Build a Consulting Business Around Your Expertise (Here’s How) with Angela Frank
Listen to the episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts | Watch on YouTube
Listen to the episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts | Watch on YouTube
According to Upwork, 76.4 million Americans are part of the freelance workforce, which grew from 57 million in 2019. And by 2027? This number is expected to rise to over 50% of the U.S. workforce.
Angela Frank is a fractional CMO, growth marketing advisor, and founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy that helps founders build clear, sustainable marketing strategies that support long-term growth. With a track record of generating over $60 million in revenue for startups and scaling brands, Angela brings a rare combination of in-house operator experience and scrappy entrepreneurial instinct to companies she works with.
Angela's path to consulting was anything but linear. She grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota and the first in her family to pursue a four-year college degree.
She started her first Etsy shop as a sophomore in college, ran a thriving e-commerce business during the pandemic, then pivoted into corporate marketing roles before eventually negotiating her way into a fractional arrangement with her employer.
As you will learn, she proposed they use the money saved to invest in another marketing channel. And for her, she used that freed up time to build her consulting practice. She officially went full-time in her business in 2022.
Angela is the award-winning author of Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More, which teaches founders and consultants how to build connected marketing systems that drive results without complexity. She also hosts The Growth Pod, a podcast where she shares practical insights on marketing strategy, consulting, and business building.
Her current focus is helping experienced operators and marketers turn their expertise into structured, profitable consulting practices.
Connect with Angela
LinkedIn: Angela Frank
Website: The Growth Directive
Book: Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More
Instagram: @angelafrankofficial
Connect with Naomi
Website: www.naomihaile.com
LinkedIn: Naomi Haile
Instagram: @naomiahaile
YouTube: Naomi Haile
This episode is for you if:
You're an experienced operator or marketer thinking about leaving corporate to consult - and want to know what the path actually looks like
You're already consulting but pricing hourly and hitting an income ceiling
You want to understand how to structure fractional engagements so they don't consume all your time
You're struggling to find your niche and keep spinning your wheels on positioning
You want a repeatable sales process for high-ticket clients, including how to run discovery calls and how to structure engagements
Looking for a specific gem?
00:00 Welcome and introduction to Angela Frank
02:42 Growing up in northern Minnesota and becoming a first-generation college student
04:43 Charging admission for backyard plays (her entrepreneurial instinct started young!)
08:19 Negotiating down to half-time in 2021 to start building her consulting business
13:50 Finding a niche: the financial advisor detour and the chance comment that led to health and wellness
17:44 How she structures fractional engagements: discovery, implementation, dialing in
19:57 Learning her limits the hard way with a chaotic client on an unlimited engagement
22:34 Why she's experimenting with month-to-month retainers in 2026
26:53 The pricing evolution from hourly to retainer
31:50 Value-based pricing and pricing at 10x–20x the value you create
33:47 The doctor approach to sales calls and finding the big sore spot
37:47 The demo call, the pitch deck, and using AI to write proposals without losing the personal touch
41:25 Why a clear, step-by-step process helps neurodivergent consultants too
45:32 The consulting program she's building, from ICP discovery to the first three clients
Conversation Transcript
Naomi Haile
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Power of Why podcast. My name is Naomi Haile, and today I am here with the incredible Angela Frank. Angela, how are you doing today?
Angela Frank
Naomi, I'm doing so great. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat.
Naomi Haile
I'm so excited to delve deeper into your story and how you got to where you are today. For the audience, Angela Frank is a fractional CMO, growth marketing advisor, podcast host, among many other titles, and has a track record of generating over $60 million in revenue for startups and scaling brands.
She's the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy that helps founders build clear, sustainable marketing strategies that support long-term growth. Angela also helps experienced operators and marketers turn their expertise into structured, profitable consulting practices, and her work focuses on moving people from ad hoc services to systematized consulting businesses with clear positioning, offers, and repeatable growth systems — which is so perfect for everyone who's listening.
Angela is an award-winning author of Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More, which teaches founders and consultants how to build connected marketing systems that drive results without complexity. She also hosts The Growth Pod, which I was just on — just recorded back to back — where she shares with her guests practical insights on marketing, strategy, consulting, and building businesses.
So Angela, it's so great to have you here. I'm really excited for this conversation. I'd love for you to start by sharing more about your origin story and sort of how you grew up. Were you a child that was really encouraged to color outside of the lines or stay within them?
