Beating Consulting's Feast Or Famine

Most consulting firms struggle with the feast or famine cycle. They have great months followed by silence. So what does it take to build a consulting firm that keeps growing for 24 years? Well, my guest, Carlo Cuesta, co-founder of Creation in Common, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits and government organizations collaborate, plan strategically, and strengthen communities. Over the past two decades, Carlo has built a business where up to 80 percent of new work comes from referrals and past clients.

In this episode, you’re going to discover how strategic partnerships open doors to entirely new markets, why shifting to value-based pricing drove 300 percent growth in five years, and the prospecting discipline required to keep a consulting pipeline strong. If you’re building a consulting firm and thinking about the long game, this conversation is packed with lessons.

In this episode you will learn:

• How strategic partnerships can open doors to entirely new markets.

• Why shifting to value-based pricing can drive significant growth.

• The prospecting discipline required to maintain a strong consulting pipeline.

• How to diversify your client base by expanding into adjacent sectors like government.

• The power of creating and sharing valuable tools to attract your ideal clients.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

With over 30 years of experience consulting for nonprofit organizations, Carlo Cuesta is a key leader at Creation In Common. His extensive client roster includes the Greater Twin Cities United Way, McKnight Foundation, and Walker Art Center. A dedicated advocate for the sector, Carlo leads workshops for the Minnesota Council for Nonprofits, contributes to the Nonprofit Quarterly, and serves on the national board of the Financial Commons. He is a former University of Minnesota adjunct faculty member and holds an MBA from the University of St. Thomas.

Connect with Carlo Cuesta

Discover more about Creation in Common

All right, Carlo, welcome.

Michael, it’s great to see you, and thank you for having me on your podcast.

Yeah, no, it’s great to have you here. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. There’s a lot to cover. I mean, you’ve been in business now for 24 years. You have a team of 10 to 12 people depending on projects and where things are at. I thought it’d be great to start with: If you look back over the growth of your business – 24 years is a long period of time, right, a quarter century almost – when did you recognize or when did you feel that the business had actually become established?

Oh, that’s a great question. I would say that around year six or seven, we started feeling like we were a going concern, and that was because you hit that point where your referral stream is starting to really kick in. Your clients that you’ve already worked with are now coming back to you. We’re a job shop; we’re project-based. So there’s a beginning and a middle and an end to most of our engagements. So, about six or seven years in, we started seeing clients come back, we started seeing people talk about us. The offerings that we were making early on in the business had taken hold, and there was a buzz around them within our marketplace at that time.

Got it. So referrals really building up. You just felt and started to see that all the seeds you had planted over those initial six years were now really starting to produce, if you could say it that way.

These businesses are so relationship-based. And so, we had a critical mass of relationships that had come together, and what those relationships were bringing us were better and better and better projects.

Right.

I would say there’s a difference between the question you’ve asked and the pivot to really understanding what was the best opportunity. We were still exploring what were the best kinds of opportunities that we should be looking for and investing our time and energy in. That went on for a long time and continues.

Sure, yeah. No, I definitely want to dig deeper into that and have you take us behind the curtain, if you will, to explain some of that thinking and how you went about making the decisions to get the business to where it is today. And let’s just talk, fast forward. What does the business look like today? What is the main focus of the work that you do with nonprofits? Planning? But just how would you describe to somebody the real focus of the work that you do today?

[03:56] – Defining Your Consulting Firm’s Mission and Niche

We help people lead and create together. Our core mission is to strengthen communities through shared creativity. Creative collaboration is a central factor of our work, and we do it in real time with organizations. So we do it through what we call our “deep insights” work, which is research, assessment, evaluation; through our “shared direction” work, which is a lot of strategic planning, business planning; and then through our “new capabilities” work, which is really very targeted around both organizational development and board governance. Those are the sort of core pieces. We also, I would say around 2016 for us, about eight years ago, we made a really conscious shift to say, not just nonprofit organizations, but state and local governments as well. And that was really in an effort to diversify our marketplace because there’s ups and downs in every marketplace. And so we were really looking to create as diverse a marketplace as we could manage.

Take me a little bit deeper into that decision, because a lot of people have the belief and the guidance to get more focused, right? Go more niche and really lean into a specific industry or area. And so you’re saying that you had that for a while, but then you decided to diversify? Was that because you started seeing less demand, less opportunity, any kind of maybe negative metrics with the existing business that made you decide, “Hey, we need to look to bolster or to add,” or was there something else going on that influenced that decision?

