You Don’t Need an MBA to Start Consulting (And You’re Probably More Qualified Than You Think)

No MBA? No problem. This guide shows how to turn your real-world experience into a clear, valuable offer that sells — no corporate pedigree required.

If you’ve spent years teaching, managing a kitchen, running events, working in healthcare, or holding together a team under pressure, chances are pretty good that you’ve built skills you don’t even think to name.

You’ve solved real, persistent, costly problems. You’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, because you’ve lived it.

That’s super valuable, and that’s what consulting is built on.

So why does it feel so completely ludicrous that you might make that leap and actually call yourself a consultant?

A consultant? Moi? Oh no, I could never… could I?

When you’ve spent most of your life as an employee, it’s easy to underestimate the value of what you know. You’re used to doing the work, not stepping back to advise someone else on how to do it.

Listen up: You don’t need permission. You don’t need a certification. You don’t need to have an MBA and be super techy. You just need to be able to help someone get a result that you already know how to deliver — and, importantly, you have to be able to package and market it.

Consulting is simply this: turning your experience into something others can learn from, build on, or apply to their own situation, without having to learn the hard way like you did.

We’ll get into how to shape a clear offer in a minute, but first: take a breath and really consider what you already bring to the table. Because I guarantee it’s more than you think.

Start With What You’ve Already Done (And Who It Helped)

Before you worry about niches, websites, or how you’re going to post this on your LinkedIn profile, start here: What have people already come to you for?

What have you figured out that others still struggle with?

You don’t need to reinvent yourself. You need to mine your own experience — the wins, the frustrations, the stuff you had to Google at midnight when no one else knew what to do.

Here’s the counterintuitive part… the stuff that feels obvious or easy to you, that thing you could do in your sleep, is often where your consulting magic lives.

You’ve done it so long you’ve stopped seeing it as valuable. But others would gladly pay for that kind of clarity and guidance.

• If you’re a teacher, maybe you’ve built bulletproof systems for managing chaos or engaging people who don’t want to be there. That’s facilitation. That’s learning design. That’s valuable for companies, teams, and creators alike.

• If you’ve worked in healthcare, you probably know how to communicate under pressure, advocate for others, and deal with complexity and regulation. That’s client management. That’s operations. That’s project leadership.

• If you’ve managed a kitchen, you know about process, timing, delegation, and quality control. You’ve led a team. You’ve created repeatable outcomes. That’s workflow consulting waiting to happen.

Think in terms of problems solved, not job titles held.

Ask yourself:

• What do people thank me for?

• What problems have I solved that others still struggle with?

• What parts of my job did I do better, faster, or differently than others?

That’s where your consulting value lives.

Next up, let’s get clear on what makes a good consulting offer; that is, something people will gladly pay for because it solves a real, specific problem.

Shape Your Experience Into a Clear, Repeatable Offer

This is where most people get stuck. They have plenty of experience, but haven’t figured out how to package it.

Consulting isn’t just about showing up, asking what’s wrong, and offering ideas off the top of your head. You need to create something useful, repeatable, and valuable enough that someone will pay for it because it saves them time, stress, or money.

That might be:

• A roadmap for launching a new service, like how you helped a local yoga studio build a profitable membership model and could do the same for others.

• A client onboarding system you created as a VA that cut hours off admin time and improved retention, which could be packaged as a plug-and-play toolkit.

• A hiring and training workflow you built while managing a restaurant team that kept turnover low, something other hospitality businesses struggle with constantly.

You don’t need 20 offers. You need one good one that you can deliver confidently, adapt slightly for each client, and refine as you go.

This is where having a product mindset comes in. I’m not trying to turn you into a full-blown tech founder, but borrowing a framework from them is going to help you stop reinventing the wheel every time.

Most of us were taught to sell our time. Hourly. Daily. Per project. Somewhere along the way, we internalized the idea that hours at work = our value.

