The Pros and Cons of Moving from In-house RevOps to RevOps Consulting

Six months ago, I made the decision to move from an in-house RevOps role to consulting.

While evaluating the transition, I went back and forth in my head with proposed pros & cons to making the switch. Plenty of people I was interviewing with, who had made the swap, gave me their opinions as to why it was the right move. On the flip side, I also spoke with people in the community who felt they were better suited for an in-house role and that I too should stay where I was.

Eventually I took the leap and I’ve observed a few things that I can share here.

This is for anyone considering a move to consulting, or back to in-house, and these are five pros and five cons that I’ve experienced when transitioning to a consulting role.

Pros:

• Variability in Work - This, to me, is the most attractive part of consulting. I rarely encounter the same issue twice and each business has a unique flavor to their problems.
• Team - In the past, if I had a problem I couldn’t solve it was up to me and Google, Reddit, Trailhead forums or community groups like WizOps. Now, I can just post in Slack and get an immediate response from one of 20+ people who have seen it or done it before.
• Learning - Problems I would have never encountered in-house are brought to my attention (with accompanying solutions) and it satisfies that part of me that wants to learn new things.
• Exposure - I’ve been exposed to more ways to run a business in 6 months than the previous 10 years. Everyone runs their business differently, and success looks different for each client.
• Excellence - I thought I was good, but my colleagues are better. For me, the bar for excellence was raised shortly after I was exposed to the talented people at my firm.

Cons:

• Ownership - Don’t get me wrong, ownership exists in consulting. The type of ownership is what makes this unique. I’m not as tied to a business's success outside of the process we are working on. A new raise doesn’t hit the same as it would if I were in-house.
• Context - My lack of context creates challenges when trying to get up to speed as fast as possible. Clients need solutions now, and sometimes don’t have a ton of time to give me full context.
• Tools - Myself & my team often find ourselves utilizing workarounds due to lack of tools. Example: tons of clients don’t have Dataloader or Leandata and we’re left with less intuitive tools/solutions to solve these problems for clients.
• Time - Tracking time is foreign to me and it took a little bit of time to get used to this
• Imposter Syndrome - Some of my clients are seriously impressive people. I frequently wonder “why me?” when I’m working through a solution with a client who has an impressive resume.

Would I recommend the swap to consulting? If you’re like me…yes.

I was fortunate enough to find a good team, and there is a lot of personal fulfillment that comes with this change. It’s a character building exercise every day, I’m exposed to more people than I’d normally be comfortable with, and my thirst for knowledge is quenched by the never ending stream of nuanced problems every day.

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