[05:56] – Expanding Into Government Consulting for Bigger Projects

Particularly within the nonprofit arena, in terms of where we were at at the time, we were in a more localized marketplace in 2016 than we are now. We’re in a national marketplace today. Back then, we were in a more regional marketplace that every now and then we would do work outside of the Midwest. And then there’s a price point limitation as well in terms of the size of projects that we can be engaging with. State and local government brought us into a whole – it was all very much the same kind of work. The services we provided didn’t change; it was just we were bringing existing services to a new market. And it was a market that had, frankly, better margins, a market that we were able to garner a better price point, larger project sizes. All of that made a huge difference in the growth and maturation of the firm.

How did you make that shift to go after that new work? And what I mean by that is specifically was this you just went after RFPs, or did you create and have some connections with people already inside the government? Did you hire somebody to just focus on building that pipeline? What did that look like?

[07:23] – Using Strategic Partnerships to Win More Clients

I wish I could say it was really methodical. It wasn’t. We had some core relationships. Actually, at the time, we made a big shift in our marketing by identifying and really working with key strategic partners. And we picked up about three or four key strategic partners that had good depth in the local and state government arena. And they were working in different areas, but they wanted to add value to their clients in new ways, and we were able to partner with them, and that created that entrée for us into that marketplace.

Carlo, can you just describe what types of companies were these?

In our arena, fundraising firms have been some of the best strategic partners that we’ve gotten to work with. And in our marketplace also, we built relationships with project managers who were really guiding through large-scale transformations in state and local government and needed specificity in certain areas on those projects. And we just built relationships with those project managers, and we came in with them, and then we started just building out our own relationships from there.

I’d love if you can just describe a little bit more around how you created those relationships. In terms of the dynamic, was it, “Hey, you work with these governments or you do this kind of project management work or fundraising. We do strategy, we do training. This is complementary. There’s no direct competition. Maybe you can bring us into some business, we can bring you into some business.” Like, was it this kind of a dynamic or do you approach it differently? Because I think people see the value in what you’re talking about, but how do you actually create that relationship in a way where it turns into business is, I think, something a lot of people are wondering about.

I think there’s one main idea that really worked for us. You talk about being visible to your marketplace, but when you’re being visible to your marketplace, you’re also being visible to potential partners. And so the more visibility that you can create has been for us essential in building those relationships, because those relationships are all built upon credibility and trust. And so, when you’re able to do a couple of projects here and there, or you’re working with – you may not even know you’re working with a potential partner, but they’re part of the team of another project you’re working on. And then all of a sudden, something begins to gel. You have conversations, you build relationships, you make those kinds of connections that are meaningful. And I’m just someone who really is interested in other people’s work and what they’re trying to accomplish and what they’re trying to do. And boy, did that just open up – it was a real amazing growth factor for us.

It sounds like you didn’t go into this thinking, “We need to find strategic partnerships to improve our revenue next quarter.” This was, “We need to create these relationships because we know in the long term it’s going to serve us well.” And the result of that, it may take many quarters or years to potentially create the return. Is that actually what you saw? Or can you maybe just talk about what your expectations were going into that, if you had any, and then when did things actually materialize in terms of seeing a positive business impact?

Particularly when you’re working on strategic partnerships, you’re always working sometimes on something that is very transactional to begin with. And when you’re able to transcend the transactional and able to bring value at a whole other level or a way of thinking that the other person, the other partner, the other firm doesn’t have, and they sort of sense that value and you sense the value in them, you start going, “Okay, there’s something interesting here. Let’s talk about that.” And then you start talking, you start having conversations about, “Well, what kind of projects would be great for us to work on or what kinds of things might be really, really interesting?”

And we just had one like last week. Another firm, an architecture firm, brought us an opportunity, and we’ve known them for a while. They’re really doing some amazing work around sustainability. And we were like, “Yeah, there are a lot of values here that are really, really in alignment.” And the project that we were talking about didn’t really work well for both of us, but it spurred the conversation about what would work for us. And then we’re both on the lookout. Right? We’re both on the lookout. We do the same thing with contractors as well. Like, when we want to bring in a contractor, it always starts out as, “Where’s the level of interest in each other and the values and in the kinds of work that we’re doing and what gets you excited, what gets us excited about each other’s work,” and having those kinds of conversations and then doing something that’s very transactional to begin with, small, really beginning, middle, and an end, nothing really prolonged. And then you see what happens. And if there’s traction, then it takes off.