And when you’re starting out, that feels like the safe route. Charge by the hour, do the work, clock out. But it’s a trap! No one is buying your hours — they’re buying outcomes.

If you keep positioning yourself as a block of billable time, the real value of what you do gets buried under a list of tasks and time-tracking spreadsheets.

Worse, if every client engagement is custom, high-touch, and wildly different, you’re basically onboarding into a new job over and over again. That’s exhausting. And it makes it nearly impossible to scale, raise your rates, or take a proper day off without stressing about delivery timelines.

Instead of asking, “What do you need?” and reinventing the wheel every time, you start with: “Here’s how I help — and here’s what that looks like.”

It’s the difference between:

• Spending 6 hours making a new proposal vs sending a refined one you’ve already used successfully

• Having to invent a new onboarding plan vs running the same proven steps that get clients results

• Feeling like you’re always at capacity vs knowing you can take on another client without chaos

So, what makes a great consulting offer?

You don’t need to be the loudest, most popular, or perfectly polished. Consulting is simply solving a real problem clearly and confidently. Here are the key ingredients to keep in mind:

1. A Specific Problem

People don’t pay for “advice.” They pay to solve something that’s costing them time, energy, money, or peace of mind. The more specific the problem, the more powerful your offer.

2. A Repeatable Process

You don’t need a fancy framework. Focus on creating a clear, step-by-step way you help people get from Point A to Point B. Think: “Here’s what I do, here’s how it works, here’s what you get.”

3. A Tangible Outcome

Your offer should answer the question: “What do I walk away with?” Because guess what… that’s exactly what prospective clients are going to ask. Whether it’s clarity, a plan, a system, or a result, make the outcome visible and valuable.

4. A Fit You Actually Enjoy

This part gets overlooked, but it matters: build your offer around the kind of work you like doing and the people you like working with. That’s what makes it sustainable and fun.

5. Real-World Credibility

You don’t need a portfolio full of logos or a wall of testimonials. But you do need a way to show that this isn’t just theory; it’s something you’ve lived. Real stories, past wins, or even one solid example of how you helped someone can go a long way in building trust.

A Real-World Example: How Tash Doherty Turned Her Day Job Into a Consulting Offer

When Tash Doherty left her job as Revenue Analytics Manager at Vox Media to write her first novel, she had no plans to become a consultant. But reality kicked in. She needed income, fast.

At first, she did what many of us would: she signed up for freelance platforms, pitched herself vaguely as a data consultant, and even tried to land product strategy gigs. Nothing landed. Crickets.

The turning point came when she realized she had something specific and valuable: lived experience in the podcasting industry.

She’d led analytics at Vox, and once she identified a real offer, podcast agencies and shows were interested in hiring her to help them grow. That clarity, combined with her network, led to real traction, and before she knew it, she had brought in $40,000 from her freelance consulting side hustle.

Read her full article for more on how she did it.

Tash’s success didn’t come from a fancy framework or perfect branding. It came from:

• Owning her actual experience (not the job title)

• Getting specific (podcast growth, not just “data”)

• Starting with warm leads via outreach to people she already knew, not cold platforms

• Setting clear boundaries around rates and time

Bottom Line

With a product mindset, you stop selling hours and start selling outcomes — clear, valuable transformations you already know how to deliver. And instead of guessing what to charge, you start pricing based on value, not time.

And that’s exactly what clients want: something proven, with fewer unknowns. It builds trust, simplifies delivery, and gives you back your bandwidth.

If you want help mapping this out, the Product Mindset Playbook was designed precisely for this. It helps you uncover product ideas from what you already do, package them up with clear outcomes, and create a simple, solid MVP you can launch fast. You get the 24/7 support of our AI Product Coach, so you’re never stuck in “what now?” mode.

So listen, you probably already have everything you need. The biggest thing standing between you and a rewarding consulting offer probably isn’t your experience or lack thereof. It’s the mistaken belief that you’re not “qualified” to consult.

You are. Just like Tash.

✌️Miranda

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