I didn’t frame a dollar bill, but I remember exactly how I got my first client as an independent consultant. I had worked in nonprofits for 14 years, most of it at the same organization after graduating from Yale in 2006, so striking out on my own was scary.
My first step was a website and a LinkedIn profile, which went first because neither required asking anybody for anything. My second was calling people I knew to drum up work.
One of the earliest calls went to Alyssa Schuren, now of The Management Center. She gave the keynote during my interview process for Green Corps, my first job out of college. Alyssa was also a Green Corps alum and talked about her clean air campaign in Bridgeport, Connecticut. From the audience it sounded like the best job in the world. We stayed in touch through her years at Toxics Action Center and Environment America and as Commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and mine as CFO and COO at The Public Interest Network.
The call itself was scary, too, because I had no idea what it was supposed to look like. Was I asking her for something? Or just telling her what I was up to, and did she even want to hear that? Did I need an agenda? What, literally, was I going to say? Six years later the call is a blur, but I remember the questions running through my head, and what I learned from my first real foray into network. Most people want to hear from you, and want to hear how you’re doing, especially if you’re interested in what they’re doing. I was interested in Alyssa, for sure. Alyssa works with government officials and public sector agencies, a world I know little about and find fascinating, so I had plenty to ask. Curiosity about the other person, plus an earnest account of how you’re doing, is the whole basis of a good networking call, if we have to call it that. Nobody needs an agenda.
The call had one other thing going for it: Alyssa knew my work, and she knew me. That, I think now, is what a network is: the people who could describe your work to a stranger without you in the room. Alyssa had been one for fifteen years, and I was lucky: she had an idea right away for my consulting practice.
The Impact Project (a great organization, sunsetted in 2024) needed fractional CFO help for the summer and fall of 2020. A key member of the leadership team had gotten very sick with COVID and needed an extended leave. Alyssa thought I might be a fit and made the introduction, and after a few conversations with the Executive Director and leadership team, they hired me.
TIP as my first client set some of my defaults. TIP was fiscally sponsored, with strong legal and operational foundations, and their rigor became my contracting and administrative practice. When a client compliments my contracts or my paperwork today, the credit belongs to TIP.
TIP hired me again in the summer of 2022 to support their state political work, and they were among the first clients of Chorus, the company I later co-founded. One introduction in 2020 became three engagements across two companies, and I am still in touch with many of the people who were there. But it’s all thanks to Alyssa, really.
Splitting my time between consulting and Chorus has only made it clearer that relationships are everything. Our 2025 Source Report said the same: about 80 percent of client engagements come from personal networks. I sound like some old guy at the Rotary Club giving a speech about networks, and 22-year-old me would have hated hearing 42-year-old me say anything as trite as “your network is the key to your professional success.”
In fact, I have always wished I could succeed on my own. In high school and college I dreamed of being a novelist, partly because a novelist, I believed, could make a living without depending on anyone. It would just be me, writing – a team of one. To a fantasy and sci-fi nerd, that sounded like the most realistic embodiment of magic there could be.
It is magical, in the sense that it isn’t real. Read the acknowledgments at the back of any novel. They run for pages. We are the social species, and getting other people to work with us is everything. I didn’t tend my relationships in my twenties so much as stay in one place long enough for people like Alyssa to see me work, and that turned out to be enough. I try harder now, though the 22-year-old in me still wishes he didn’t have to!