The consulting career paid well. I want to be clear about that, because the story only makes sense if you understand what I walked away from.
Two hundred nights a year in hotels. Client meetings across Austria, Germany, and occasionally further. Strategy frameworks, competitive analyses, innovation workshops for companies large enough to have dedicated innovation budgets. The intellectual challenge of walking into a company I’d never seen before, diagnosing its strategic problems in a week, and designing a path forward that the people inside couldn’t see because they were too close. That lit me up.
The money was good. The status was comfortable. The trajectory was clear: senior partner track, growing client list, increasing rates, a professional identity that opened doors at conferences and dinner parties. I was, by every external measure, successful.
And I was, by the one internal measure that matters, restless in a way that wouldn’t quiet down.
The Restlessness
The restlessness started around year twelve. Not a dramatic crisis — nothing that visible. More like a persistent low-frequency hum that accompanied everything I did. I’d deliver a strategy presentation and feel the hum. I’d close a new client and feel the hum. I’d receive positive feedback and feel the hum.
The hum said: you’re building frameworks for other people’s businesses. When are you going to build one for your own?
I ignored it for three years. Not consciously — I was genuinely busy, and busy feels like an answer when you’re avoiding a question. But the hum got louder. It started showing up in hotel rooms at 2am, in airport lounges, in the quiet minutes between meetings when there was nothing to distract me from the question I didn’t want to face.
The question wasn’t “should I leave?” The question was “what am I waiting for?” And I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t about fear.
What I Was Actually Afraid Of
The fears were specific, and naming them is the only way to explain why I stayed so long.
Fear of financial uncertainty. Consulting income is predictable. Client revenue, product revenue, startup revenue — these are volatile. I’d been earning a stable, growing income for fifteen years. The idea of a month with zero revenue wasn’t theoretical; it was a physical sensation of dread in my stomach.
Fear of identity loss. “Felix, the innovation consultant” was a complete identity. People knew what I did. I knew what I did. Becoming “Felix, who left consulting to try something else” was an incomplete sentence that required an ending I didn’t have.
Fear of wasted experience. Twenty years of consulting expertise felt like a significant asset. Leaving consulting felt like deprecating that asset. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to recognize in others and almost impossible to recognize in yourself.
Fear of public failure. Consulting failures are private — between you and the client. Product failures are public. Reviews. Rankings. Revenue numbers. The exposure felt like standing on a stage under bright lights with no script.
Every one of these fears was legitimate. None of them was sufficient reason to stay.
The Trigger
There wasn’t a single moment. There was an accumulation that reached a tipping point in 2019.
I was in a strategy session with a client — a manufacturing firm in Styria. Smart people. Real problems. Good budget. The engagement was exactly what I’d built my career around. And in the middle of the session, while explaining a framework I’d explained to forty other companies, I heard myself thinking: I’ve already done this.
Not dismissively. Not ungratefully. Just factually. The challenge that had driven me for fifteen years — walk into a new company, diagnose the problems, design the solution — had become a pattern I could execute in my sleep. The intellectual challenge was gone. What remained was competence, which is a fine thing to have but a terrible thing to live on when the rest of you is hungry for something new.
I gave my last consulting clients ninety days’ notice and started the cost of not starting calculation for real. The math was clear: every month I stayed was a month of compounding opportunity cost on the next chapter.
The Transition
I didn’t leap into the void. I built a bridge.
Phase one: Financial cushion. Before leaving, I saved twelve months of living expenses. Not because I expected the new venture to take twelve months to generate income — because having twelve months of runway eliminates the desperation that leads to bad decisions. The profit first principle starts before the business does.
Phase two: Skill inventory. I listed every skill I’d developed in twenty years of consulting and assessed which ones transferred to building and which ones didn’t. Strategy, analysis, client communication, project management — transferred directly. Sales, marketing, product development, operations — needed development. The gap analysis told me exactly what I needed to learn first.
Phase three: First experiment. Before fully committing to a direction, I ran three small experiments. One in product development (which eventually became Vulpine). One in content creation. One in education. Each experiment cost under EUR 2,000 and three weeks of time. The product experiment produced the strongest signal, so that’s where I went.
Phase four: Identity reconstruction. This was the hardest phase and the one I didn’t plan for. I had to rebuild at 40 — constructing a new professional identity from scratch while the old one was still visible in the rearview mirror. The discomfort lasted months.
What I Found on the Other Side
The other side wasn’t easier. Let me be specific about that. Running Vulpine Creations was harder than consulting in almost every measurable way: less predictable income, higher personal risk, longer hours in the early stages, more emotional volatility.
But the hum was gone. Replaced by something I can only describe as alignment — the feeling that the work I was doing was the work I was supposed to be doing, even when the work was difficult, frustrating, or frightening.
The consulting skills didn’t deprecate. They transferred. The strategic thinking that served clients now served my own business. The pattern recognition that diagnosed corporate problems now identified market opportunities. The communication skills that delivered presentations now wrote product descriptions that sold.
Twenty years of experience wasn’t wasted. It was the raw material for everything that came after.
The Advice I’d Give
If you’re a skilled professional with a comfortable career and a persistent restlessness that won’t quiet down, here’s what I know:
The restlessness isn’t going to go away. You can drown it in busyness, numb it with comfort, or redirect it into hobbies. But the hum that says “you should be building something” will keep humming until you either build the thing or accept that you won’t. Both options are valid. Limbo is the only one that isn’t.
The fears are real and mostly survivable. Financial uncertainty exists but can be managed through preparation. Identity loss is temporary and leads to identity reconstruction. Experience doesn’t depreciate — it compounds in new contexts. Public failure is uncomfortable but not fatal.
You will not feel ready. I didn’t feel ready. Readiness is a myth propagated by the part of your brain that prefers comfort to growth. The permission to start small is the permission you need — not to start big, not to start perfectly, but to start at all.
The best time to start was five years ago. The second best time is now. The worst time is never.
I left a comfortable consulting career in my late thirties to build something of my own. The years since have been the most demanding, most uncertain, and most fulfilling of my professional life. Not because leaving was brave — it wasn’t, it was overdue. But because the work on the other side of the decision was the work I’d been avoiding for a decade.
The hum is information. Listen to it.
