Making the PhD to consulting transition: What I wish I’d known

I announced my coaching and consulting business in May of 2020, still fully employed in academia, in the middle of a pandemic, with no idea if anyone would even want to hire a PhD consultant. I had no idea what I was doing, felt like a total fraud, and was completely afraid everything would crash and burn.

And no, that wasn't the hard part.

PhDs are, it turns out, pretty well-equipped for entrepreneurship. We have solid research and communication skills, thrive doing independent work, and have a thirst for figuring things out.

I'd spent years in academia assuming the hard part of going out on my own would be figuring out if I could actually do it. Turns out, for most PhDs making the move to consulting, that's not the hard part at all. It’s the stuff that has nothing to do with your expertise: how to price your work when you've spent years in a culture that gives knowledge away for free. How to find clients when there's no job posting to apply to. How to keep going when there's no department, no colleagues down the hall, no structure telling you you're on track (and maybe a little voice inside telling you you’re a fraud along the way).

What does a PhD consultant actually do?

In academia, your expertise is defined by your institution, your department, your research area. Moving into consulting after leaving academia, none of those containers exist. You alone have to figure out what you're actually offering and to whom.

For me, that looked like starting with coaching. I was going through coach training at the time (very on-brand for an academic: get certified before doing the thing), and I started working with people who were navigating their own career transitions. Eventually I added writing and other PhD consulting services to my work: research translation, white papers, blog content for companies who needed someone who could make complex ideas accessible. That came later, built slowly through a portfolio of low-paying and barter work until I had something I could pitch myself with.

The point isn't that you should do what I did. The point is that PhDs have more transferable skills than they realize, research, writing, synthesis, independent problem-solving, and consulting can take a lot of different shapes depending on which of those you want to lead with.

The harder question isn't "am I qualified to be a consultant?" You almost certainly are. The harder question is: what do you actually want to do? And once you figure that out, what do you charge for it? And how do you find the people who need it?

Pricing and finding clients as a PhD consultant

Let's start with pricing, because it's where most PhDs get stuck first and where the academic culture hangover hits hardest.

Academia has a complicated relationship with money. Knowledge is meant to be shared freely! You publish, you present, you mentor, you review, all without extra compensation. It's the water you swim in for years. And then you leave and suddenly you're supposed to charge people for your time and expertise, and some part of you feels deeply weird about it.

I felt that. I still feel it sometimes.

When I was figuring out what to charge, I did what I suspect most people do: I Googled what others were charging and picked something in the middle. It wasn't a particularly scientific process. But it got me started, and I adjusted from there. The thing that I see come up again and again with the people I work with is that your instinct will almost always be to underprice. Charge more than feels comfortable. You can always adjust, but starting too low is much harder to recover from than starting too high.

Finding clients is its own challenge. In academia, jobs are posted, grants are announced, conferences are organized. None of that infrastructure exists when you're self-employed. You have to build it yourself, which can feel disorienting at first.

My first coaching clients came through my network. People who knew me, trusted me, or had been referred by someone who did. That's still where most client relationships start, in my experience. If you haven't already, tell the people in your life what you're doing and who you help. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, and it might feel scary at first, but it works.

For consulting work, I started on Upwork. I won't pretend it was glamorous, the rates are low and the competition is high. But it got me my first clients (one who I continue to work with 4+ years later) and it gave me something to build a portfolio from. I wouldn't recommend staying there long-term, but as a starting point when you have nothing else, it worked for me.

The harder stuff: Identity and loneliness

Here's something I didn't fully anticipate: how much I'd miss having people to think out loud with.

In academia there's always someone around: a colleague, a lab mate, a student or peer. When you're self-employed, that's gone, unless you intentionally seek it out. For a while I didn't realize how much of my thinking had happened in conversation until there was nobody to have the conversation with.

Being in charge of everything in your business can be exciting! But it can also be a lot, and it can leave you stuck in your own head. What helped me most was finding a thinking partner. Someone to process decisions with, get out of my own head with, and reality-check the stories I was telling myself. (This is the honest truth! Not just a plug for coaching. I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be where I am in my business without having been coached extensively along the way.)

You’re more ready than you think

If you've made it this far, I'm guessing some part of you is already thinking about making this leap, or maybe you're already in the middle of it and wondering if you're doing it right?

If nothing else, here's what I want you to take from this article: you're more ready than you think.

Not because it's easy, and not because you won't hit the moments where the inner critic gets loud. You're charging too much, you don't know what you're doing, who do you think you are. You will. I still do.

The skills that got you through a PhD, the figuring things out, the independent work, the willingness to sit with hard questions, those don't disappear when you leave. They come with you.

If you feel that entrepreneurial itch, and especially if you have an inner voice telling you not to, say screw it and start anyway. Figure it out as you go. Six years in and I’m still figuring it out.

You’ve got this.