What are you selling?
A product or service that are the embodiment of your ideas: then you are an entrepreneur. The resources needed to enable entrepreneurs, money: then you are an investor. The expertise that you earned with time, and your time itself: then you are an employee, if dependent on others, or a consultant if independent.
I have never defined myself as a consultant, as I would always prefer to use my expertise as the opportunity to move to the next stage, and it would not be monetized by itself. But in this times of free experimentation I have introduced the opportunity for those who want to pay for the attention that I can give, to be able to do so, through two different options.
On my Patreon page I introduced new tiers that I am now defining as Fans, Supporters, Sponsors, and Benefactors. At each level the engagement becomes more and more specific and proactive, personalized.
On my Calendly you can book sessions of Project Review and Pitch Deck Review that give you and your team a detailed understanding of how to improve them.
I am intrigued about the opportunities of increasing the level of impact of these new experiments, and adding value to them. For example I will be happy to do them in live streaming too, if the teams agree. And I am already providing recording, transcription, topic charts, etc. that are now part of the toolset with which I curate the content that I generate.
As expertise consolidates, it becomes naturally commoditized. On the other hand, if the expert openly experiments, in agreement with the client engaging in the consulting relationship, then by definition there is little room for scaling. This is in my opinion the fundamental conundrum of a consulting business, which I will be happy to explore.