Why I’m Working Late Again (And Actually Enjoying It)

What does delegation look like in a consulting or coaching firm?

We never wanted to be a hundred people.

Getting to a team of 20 at Consulting Success wasn’t an accident or a ceiling we hit. It was a choice we made deliberately, over nearly two decades, about the kind of business we actually wanted to run. Small enough to stay close to the work. Big enough to serve clients well.

What I didn’t anticipate was how the nature of what I was making would narrow over time. I never stopped creating. I’ve been writing articles for years, hosting the Consulting Success Podcast, recording videos, producing content consistently across two decades. Making things has always been part of how I work.

But there’s a difference between creating content and building the infrastructure underneath it. The systems. The client-facing tools. The internal processes that hold everything together. That layer of work was something I delegated a long time ago to others on my team. I found myself moving further away from building new things inside our company.

And I guess I accepted that. I didn’t really question it. For a long time I thought that was just what maturity in a business looked like.

Then AI came along and something shifted.

What Does It Actually Feel Like to Get Back Into the Work?

Over the last several months I’ve been walking downstairs in the evenings, putting on music, and working on things I genuinely want to work on. Nobody’s asking me to. If I asked someone on my team to, they could handle it. But I’m in my home office anyway, and two hours go by without me noticing.

I haven’t felt that in a long time.

What I’ve been building isn’t the usual content that I’ve spent so much time on over the years. It’s the layer underneath. Client-facing tools for pricing, building out new content pillars, working on new ad creatives. Next it was internal workflows that existed in people’s heads but never quite made it onto paper.

The content side of the business has always moved. What AI has done is make the structural side move too. Things that would have taken days to build properly, or that I’d have handed off because the doing felt slow, I can now work through in an evening. Not perfectly. But well enough to actually finish.

“The late nights I used to grind through out of necessity are back. The difference is they’re now by choice.”

That distinction matters more than it might sound. In the early days of Consulting Success, the late nights were about survival. There was no team. There was no system. You worked because if you stopped, things stopped. I look back on that period with a lot of pride, but I don’t romanticize it. It was hard in a way that wasn’t always sustainable.

What’s happening now is different. I’m choosing to be there. I’m not behind on anything. I’m not covering for a gap in the team. I just find that some evenings, the most interesting thing I can think to do is go downstairs, open up whatever I’m working on, and build something.

That’s a feeling I didn’t expect would come back when it did.

Why Do Firm Owners Stop Building in the First Place?

I think a lot of consulting firm owners are further removed from the actual work of building than they ever planned to be.

It happened gradually. The business grew, the team grew, and the natural response to both was to keep moving up and out. More oversight, less doing. More strategy, less execution. Until one day you look up and realize you’re mostly in meetings, on calls, reviewing other people’s work, and not really creating anything yourself.

For some people that’s exactly right. They genuinely prefer that altitude, and the work of building doesn’t pull at them the way it once did.

But I’ve talked to enough firm owners to know that for many, the distance from certain kinds of work wasn’t really a choice. It was a default. Not from the creating, most firm owners at this level are still producing, still communicating, still visible. But from the structural work underneath. The building of the actual business.

I want to be clear. It makes sense to delegate MANY things to your team. When you have someone on your team that is an ace at operations – they should be the ones building the operational plans and managing the team and scorecards – not you.

“At some point the output didn’t justify the time, and so you handed things off. Until you were operating almost entirely at arm’s length from the parts of the business that originally got you interested.”

So this isn’t about delegating less. It’s not about you spending time on things that are not the best use of your time. Because if you enjoy getting lost in Claude late at night working on a new client tool – great. Sure, someone else on your team could do it. But if it gives you joy to dive back into building sometimes, enjoy it.

What AI has changed is the time to output. What used to take days or weeks of your time – and so you delegated it – you can now get done in an hour or two. That means the cost of building something yourself has dropped significantly. Not to zero. There’s still thinking required, still judgment, still iteration. But the friction that made delegating the obvious choice isn’t present like it used to be.

And that means the calculus has changed.

What Happens When Building Becomes Accessible Again?

I want to be careful here, because I’m not making an argument that every firm owner should be doing what I’m doing. The right role for you in your business is the right role for you. If you’ve built something that runs well without you in the weeds, this isn’t a call to jump back in and disrupt something that’s working.

Your team doesn’t want that. And honestly, neither do you.

But I do think there’s something worth examining in the assumption that distance from the work is always a sign of progress.

For me, getting back into certain kinds of building has been clarifying in ways I didn’t expect. When you’re the one actually constructing a system, not describing it to someone else, not reviewing a draft, but sitting with it and working through how it should function, you notice things in a different way. You make different decisions. You understand the business differently than you do from the outside.

We’re also living through a moment where most people feel like they can’t keep up. AI is moving faster than anyone planned for. Doing the work helps me understand the change and feel closer to it.

That matters to me. And maybe more than anything else, I’m enjoying it in a way I wasn’t expecting to.

Late on a Tuesday, music on, building something that didn’t exist that morning. For me, right now, it doesn’t feel like a step backward.

It feels like exactly the right work, at exactly the right time.

Ready to Build a Consulting Business That Works for You?

Most consulting firm owners reach a point where the business feels like it’s running them rather than the other way around. The work that originally energized you gets further away, and what replaces it isn’t always more satisfying.

At Consulting Success, we’ve worked with over 1,500 consultants to help them build businesses that fit the life they actually want — not just the one that growth defaulted them into.

Schedule your free Growth Session today ?

No pressure, no pitch. Just an honest conversation about where your business is and what it could look like.