Angela Frank
So I grew up in a very small town in northern Minnesota, and I've always been very type A, very achievement oriented, always wanting to go out and do more things, learn things, participate in all of the activities. And of course, I set a very high bar of excellence for myself.
So growing up, I'd say the hallmark of my tween and teen years was that I was very involved in science fair, and I would do it every year with an experiment. I even competed on a national level, winning a silver award at what's basically the Olympics of science fairs — which is incredibly nerdy, but just to give you a little bit of an insight about who I was and the kind of things that I cared about as a child. Everything was geared toward going to college, having a successful career.
Neither of my parents had a four-year college degree, so I was a first-generation college student, and I was really driven to be successful in my career. I've taken a very twist-and-turn route to where I am today.
Naomi Haile
That's great. And I can definitely see that excellence is at the heart of how you operate and how you move. For anyone who follows you online, it is evident.
Angela, I'm curious — with your origin story, how did you get into the work that you do today, into starting your business? I know that you first started with your Etsy shop, and you launched your consulting business, really working with brands to help grow their platform. So can you bring us back to that time? Why did you start an Etsy shop? What stage of life were you in, and how has that really contributed to cutting your teeth in the business world and scaling to where you are today?
Angela Frank
It actually starts in childhood. I was always experimenting with things, coming up with these little schemes to charge my parents a nickel. My sister and I would put on plays, and we'd say, "You guys have to come, and you have to pay admission" — because we put a lot of time and effort into this. And they would always play along.
My mom was a single mom, and so we always looked for opportunities. One of those things growing up was participating in craft shows. She would create these cute little aprons with prints on them that kids could use when doing arts and crafts. We would try out different things at craft fairs. I would make and sell little beaded earrings — you just get a little metal post and put the beads on — and I would sell those for a few dollars. All of that led up to me starting my first Etsy business.
When I was a sophomore in college, I really just wanted to make some extra cash. I liked the idea of going into a business online. It wasn't really something that people did the way they do now — back then, it was just on the cusp of people finding success in that space, and I wanted to see what it was all about.
My first Etsy shop was not very successful. I sold scarves and things that I had eventually evolved into selling at craft fairs, but it didn't really translate to a global marketplace that well. So I shut down my Etsy shop and went to school. My husband — boyfriend at the time — ended up joining the military, which was incredibly traumatic and uprooted my whole life. We ended up moving to Hawaii and then California, and we were moving every few months to a year.
At that point, I really needed to figure out how I could make money while my life was being uprooted every six to twelve months. That's when I reopened my Etsy shop. I dabbled in a lot of different things with the shop. Eventually, during the COVID pandemic, I did incredibly well — I had a $54,000 revenue month, and I was like, wow, this is great. At the same time, you have this great revenue month and you realize margins are not so good. Out of that $54,000, I took home half or less. And of course, margins in e-commerce are not that good overall.
At that point, I went, I don't really love running an e-commerce business with low margins. What I love about my Etsy shop is the business and the marketing. And so my husband left the military — he did his four years and said he was done — and I was able to pursue more of a traditional career. I had a few jobs in corporate as a marketing director and as a head of growth, and I really loved what I did.
But coming from that entrepreneurial background, I would get bored. Working with somebody, getting these amazing outcomes for them, and then once all of that foundational work was done within six to twelve months, there wasn't much more for me to do other than continue to experiment and improve their growth — which was not a full-time job. So at that point, I approached my boss and said, what would it look like if I dropped down to half-time, consulted for you on a fractional basis, and what I would like to do with the money saved is invest it in this other marketing channel. It was a win-win.
Naomi Haile
Hold up, Angela. This is so brilliant. I love that you did this. And what year was this?
Angela Frank
This was in 2021, and I went full-time in my business in 2022.
Naomi Haile
Brilliant. Okay, keep going. I know I interrupted you.
Angela Frank
That's okay. I was just going to say it was a very convoluted route to get here. But at the end of the day, I loved marketing and helping these startups grow. I needed more. I'm somebody who likes to be very busy, somebody who likes to try a lot of new things. And in growth marketing particularly, the more brands you work with, the better you are as a growth marketer, because you start to recognize these patterns. That's the very long story about how we got to where I am today.
