I have some version of this conversation almost every week. A talented Salesforce professional, usually with ten or more years of experience, leaves a stable W-2 role to consult independently. Smart move on paper. More autonomy, more upside, work that actually interests them.
Six months in, they’re doing work for anyone who will hire them. Twelve months in, they’re thinking about going back to W-2.
It’s not that consulting was the wrong call. It’s that the decision gets made without solving the one problem that determines whether it works: a clear, defined offering. Without that, independent consultants drift into “everything to everyone” positioning, and that’s where the panic sets in.
The professionals I see thriving on the consulting side aren’t the ones with the broadest skill sets. They’re the ones who can answer in one sentence what they do, who they do it for, and why that matters. Everything else follows from that.
There’s another dynamic that compounds this. When you’re consulting, you’re not selling. When you’re selling, you’re not consulting. The income reflects those troughs, and without a pipeline running in the background, every project end feels like starting over.
The W-2 pull is real too, and I’m not dismissing it. Healthcare costs, income gaps between projects, the mental weight of running a business while doing the work – those are legitimate pressures, not just a failure of nerves. But most of the people I talk to who go back to W-2 aren’t going back because consulting didn’t fit. They’re going back because they never gave consulting a real structure to stand on.
If you’re weighing this right now, the question worth sitting with isn’t “W-2 or consulting?” It’s “what would I actually offer, and to whom?”
That’s usually where the real answer lives.
Happy to think through it with you if you’re at that crossroads. And if you’re on the hiring side looking for Salesforce talent on either a permanent or contract basis, that’s a conversation worth having too.
