Helping Higher Education Professionals market their talents and skills.
Guidance from someone who recently walked the path you are about to walk.
You have spent two or three decades inside higher education. You know how to run a division, manage a complex budget, navigate accreditation, lead through crisis, and produce results inside an institution someone else built. You are now thinking about doing this work independently, on your terms, for institutions that need exactly what you know. The expertise is not the problem. The business around the expertise is.
Who This Is For
This advisory practice is built for senior higher education professionals considering the move to independent consulting. That includes vice presidents and cabinet officers approaching retirement who want a meaningful second act, mid- and late-career administrators ready to leave institutional life on their own timeline, recently retired executives who have already been asked to consult and do not know where to start, and professionals who can clearly articulate the value they deliver but have never had to price it, contract for it, or invoice for it.
Three Kinds of Practice
Most advice for new consultants assumes everyone is building the same thing. You are not. Everything in this advisory, from the free assessment to the launch plan, calibrates to one of three practice designs. The Retirement Supplement practice targets $20,000 to $50,000 a year at 5 to 15 hours a week, built on a pension or Social Security foundation, designed so the practice serves the life rather than the reverse. The Niche Practitioner practice targets $100,000 to $175,000 a year at 20 to 30 hours a week, deliberately one person, built on a recognizable specialty. The Growing Practice targets $200,000 to $400,000 or more at full effort, building toward something substantial. The assessment asks you to name your design before you score yourself, because the same score reads differently across the three.
The Core Problem
Higher education trains us to lead inside institutions. It does not teach us to build one. When you leave the institution, you discover quickly that no one taught you how to choose an entity structure, what S-Corp election actually does for you, how to set up a chart of accounts, what belongs in a Statement of Work, how to price a six-week engagement versus a six-month one, what professional liability insurance you actually need, how to read a 1099, or how to keep a small business running while you are also delivering the work. Most of us figure this out by getting it wrong the first few times. That is expensive and it is unnecessary.
What I Offer
I work with you across the full arc of building an independent consulting practice. In the pre-launch phase we work on naming, brand identity, scope of practice, and the entity structure questions you need to bring to your CPA. At launch we address website fundamentals, LinkedIn positioning, proposal templates, engagement letters, and the structure of a Statement of Work that protects both you and the client. In your first year we work on pricing models, contract negotiation, scope creep management, invoicing cadence, and whether retainer or project work fits your situation. In year two and beyond we address scaling decisions, when to subcontract, when to say no to work, and what eventual wind-down or succession might look like.
What I Am Not
I want to be direct about this because it matters. I am not a CPA. I am not a tax advisor. I am not an attorney. I am not a technology consultant. I am not a marketing professional. I am not a financial planner.
What I am is someone who recently had to find, vet, and work with every one of those professionals to build my own practice. I know which questions to ask them, which decisions you can defer, which ones you absolutely cannot, and where the expensive mistakes hide. I will help you build the team of professionals around you and translate what they tell you into decisions you can actually make. When you need a CPA, an attorney, or an insurance broker, I will help you find the right one and prepare you to use their time well.
How We Work Together
Engagements come in five forms, and every path starts with the same free 30-minute Discovery Call.
A single Strategy Session fits someone still deciding whether to make the leap: ninety minutes of working time and a written 30-day decision framework.
Launch Light is three structured sessions over four to five months, built for the supplemental-scale practice that rests on a pension foundation.
Launch Full is six sessions over three to four months, taking specialty and full-scale practices from entity formation through the first signed client.
The Self-Serve Library puts every document, template, and the live planning workbook in your hands to work through on your own, with full credit toward either program if you upgrade within ninety days.
Ongoing Advisory continues monthly through the first year or two of practice, when most of the avoidable mistakes happen.
What You Walk Away With
A Quick Start guide matched to your practice design: your numbers, your reading path, and your launch lane on three pages. A live Excel planning workbook that computes your floor rate, project fees, retainers, and value-based pricing from your own numbers, and tracks your network and technology costs against the targets for your design. The complete GSD Practice Library: a launch plan with a lane for your archetype and a relationship track that starts on Day 1, plus proposal, engagement letter, Statement of Work, invoice, scope change, and mutual NDA templates, each with commentary on the clauses and decisions that matter. The pre-launch prerequisites, from pension return-to-work rules to the health coverage bridge, with a guide for the conversation at home that everything else waits on. A vetted list of questions to bring to your CPA, attorney, and insurance broker so you do not waste their time or yours. And a peer who has done this work and who will take your call when the first hard thing happens, because it will.
Why Me
I spent more than three decades in senior higher education roles before launching GSD Higher Education Consulting. I built this practice recently enough that I remember every wrong turn, every overpriced vendor, every tax decision I had to revisit, and every contract clause I learned the hard way. I am advising peers, not selling services to strangers. The people I work with in this practice are colleagues I respect, navigating a transition I have just made myself.
Call to Action
Schedule a 30-minute conversation. If this advisory work is not the right fit for where you are, I will tell you and point you somewhere useful. There is no charge for the first conversation and no obligation after it.
Book a 30-minute call Email Scot directly
Not sure if you are ready to launch?
Take the 15-question Readiness Self-Assessment. Eight to twelve minutes. Free. You receive your score (out of 75), the readiness band you fall into, and specific next steps for your situation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to wait until I retire to start?
No, and in most cases I would argue against waiting. The most successful transitions I have seen involve eighteen to twenty-four months of parallel work, where you stand up the legal entity, build the website, develop your service offerings, and land your first one or two clients while still drawing an institutional salary. You take on small engagements that do not conflict with your current role, you build a pipeline, and you walk into retirement with a functioning business rather than an idea for one. The exception is when your current role has a conflict-of-interest policy that prohibits outside consulting. We will work through that early.
Should I form an LLC or stay a sole proprietor?
In almost every case, form an LLC. Sole proprietorship exposes your personal assets to business liability, which matters more in consulting than people realize. An LLC is inexpensive to form, simple to maintain, and creates a meaningful legal barrier between your business and your personal finances. The follow-on question, whether to elect S-Corp tax treatment for that LLC, depends on your projected revenue and is a conversation for your CPA. As a rough guide, S-Corp election starts making sense somewhere around 60,000 to 80,000 in annual net business income because of the self-employment tax savings, but it adds payroll complexity and cost. We will frame the question so your CPA can answer it efficiently.
How much does it cost to start?
Less than you think and more than you want. Plan for roughly 2,500 to 5,000 dollars in actual startup costs in the first ninety days. That covers state LLC filing fees, registered agent service, an EIN, a basic website with a custom domain, a business email, accounting software, professional liability insurance for the first year, and an initial consultation with a CPA and an attorney. You do not need an office. You do not need staff. You do not need expensive software. The discipline is in spending on what protects you and generates revenue and refusing to spend on anything that just looks like a business.
How long before I land my first client?
Plan conservatively for six to nine months from the day you decide to do this to the day you sign your first paying engagement, and roughly twelve to eighteen months before the practice can replace a full institutional salary. Then beat the plan: clients who run the launch plan’s relationship track from Day 1, reconnecting with their network in week one rather than waiting for the website to exist, typically hold their first warm conversations within two weeks and sign their first engagement inside or shortly after the program window. The first client almost always comes from your existing network, someone who knows your work and has a problem you can solve. The second client comes from the first one. The realistic risk to manage is the gap between launch and revenue, which is why the infrastructure work and the relationship work run in parallel from the first day.