Naomi Haile
It's crazy, because looking back on that and recounting all the steps that you took, you really demonstrated the moment you went from having that employee mindset to more of an owner mindset. I just love that you initiated that conversation, and it was very practical — you were like, I'm not maximizing what I can do here, and instead of sitting idle, let me present a solution to the startup that could be better and more effective. Let me be the one to own that. That's fantastic.
Angela Frank
Yeah, I love how you phrase that. I'm going to take that.
Naomi Haile
You recently — the way that we met on Threads, which I love the platform, I love how conversational it is. It's a very supportive community, or at least I've found the supportive community side of it. And you've been talking a lot about how to actually build your own consulting business. That's the content I found you through. You talk about how consultants can triple their corporate salary while working less.
So what happened after you presented that to your employer? And how did you really spin that to continue to grow that model?
Angela Frank
So I was very lucky with that employer, because they were so familiar with contract work and fractional support already.
Taking that transition out of that full-time role, I really had no idea how to build a consulting business. I didn't have a consulting background. I wasn't really sure how to position myself. I had seen some people call themselves a fractional CMO, and I thought, okay, maybe that's what I should call myself. But it was a very long journey after that conversation to get to where I am today and to really develop my positioning and understand what people were looking for.
I had that quick win, but everything else was like very much slogging through the mud trying to figure it out step by step. Eventually things felt very stable, and then you realize: okay, I've solved the problem of getting clients, but now I'm so busy with clients — how do I manage building the business, continuing to bring in demand, while creating exceptional outcomes for clients? That's where the systematization and the ops part comes in.
Naomi Haile
So after you freed up more than half of your time, and started experimenting — how soon did you go out and find other clients that you could replicate a similar model with?
Angela Frank
It took about three months from the time I left to signing my first client outside of that role. During that time, I was doing basically a positioning exercise. I initially thought there was a real market working with service providers, and because my first role was with a B2B service client, I thought, okay, I'll just work with more brands like them — startups in the B2B service space. What I found is that that's too broad for people to really resonate with that positioning and understand how I could actually help them as a consultant.
So I created a lead magnet, tried to have some conversations on LinkedIn, but nobody was really taking that bait. I said, okay, let me take a step back and see if there's a way I can be more niche. I looked at the work I'd done previously, and some of that included working in-house as a marketer for a financial advisor. I knew from that role that financial advisors have a very antiquated marketing strategy. They're bogged down by legal and regulatory compliance, and so a lot of what they're doing isn't effective. I thought if I could come in and present a marketing strategy that was compliant, rooted in growth marketing, and could help them get more clients — that would be a high-ticket market, I would be solving a real need, and I felt like it could have some product-market fit.
I started marketing on LinkedIn and doing more outbound, and was able to book some initial sales calls with financial advisors. But in those calls, I found out there was a lot of fear around going outside of their broker for marketing. In many cases, their agreements were that they couldn't really go outside their broker, and even though they were hungry for the solution I had to offer, there was this real block. I didn't want to spend years trying to overcome that broker-advisor relationship, so I took another step back.
Around that time, I had applied to some fractional talent agencies, and I had a conversation with someone as part of the vetting process for their firm. He said, "Oh, you would have been great for this health and wellness client that I just placed someone in. I think your health and wellness background is so exciting." It was like being hit in the face. I thought, why wouldn't I niche into health and wellness? And while that still felt pretty broad coming from the B2B service niche, it ended up working — because there are a lot of health and wellness companies that identify within that niche, and it was just niche enough for them to bring me consistent business.
The nice thing about being a consultant is you can work on a low-volume, high-ticket basis. At any given time, I have two to three high-ticket fractional clients, and then occasionally I'll supplement with project-based work, my power hours, or advisory work.
Naomi Haile
And so for your fractional work — how in the weeds are you? Were you managing their team, or were they at a stage where they didn't necessarily have a team, and you were the one coming in to help set strategy and approach for their marketing efforts?
Angela Frank
So I work with startups up to the $20 million mark, so they could have a team or they could not. The way I structure my fractional engagements is based on the work I was doing in corporate — coming in, creating the strategy, implementing the wins, implementing the strategy. At the six-month mark, you're pretty much at that refined stage. And so if you're a high-growth startup, that's where you do your next strategy and continue to iterate.