What percentage of your business today would you say comes from referrals versus other channels?

It’s gotten to the point where we don’t delineate past clients from our referrals so much anymore. And I would tell you, I was thinking – I knew you were going to ask me this question, so I was actually thinking about it this morning. Some years it’s been as high as 80 percent between past clients and referrals mixed together. And I don’t know if that’s always a good thing, in all honesty, because it actually relaxes you a little bit when you have that kind of ongoing flow for two or even three years of continuous work. And I’m a big believer in all the prospecting work that you have to do to sort of keep the mix really rich and alive.

Outside of referrals and past clients, strategic partnerships, what other channels are you using right now at the firm?

[14:57] – Using LinkedIn and Events for Consulting Lead Generation

I can give you the arc a little bit over the years. We started really doing a lot of industry conferences. And through industry conferences, we did a lot of presentations and training. I used to train a ridiculous amount, like doing almost 30-plus trainings a year through events that different organizations were holding. So that was a major early channel. When everything moved online, we moved to the whole webinar channel and really building our lists and keeping those things alive. And I would say our channel now is much more social media based.

You mean like LinkedIn?

Yeah, LinkedIn. Keeping consistent on LinkedIn, having a consistent presence for us is really, really important. Delivering – we have built a stewardship list that we deliver very, very specific tools to that we’re being very mindful of. It’s not a huge list. It’s not about volume; it’s about target.

When you say tools, Carlo, what do you mean? Like, these are free tools that you’re just providing?

Just a tool that brings about a mindset shift. We created a recent tool which is like a “reframing matrix.” It’s one page, and people love it. We have a tool called the “Board-Staff Decision-Making Matrix.” People download this thing on a regular basis. And these discrete offerings are actually giving value because they’re relevant in any particular moment or time. When COVID hit, we developed an “adaptive strategy map” tool that took lean methodologies and applied it to what nonprofits need to be doing now to do some solution-building and recalibrate.

Makes sense. You talked earlier about that your engagements are project-based, right? A defined start, middle, and end.

Yeah.

Has that always been the case? And if so, why? Why not retainer-based, ongoing, or some other structure?

Well, we try to keep about a third of our portfolio mix as a base of continuous clients that we’ve had for three or more years. We consider those continuous. The nature of the work that we do is very episodic.

Okay.

And so it lends itself to project-based. We also have to go back to something that’s where the firm started and was at the roots of the firm. When we started, myself and my two other co-founders, we’re all theater artists. So we came from that kind of episodic background of rehearsal, production, rehearsal, production, rehearsal, production. And that’s sort of deep into our roots in that we always really enjoyed this idea of having a really amazing variety of work to work on. Now, there are clients that we’ve done their strategic planning for the last 15 years. Every three years they call us up and we come in, we do their next. You can call those a continuous client, but we call it a project. But then, we also have, like I said, about a third of our portfolio is still in that continuous realm of ongoing contracts.

And has your pricing changed over the years?

Yes.

In what way? Just increases, or-

[19:31] – Switching to Value-Based Pricing in Consulting

I’ll just be honest, we made some stupid moves in our pricing over the years. We were trying to predict where the market was at, and we kept ourselves where the market was at. And we weren’t really moving more toward a value-based pricing and really understanding where our value lived.

Right.

And we didn’t watch our pricing as closely as we should have been watching our pricing. We changed that about eight years ago. We just started really, really being mindful of where we’re at and how we want to make leaps forward and where we want to be in terms of our pricing.

Was that then really focusing not so much on just hours, but thinking more about the value or the impact or the outcome that you’re creating?

Yeah, absolutely. It was very much about thinking about the value of the impact that we’re creating. There’s a really big difference- when you’re asked to do a strategic plan, it’s one thing, and different markets call for different levels of pricing.

Sure.

You know, what the market will bear.

What was the impact of that on the actual business when you moved from the prior model to focusing more on time to focusing more on value and outcomes and so forth? What did that actually do to the financials of the business?

