let’s get started!
Who’s the “we” behind Going Solo, Going Big?
SUSAN SCHAEFER
Resource Partners, LLC
I spent my pre-consulting career in higher education and always had an interest in the corporate sector. So in 2001, I began my consulting adventure, excited to combine my interests by launching a business and serving nonprofits.
Not coincidentally, this new phase began soon after the birth of my first son. It was not easy in those early days. But, with my virtual colleagues, phone and computer, it was liberating to “fire” two former associates—long commute and regular travel.
It has been a fantastic adventure, with all of the promised flexibility and freedoms. It has also been a career path with less of a roadmap than I expected. So I vowed early on that, if I hung on for a decade, I’d give back by helping fellow consultants propel their careers.
I spent that first ten years on a winding road of clarifying and re-clarifying my ideal client profile, scope of work, and vision for this very malleable profession. In addition to client work, I wrote and edited books, taught at the community and university level, and learned as much as I could about this field.
In 2011, the tenth anniversary of Resource Partners LLC, I began work on The Nonprofit Consulting Playbook. (Yes, we consultants tend to be very goal-oriented people!) That year began my formal entry into the complementary worlds of consulting and helping others consult well. Every day I do the latter teaches me more about my own work in the former.
Several years later, when Don learned about my interest in consulting to consultants (so to speak), he had already begun to develop an outline for a beginner’s workshop. That became the seed of our live—and now online—courses. His generosity and terrific insights are indicative of the growing Going Solo, Going Big community and continue to remind me that this field is full of fabulous people looking to help each other grow.
DON TEBBE
dontebbe.com
I launched my consulting career in 1993 after two and a half decades in the business, government, and nonprofit sectors. (Yup, I am that old. And darn proud of it.)
There are oh so many business-related skid marks on this crash test dummy that I’d like to help you avoid.
And so many wonderful consulting moments that I wish I could share, working with extraordinary people – opportunities to contribute, enough to feed my soul for eternity.
The opportunity to advise a presidential transition (okay, I’m bragging here) to helping many start-ups get off the ground and helping established organizations find their place in the sun (the real soul-feeding stuff).
I started consulting as a soloist, providing planning services. I soon discovered how to meld that with my previous life experience as a military recruiter to help organizations find a better, smarter way of managing turnover in their top leadership positions.
This became my work for the next two-plus decades, helping several hundred organizations manage turnover in their CEO position, writing a couple of books on the topic, and co-founding a consulting practice that my partner and I built into a seven-figure national practice.
Along the way, I discovered my inner geek and systematized our transition management process, making sure that we had from project beginning to end, all of the tools and practices in place to consistently deliver great service with multiple associates and varying clients involved.
I sold my interest in that business in 2013 to launch an encore career and give attention to a number of items on my “bucket list” that didn’t fit that business model, such as the body of work that eventually became Going Solo, Going Big, with Susan’s inspiration, guidance, and voice.