I try to package things in six-month chunks. That way it's flexible for my startup clients. They can say, we have a strategy that works, our team is trained on it, they're able to manage it from here on out — or they can say, great, we want to go out and raise a round next year, so we need to get these other metrics in place, and we can start the whole process over.
In practice, the first 30 days is discovery. I'm looking at all of their data, identifying any issues in their reporting, and just fixing structural things that need to be fixed. I'm also creating the strategy based on performance and on my insights as a growth marketer. At the end of 30 days, I present that strategy, we align, and during that alignment call, I'll also call out resourcing issues — we need to bring on a new SaaS platform, we need to make another hire, does that hire need to be full-time or can it be fractional.
Then months two and three, I'm implementing the strategy and working with the team if they have one. At the end of three months, we say: the entire foundation is built — where do we still need to tweak? With marketing, even the best, most informed plans, there's going to be a period of dialing in. Between months three and six, that's where we're dialing in. If something's doing really well, we scale that channel. If something's not working, we switch in another channel and have it dialed in by the end of the six months.
Naomi Haile
That's brilliant. There's still spaciousness in that strategy to get the client traction, to build a foundation specific to them. How have you learned, over time, the best way to structure retainers so they don't consume your entire week, and so they are truly part-time for you — allowing you to work with two or three other clients at a time?
Angela Frank
This is something that took me a while to learn, because I like to be busy, I'm very excited about new business. So I had to learn the hard way where my limits are. I learned that from signing a client who was, let's say, very dynamic — where things were constantly changing in their marketing department — on an unlimited engagement, which probably wasn't the best move knowing what I was walking into. I ended up basically working myself into a really difficult place.
Coming off of that engagement, I knew: okay, realistically I can handle two to three fractional clients, and I know exactly how I need to frame it up and have that conversation about what they can expect from me from the very first call.
When I'm meeting a prospective client for the first time, they always ask, do you work hourly or on retainer? I'm very upfront: I work on a scope-of-work-based retainer. It's not hourly. You can generally expect about 20 hours of work a week. However, it's flex — so in a startup environment, something may pop up that needs more than 20 hours of attention, and I can flex up or flex down depending on your needs. But at the end of the day, everything within the scope of work is going to be accomplished.
Naomi Haile
And just to clarify for folks — there's a six-month minimum in order to work with you?
Angela Frank
Traditionally, that has been the case. This year, I'm playing around with month-to-month engagements, mostly because consulting is a high-trust environment. If somebody's finding me on LinkedIn, engaging with my content, and booking a sales call, there's a baseline level of trust. I'm finding it easier to have that conversation where I guarantee the quality of my work, and it's a simple month-to-month retainer. From a sales perspective, now they're only saying: do I feel like she will get outcomes for me within the first month or two? And that gives me enough time to show up, create exceptional outcomes, and prove it.
Month-to-month retainers actually seem to have a little more longevity. I had experimented with this in a smaller way in previous years, and this year I'm bringing it into my fractional retainers. So they don't need to make this huge investment decision every six months. They just need to decide if I'm continuing to get outcomes — which I'm very serious about. I think it's the best of both worlds.
Naomi Haile
The reason I ask is because that's also what I've been experimenting with. The first two clients I signed this year have both been month-to-month, and because we both know we're going to deliver results, I think it's a less intense thing for a client to say yes to. And once they see, okay, this person is serious, you don't have to overcome such a big hill to start working with them.
Angela Frank
Yeah. And I find, too, working with startups — there's a lot changing in their environment. Maybe they expected to close a round and funding fell through. Maybe something hit their economics and they need to downsize the team. The month-to-month engagement also honors where they are in their stage of business. I love startups — I find it so exciting to work with them. So I just took a look at whether my engagements were startup-friendly, and how I could continue to serve my clients better. Sometimes that means restructuring the nature of your engagements.
The reason I was doing the six-month engagement was to make sure that the strategy and front-end work — which in my opinion is the most valuable part of the engagement — was fully compensated. But I realized that's flawed thinking. If you get in and create a great strategy, they're going to enjoy working with you. It'll pay off. Instead of going into the engagement thinking, well, maybe they're going to try and rip me off — I just needed to do a little bit of internal work around how I'm showing up and serving clients.