[21:03] – How Value-Based Pricing Increased Revenue 300%

Oh, it changed it radically. I mean, if you think about it, we’ve grown about 300 percent over the last five years. We’ve been on like a 60 percent annual growth clip as a result of that value-based kind of pricing. And part of that is you’re always focused in on your value creation and what that value creation looks like. And really thinking through, philosophically, we came to about five years ago saying, “All right, what are the three things we’re going to promise all of our clients?” And we say we promise them “deep insights,” “shared direction,” and “new capabilities.” That’s what you’re going to get through a Creation in Common project, and that’s the value we’re going to generate for you. And so that was really, that was a game-changer.

Yeah, I’m not surprised to hear you say that. I mean, we see this with a lot of the clients that we work with where the old model used to be hourly fees or something that wasn’t focused on the outcomes and value. And it’s pretty amazing, no longer surprising, after doing this for so many years, that you can really dramatically increase your revenue and profitability by making that shift. I’m wondering for you, Carlo, what surprised you? Were there any beliefs or, call it even, misconceptions or limiting beliefs you had around pricing that when you made this shift, it’s like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t think that would have worked as well as it did,” or just anything that really surprised you?

Within the nonprofit marketplace, there is a lot of scarcity thinking, just in general, right? That’s sort of rooted in that particular marketplace. And when you shift to a value-based pricing model and thinking in those terms, you’re also looking at your clients differently. You’re not looking at them from, “What are their weaknesses and what gaps can I help them get past?” You’re really starting to say, “No, what are the assets and strengths of these organizations? And how do we really harness and build upon those assets and strengths?” So philosophically, we always talked about that from the get-go. Going back 24 years, it was a core belief system. We had to practice it. So we weren’t necessarily practicing that for ourselves and going, “We want our clients to see value in themselves, but we also then want them to see value in what we are making sure we’re providing them.” And so, we’re going to come forward with a very different kind of approach.

The world’s been pretty chaotic the last couple of years or so. There’s been lots of uncertainty, lots of change. What’s been one of the biggest challenges or just changes that you’ve had to make as a business owner and as a business over the last one or two years?

[24:27] – Navigating Market Uncertainty in Nonprofit Consulting

Before I got on this call, we had our team – we do a transparent, we keep a transparent book. So we share all of our numbers. We do quarterly numbers reviews, and we did our 2025 annual review about 30, 40 minutes ago.

Okay.

And we faced significant headwinds in 2025. And there’s just a lot of anxiety within the marketplace. And our marketplace is very disjointed because our marketplace is very dependent. Not just local and state government is dependent on federal dollars, but also, we have a nonprofit field. Federal dollars flow significantly through the nonprofit field. And so the lack of stability in both of those areas, the volatility, as you said, we’ve been feeling that every step of the way. And we’ve had to really help our clients and help ourselves build a couple of really clear frameworks of how to approach what we’re dealing with right now. And so, there are no silver bullets, but really starting to think about workflows that are really based on how we clear the noise away and get to where the signal actually exists.

What does that look like in reality? So if we just zoom out for a moment, you have a market that is going through a lot of chaos. There’s uncertainty. There are these state, local government, or just other nonprofit organizations that are your client base that used to get a significant amount of funding. That funding has potentially dried up completely or had a substantial reduction, which then leads to, even if there are still some funds and funding flowing into these organizations, they tend to be a little bit more cautious, hesitant, right? Careful about deploying funds going forward. What actions did you take or how are you specifically navigating that so that the business is still growing, still doing well, you’re still generating revenue. Can you walk me through that?

Yeah, well, there are a couple of different things that we’ve done. But one of the things I feel like we have to be very, very careful of is, you’ve seen one client, you’ve seen one client. Manal, who was on your show –

Yep.

– she talked about listening and the power of listening, and that is very, very central to the kind of work that her firm does-

Sure.

– is that kind of listening. And everyone’s reality in this time that we’re experiencing is different. We can make vast generalizations, but when we get down to the specificity, there are always inroads if you are listening really carefully and you are helping your clients understand where there is opportunity, where there is a way to strengthen something they need to protect, where there is agency when you feel like agency no longer exists. And all of that is that’s number one. I just have to say that just up front.

[28:22] – Prospecting Consistently to Avoid Revenue Gaps

Number two, for us is we’re always thinking about operational capacity in relationship to sales and sales in relationship to operational capacity. In 2025, we said, “Nope, we’re going to prospect, prospect, prospect, prospect, prospect. We’re going to front-load as much work as we can front-load.” And that was because the volatility, you just see it was – the feast or famine cycle was just, we’ve been trying to smooth that out for 24 years. Well, it just comes back when you have that kind of volatility in the marketplace. But we have more tools now at our disposal. And one of those tools is we have a system for prospecting that we work. And we just made sure that in our first two quarters we worked to outperform in terms of our sales prospecting. And that mattered because that smoothed out the year, helped us smooth out the year.

