The most revealing question we ask when we start working with a consultancy founder is this: if you stepped away from all business development activity for three months, what would actually happen to new revenue?
Most founders pause before answering. Some give a version of “things would slow down a bit.” A few are more direct and say that new business would essentially stop. Either way, that answer tells us almost everything we need to know about the current state of the commercial function, and it’s a far more common situation than most founders are comfortable acknowledging.
Why founder dependency develops
Founder-dependent sales is rarely the result of a deliberate choice. It’s the natural consequence of how consultancies grow. The founder starts with their network, their reputation and their ability to open doors. They win the first clients, generate confidence in the model and hire people to deliver the work. Because they are, almost by definition, the most commercially effective person in the business at this stage, they stay close to sales for longer than is ultimately sustainable. There’s no obvious reason to change something that’s working, and the reorganisation required to change it would create short-term uncertainty in a function that currently feels stable.
The problem becomes visible when the founder wants to step back and finds there’s nothing beneath them to step back onto, or when a potential buyer starts asking uncomfortable questions about what happens to revenue generation when the founder’s involvement reduces. At that point, what looked like a strength, the founder’s commercial capability, is suddenly visible as a structural risk.
Documentation as the foundation
The starting point for building a sales function that operates independently is always documentation, because you cannot transfer or scale a process that exists only in one person’s head. The documentation doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to be honest and specific enough that someone new to the business could use it to have a credible commercial conversation.
That means writing down, in practical terms, how you identify and prioritise the right kind of prospects, what a strong first conversation covers and what you’re trying to establish in it, how you qualify an opportunity before investing time in a proposal, what your pipeline stages mean and what has to be true for a deal to move between them, how you structure and present proposals, how you handle the most common objections and concerns, and what follow-up looks like after a meeting. Most founders can answer all of these questions clearly when asked directly, because the knowledge is there. The work is externalising it: getting it out of their head and into a form that someone else can learn from and apply.
The sales playbook
The documentation described above is the raw material for a sales playbook, which is the operational guide to how your firm sells. It’s distinct from a credentials document or a capability overview; it’s a working tool for the people responsible for commercial conversations.
A good playbook covers your ideal client profile in real specificity: not just a broad sector description but the types of organisations, situations and triggers that make someone a genuinely strong prospect. It covers the messaging that opens conversations effectively and how that adapts for different contexts. It covers discovery: what questions to ask, what you’re listening for beneath the answers, and what patterns of response indicate a qualified opportunity versus a polite conversation going nowhere.
Crucially, a playbook needs to be a living document rather than a one-time effort. The best ones evolve as the team learns: when someone finds a more effective way to handle a particular objection, or identifies a new approach to opening conversations in a specific market, that learning goes in. The playbook reflects current practice rather than aspirational practice.
Hiring for sales: sequencing matters
One of the most consistent mistakes we see consultancies make is hiring a dedicated commercial person before they’ve built the infrastructure that person needs to succeed.
The pattern tends to go like this: the founder is too stretched to maintain business development activity at the required level, so they hire someone to take it on. The new hire is given a target, access to LinkedIn and a brief introduction to the firm, and told to get going. Six months later, results are limited, frustration has accumulated on both sides and the conclusion drawn is that “salespeople don’t work in consulting.”
The problem is rarely the person. It’s the sequencing. A commercial hire in a consultancy needs several things to be in place before they can be effective: a documented process to follow, an accurate and usable CRM, a clear definition of the ideal client, enough market positioning to have a credible opening conversation, and regular coaching and management from someone who understands the commercial function. Without those things, you’re not giving them a sales job. You’re giving them a blank canvas and expecting a masterpiece. Build the infrastructure first, then hire to run and develop it.
Coaching, accountability and the weekly rhythm
Even with the right infrastructure, a commercial function doesn’t sustain itself. It needs regular coaching and genuine accountability to keep performing at a high level. Coaching means investing time in one-to-one conversations about what’s working and what isn’t, listening to how people handle discovery conversations and giving honest, specific feedback, reviewing individual pipeline together and asking the right questions about how each opportunity is being managed.
This is a skill in itself, and one that founders sometimes underinvest in when they’re stretched across other priorities.
Accountability means clear expectations that are reviewed consistently. Business development targets that get set but never formally reviewed effectively don’t exist as targets; they’re aspirations. Pipeline that gets logged but never discussed in a group setting loses its function as a management tool. The weekly commercial review, kept short and focused on decisions rather than reporting, is what makes all of the infrastructure actually work in practice. It creates the expectation that things will be updated because they’re going to be looked at, and that creates the habits that produce reliable data over time.
What to do with this
The transition from founder-dependent commercial function to one that operates with genuine independence takes time, typically twelve to eighteen months when done properly.
The founder doesn’t disappear from the process overnight; rather, their role gradually shifts from being the primary seller to being the commercial leader who sets direction, coaches the team and represents the firm in the most senior relationships. That’s a meaningful role, but it’s different from being the person who all commercial momentum flows through.
The place to start is the documentation exercise: block a day, answer the questions honestly about how you actually sell, and write it down. That single step, which most founders find easier than they expected once they sit down to do it, is the foundation that everything else gets built on. From there, build the CRM discipline, establish the weekly rhythm, develop the playbook and create the conditions for others to develop commercial capability. Done consistently over time, the result is a business that generates revenue with or without the founder in the room, which is a fundamentally more valuable, more resilient and more scalable business than the one you started with.