Naomi Haile
That's such a good point. The other thing it also offers is a chemistry period for you both. That client you mentioned earlier — where you knew you were walking into something chaotic — this also gives you, Angela, some room to see whether you have a good working relationship, without feeling like you need to sign up for something so large when you're just getting to know each other. There are a lot of reasons why month-to-month can work, and people who are listening should explore that.
Angela Frank
Yeah, I agree. And it's funny that you bring that up, because that was one of the catalyst factors. I had committed to fulfill that contract with the needy client, so I did. And when they asked me to renew, I politely backed out. But with month-to-month, I could have said: we either need to restructure this, or I'm going to have to step back.
Naomi Haile
Thank you for sharing that. I'm curious — you mentioned capacity earlier, and really finding out the hard way what your schedule needed to look like and how many clients you could comfortably serve at a time. You mentioned the Power Hour and other ways you supplement. But at what point — how many years in — did capacity become a bottleneck for you, and what was the first lever you pulled to make it work? Was it raising prices? Narrowing your scope? What helped you, outside of changing and experimenting with month-to-month?
Angela Frank
There were a lot of inflection points that made me restructure the way I was serving clients. The first capacity issue you'll run into as a consultant, if you're pricing hourly, is that you run out of hours to sell in the day. I had signed a 30-hour-a-week client, and I thought, how do I expand my income beyond just a 30 to 40 hour a week situation? That's when I made the pivot into value-based pricing and changed from hourly to retainer.
Once I did that, I needed to explore how a retainer works in practice. I originally had my fractional retainers priced at $5,000 — I'd come in, run the whole team, do the whole marketing strategy, six-month engagement. And as soon as I pitched that to a founder, the look on his face told me that was way too low for that kind of work, and I lost that business. So I had a very big pricing exploration after that, getting on calls, talking to people face to face, pitching over and over, until I finally landed in a good spot with my retainers.
At the same time, I was talking to some founders in the seven-figure range — maybe not quite $5 million to $20 million, but they'd hit their seven figures and needed growth support, but couldn't support a full fractional retainer. That's where I introduced my advisory package, informed by the conversations I was already having. People really liked what support I could provide but couldn't opt into the full-service package. So I played around with advisory — you can meet with me weekly, or I'll meet with one of your team members weekly and advise on growth strategy, or we can do it monthly.
Outside of that, I would get requests on LinkedIn — "Hey, can I just run something by you?" That's where power hours came from. Every step of that evolution was informed by conversations I was having and real bottlenecks I was finding in the business. How I got to two to three fractional retainers is really just understanding my limits. I thought at one point I could sustain five fractional retainers, but to provide the high-touch service and exceptional outcomes I want to provide, I opted for a lower number of higher-ticket clients.
Naomi Haile
And for those listening — I highly encourage you to follow Angela on Threads and on LinkedIn, because she is very generous with the information she shares. A lot of different data points gathered through conversations, but also through studies that are out there around proper pricing for your work and services. You actually say that $5K is a low-ticket offer.
So how should people be thinking about pricing when it comes to marketing, ops, HR — the different functions of a business — especially if they're going to make the leap from monetizing what they're doing in a corporate setting to doing it on their own?
Angela Frank
So I'm a huge proponent of value-based pricing, which is a concept I've taken from Alan Weiss. He wrote a book called Million Dollar Consulting. I followed him on LinkedIn, and he is a little problematic, so before you purchase his book, maybe do a little bit of research into the type of person he is.
But the concept of value-based pricing I got from him is where you take a look at all of the value you'll be creating for a business — not only in terms of revenue generated, but in cost savings, which can be incredibly relevant to people in ops or HR. You are either making the workforce more productive or saving costs by restructuring it. And you really look at the total value being created.
Once you say, over a 12-month period, here's the value that would be created for this client — for me, maybe I'm able to save them a million dollars in ad spend over the next year by making a more efficient growth strategy, and I anticipate we would be able to generate $2 million more in revenue based on my experience and the opportunities I see in a preliminary audit — you take that total number, $3 million, and you price your services based on value.
A good spot is where the value you're creating is 10x, 20x, or 100x higher than the amount you're charging on an annualized basis. So if we take that $3 million example and go with the 10x scenario, over 12 months, your retainer would cost the client $300,000. That's on the very high end. I price more around the 20x range — kind of right in between. It's really just about showing clients the value you could create in numbers, and pricing your services accordingly.