We’re still doing it in 2026 as well. I was talking to the team about it. It creates, on the team, some difficulty because their thinking is like, “Look at all the prospecting you’re doing. Do we have the operational capacity to meet all of that?” And so you have to really manage the operational side and the mindsets that are going on there and the thinking going on as well.

And so is the belief behind that that, “Let’s just create as much demand and opportunity as we can. We may find that we get to a point where we actually don’t have the capacity to deliver on the pipeline that we’ve now built. That’s a better problem to have than to not have the demand and the opportunities.” Is that the thinking?

Yeah, I mean, it’s just like, you can’t fish if there’s no bait. And so, that is the “why” you just described, and it sounds very simplistic, but –

But not a lot of people do it. And so I think what you’re doing, you’re just raising the bar. You’re giving yourself more opportunity. You’re putting yourself in the best position you possibly can, where others would overanalyze and create reasons not to do the prospecting. Because the reality is for most consultants, they don’t enjoy doing prospecting. That’s not why they became consultants. But it’s something that is critical for the business to grow long-term. Because even in a situation like yours where referrals are the majority of the business and they’re a great thing that I’m sure you and everyone else will always welcome, it’s not something you always want to or should rely on. And so putting that work in the prospecting is a good move.

[31:23] – Diversifying Your Consulting Pipeline for Stability

You know what, it’s a lesson of 24 years. I mean, I’m just going to say this: Yeah, there are days I don’t want to do the outreach. I don’t want to make the calls and the emails, follow up on the calls, follow up on the emails. We rely on – we’ve been able, you were mentioning different pipelines that we have developed over time for our prospects. We’ve built a fairly good inbound. We do quite a bit of outbound prospecting, but we also have a fairly vital and rich inbound prospecting pipeline as well.

And so, what I’ve learned is going through the Great Recession in the U.S., going through Trump 1, I’m just going to say, going through the pandemic, going through Trump 2 sort of shows that there are levels of volatility. And so if you really want to be able to continue the kind of compounding that you want in your business of value, you have to diversify. You have to really think through, “How am I going to diversify this process or this set of pipelines?” That’s, for me, been my big “why.” We go back to the state government thing. State government really came about because I got gun-shy. That’s not a great term. I got scared. There’s a better, more real, visceral term.

Yeah, right.

I got scared during the Great Recession.

Scared of what?

Scared that I was never able to get that my marketplace wasn’t big enough, that my marketplace wasn’t sustainable enough, that we were never going to get out of the feast or famine cycle. And so that’s when I was like, “No, I have to make a shift, and I have to sort of see where we can diversify a little bit.” And that’s where local and state government came in.

Would you have told yourself something different now, experiencing what you’ve experienced? Is there something that you would have said to the Carlo that was feeling scared? Is there something that you would tell that person?

One of the things I would tell that person is this: Breathe. Yeah, breathe. Work on the basics. Make sure the basics of the consulting practice are in place and continue to work that. That’s how we found our way out of the recession was like, I got help and support to really work on the basics at that time. And that was a really transformative moment for us. And slowing it down a little bit also helped because then you can see where those relationship opportunities begin to arise. The strategic partners that we were talking about earlier, I would definitely say those things to that person.

I would also say, and I think this is something you were indicating earlier, we created verticals in certain sectors of the nonprofit and social impact field. We had really good verticals in arts and cultural organizations. We were building a vertical in the disability services arena and working with organizations that serve people who are disabled. And we saw value in those verticals. But at the time, I wasn’t even thinking about that. My mindset was still moving, I think, a little too fast for my own good. But in hindsight, I could sort of say, “You know what? Always love the one you’re with, and do your best to go deep with them.”

[36:11] – How to Remove Yourself from Day-to-Day Consulting Delivery

You mentioned that you got some support or you put more focus on some of the foundational elements, the fundamentals. Just briefly, what were those things that you felt were so important and had such a big impact?

The day the team member came in and took my calendar away from me.

So you got administrative support, is that what you’re referring to?