Naomi Haile
I love the way you broke down the math. And practically, that requires somebody to sit down and look at their track record and put numbers to things they may or may not have thought about. I love that you've approached it that way. And I think for individuals who are first starting out and maybe don't have that track record yet — in my mind, you can probably pull that track record from your corporate job, because the work you're doing in your nine to five is exactly what you can flip and position as what you're offering on a fractional basis.
So after you figured out this model, how has it really helped you when your sales cycles might be longer than another type of business? Because with consulting, it's all about trust, judgment, building the relationship. How has value-based pricing helped you when you're having conversations that may not lead to an immediate buying decision?
Angela Frank
So I'll start with the goal of my sales conversations. When I get on a discovery call with a prospect, I'm trying to understand how urgent their need is in the course of the first call. I almost take a doctor approach: what's bothering you with your marketing, what have you done to try and fix it? I really try to understand what they're presenting as their problem. And I also want to understand their goal — maybe you're not hitting your customer acquisition cost targets, but why is that a problem? Are you trying to raise a round? Trying to have an exit? Are your investors unhappy? I'm really trying to find that big sore spot that made them book the call with me, because they usually say something symptom-based instead of describing the actual problem.
Based on that, I can understand how serious somebody is. A lot of times in startups, people do come in with an urgent need. When that's the case, we go through the rest of the sales process — after the discovery call, there's a demo call, where I walk them through what this process would look like specifically for them. I like to think of it as: the first call, they talk about themselves the whole time, and I really learn about them. Then that next call, I talk about them the whole time — how this would look in their business.
If somebody doesn't have an urgent need, I like to think of it as a seed that's been planted that I can continue to water. Generally they've connected with me on LinkedIn, and I continue making high-value content. I use the content of our calls — questions or issues they were having — to make sure that's incorporated into my content calendar so I can stay top of mind and continue to show up as an expert. Pricing on a high-ticket, low-volume basis also helps, because I can continue having sales conversations even when I'm fully booked, knowing there's a good probability they just needed a warm-up intro chat with me, and we may connect down the line when I have availability.
I have a small process for following up with people when availability opens up. Generally my LinkedIn pipeline fills my availability as it becomes available. If somebody lets me know 30 days before their contract is ending — or on the month-to-month, they give 30 days' notice — I can already have somebody in the pipeline ready to fill that spot. It's created a lot of security knowing what my capacity is, how I price my retainers, and that I either have the high-touch option or I don't. In the meantime, I can continue to provide resources for people and try to nurture through thought leadership.
Naomi Haile
And that's why it's so important — which I love that you touched on — that even if you are at capacity and servicing as many clients as you can in that moment, you don't stop marketing, and you don't stop being visible and present, because it's always working. When I was on your podcast, I very much talked about the importance of planting those seeds and just building relationships consistently, because that also adds to people trusting you and seeing you as a credible person they would want to work with. So, on the money as per usual.
For people who — you mentioned a few things in your response around that first discovery call, and then the demo call where you're talking about them and how you can support them — is that a tailored presentation you walk them through? And how much work are you doing up front before the contract is signed?
Angela Frank
So the work I do up front is very limited. The reason I have the demo call is born from working with startups — typically, a founder will book a call with me and not bring their co-founder or some other critical decision maker, even though in my confirmation email it says to make sure all decision makers are on the call or aware of the investment. It just happens. So at that point they're like, oh my god, I've got to get my co-founder on. Then we have the demo call.
In the demo call, I do have a little bit of a pitch deck. I make a joke about it, but it's easier sometimes for people to have a visual than to just watch me talk at them for half an hour. The pitch deck basically shows the phased process I use — and the way I present it is tailored based on the information they gave me in the discovery call. I'll say, here's priority one, two, three, based on what you shared, and here's how it would look for you. Even though I have a consistent process, I'm showing how it's tailored to their specific experience.
What I actually do that's truly custom is the proposal. And I do proposals a little differently than is traditional — I only send a proposal if somebody has indicated they want to work with me, and therefore there's a high probability they'll close. That's where I do a little bit of custom work. By custom, I mean I take the call transcript and put it into a GPT that I've trained on my proposal format, and make sure it accurately reflects their current problem statement, the value to the client, and the objectives and outcomes they could expect. That process takes me about 30 to 45 minutes to fully get right. Even though I'm using an AI-assisted process, I really want to make sure it's nailing what they've told me and speaking to that big, painful goal that caused them to book the discovery call in the first place.
The proposal is also the contract, which streamlines the whole thing. Not only are they reviewing the scope of work, the nature of the engagement, and everything that's been proposed — they also have the contract right there. So now there's not an "okay, we accept the proposal, now we need to bring the contract to legal." They can do it all in one step.
Naomi Haile
This is such a wonderful walkthrough. And as an ops person — as a person who works on systems with businesses — your systems are amazing, incredible, thoughtful, seamless. Just at every point throughout this interview, Angela has demonstrated how she is iterating in real time, and how she's created a system that not only works for her, but is designed for the people she wants to work with: startups, people in high-growth industries. That level of intentionality, and really delighting your customers — they're like, wow, everything you're sharing with me has been laid out, and it's very clear for me to follow. I know that goes a very long way.
Angela Frank
Yeah. I've had a few conversations with aspiring consultants who are neurodivergent or have ADHD, and their question to me is, how do you know what to work on and not get swept up in the day to day — especially when you're on a scope-of-work basis and not an hourly basis? And it really is about having that step-by-step process laid out for the client on the front end. They go into the engagement knowing: the first 30 days, I'm going to be getting access to everything, I'm going to be looking at the data. They know exactly when to expect the strategy. That also helps you, as the consultant, stay focused. My objective over the next month is to get access to everything, look at the data, create the strategy. We're going to meet to discuss it, and then I'm going to implement it.
All you need to do is follow the process you're laying out based on what's going to create outcomes for the client. That was something I had to learn the hard way — but being communicative, laying out that map on the front end for the client, they feel confident knowing what it's going to feel like to work with you. Because if you're a mess during the discovery call and you really don't know what to do or talk about or how to present yourself, they're not going to feel like you really know your stuff.
You mentioned on my podcast: the way you show up and articulate your value is what determines how much people are willing to compensate you. It doesn't have anything to do with your personal worth, but it has everything to do with the way you're presenting yourself. If you're just buttoned up and you know what you're going to be doing, that helps so much — because now people aren't confused about your offer and having to do all these mental gymnastics.
Naomi Haile
Yeah. And before we wrap up — there was one thing you shared on another episode, which I was doing research on you, around being in that first call with a leader and they basically turned down the offer because it was priced so low. For you, the research you've done up front, and at this stage of where you are today, there's so much that you're able to contribute and pour into others who are looking to pursue this career more seriously and really build their own thing. I'd love for you to share a little bit about the program you've built, and your process of taking all the knowledge you've gained over the last couple of years and turning it into a curriculum that people can follow, engage with, and then launch their own companies.
Angela Frank
One of the things that becomes so clear as a consultant is that you need those systems and structures so you can do your work efficiently, create exceptional outcomes, and still continue to grow your own business. I've spent the last few years really nailing that system in my own consulting practice, and my goal is to create essentially a plug-and-play consulting practice for people who are looking to leave corporate and start on their own journey.
Right now, it's in beta, so I'm only taking on five people. It's going to be very high touch. By the time this recording comes out, we'll already be mid-beta and the doors are going to be closed. What I would say is, follow along on Threads — I share as much information as possible given the character limit — but I also have a newsletter launching designed to help consultants get clients, and a podcast that's relaunching geared toward helping people build their consulting practice. Everything I'm doing is trying to get you from that ICP discovery — trying to make that process take a few weeks instead of three months — all the way through signing your first three clients. That is what you can look forward to at some point. But I want to make sure it's a signature program, totally polished and ready to go, before really launching it to the broader market.
Naomi Haile
That's brilliant. So much of the high-touch, one-on-one nature of this beta — because it's a group, but it's high touch — means you'll really have the comfort from the people going through it to give you feedback, ask all the questions they have, and help you iron out what the program looks like. Which I feel is the same way I look at working with clients one-on-one as you're figuring out what your signature offer is going to be. You're on to an incredible journey ahead. I'm sure that when this episode goes live, after you follow Angela, she's going to open up more formally, and if you're interested in developing more in this area, I very much encourage you to consider Angela and her corner of the internet.
Angela, thank you so much for being here on The Power of Why podcast. It was a pleasure to speak with you, and thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. We'll catch you in the next one.
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