Oh my God, it was transformative. It’s like, I can’t schedule my way out of a paper bag. These businesses are logistics-based, right? And we have to be able to hit certain things and hit certain deliverables on certain timelines and such. And that’s just not a strength of mine. And having that team member really step in, she came in and she said, “No, you are not touching your calendar again,” and organized that and organized our project, the way our project systems and streams work. Those kinds of basic things. And that was six, seven years in, like right when we were getting the notoriety and things were ticking up while at the same time the bottom was falling out of the marketplace. We had a lot of really interesting things going on.

How are you spending your day? Like, what percentage of your time right now in the business is actually delivering work?

We are on a journey to get me to zero-

Okay.

-on day-to-day. The team is, I have an amazing team of people and they deliver outstanding work. And pre-2025, I got as low as like about 10 percent of our portfolio was falling in my court, 15 percent. It’s gone back up in 2025. It went back up because of a lot of the volatility to about, I’m carrying about 30 percent of the portfolio. And we’re using these moments in time to get me back down to 10 percent.

And if there was one or two things that you’re doing in that regard that you feel are going to have the biggest impact to shift reliance off of you, get you out of the delivery, what are those things?

All right, so Michael, the biggest thing for us has been where decision-making lies and who has decision-making authority and giving folks, really empowering folks and being very, very clear. “These are the questions you get to answer. These are the questions I will answer. These are the questions that you answer,” and being really, really explicit and clear at different levels of the organization. We’re not big, so we’re fairly flat, but we have good enough systems. And now we’re building better workflows because it’s not- I think for me, my co-founder who’s my wife, we spend a lot of time on sales and marketing, and so we’re very, very much the faces of the organization. And so, we’ve been building workflows that do really intentional, visible, seen handoffs in front of our clients so our client never feels surprised, never feels like we’ve done a bait and switch or anything. We’re making sure that our project leaders are brought into the sales process from the very, very beginning and carrying forward. Again, for all intents and purposes of strengthening the relationship-building process.

What do you see as being one of the main challenges that a firm like yours is facing in today’s market and environment? Is it AI-related? Is it government-related? Is it something else completely?

[40:48] – How AI Is Changing Consulting Services

Well, I think the immediate is the fact is the volatility in the marketplace. That’s number one. I would say number two is AI. I can point to it right now and I can say there are certain components of our work that are being commodified by AI and probably in two to three years will no longer be in our service mix. Or if they’re in our service mix, they’re being done by an AI agent, and we’re able to offer them at a much more discounted rate. So I think we have to be very, very mindful about where our revenue is coming in from today, what parts of our service stream are really bringing in the most revenue, and what’s really vulnerable.

But I would say this: We are in the empathy business, we’re in the relationship business, we are in the community engagement business. We’re in helping to bring the lived experiences of communities forward. We’re all about making sure that people are building better skills with one another in how they interact with one another. I feel like our work is more relevant than ever. How we offer that in two to three years is going to shift and change, and it’s about meeting that timeline. I read something last night that one of our team members shared, and I was like, “Ah, man, maybe we’re not moving fast enough. Maybe we have to move a little bit faster. Maybe we need to experiment a little bit more quickly, and maybe we need to find a set of clients who will be willing to let us experiment with them in this way.”

[42:36] – The ‘Art vs. Artist’ Philosophy of Consulting

Looking back at the growth of the business and knowing what you know now, Carlo, is there one thing that you would have done differently that stands out to you?

Oh, yeah.

You’re welcome to share more than one.

I have a saying that I keep. ‘It’s about the art, not the artist.’ And so I think early on, for me, the business was very much about me, and that caused consternation with team members and stuff over time, and that was challenging. I mean, that was hard. And for me, it was about me understanding where I was with the art, my relationship to it. So thus, it’s about the artist, not the art. And if I could go back and talk to me 24 years ago, I’d say, “Calm down, make it about the art. And you will find your way, and you’ll find that sense of trust in your own art and being and being an artist.” And so that would be the piece of advice I would give myself.

Carlo, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. For those that want to learn more about you and your work and your company, where’s the best place for them to go?

The best place is to go to our website at creationincommon.com. We’re also on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/creation-in-common-llc/.

Okay, we’ll have all that linked up in the show notes. Thank you again so much for joining.

Hey, Michael, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Important Links:

Carlo Cuesta
Creation in Common Website
Creation in Common LinkedIn
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