The decision to quit your job and go full-time consulting usually gets framed as a confidence problem — do you believe in yourself enough to make the leap. It isn't. It's an underwriting problem. Four specific, checkable things need to be true before quitting is a calculated bet instead of a gamble, and none of them are about how you feel on a given Tuesday.
Here's the checklist, worked through with real numbers.
1. Financial runway — a number, not a feeling
"I have some savings" isn't a plan. The number that matters is: months of your actual monthly expenses covered in cash, not your old salary, not a revenue target. Add up rent or mortgage, insurance, debt payments, groceries, and everything else you spend in a normal month — then divide your savings by that figure. Six months of runway is the floor for most people; less than that and one slow month turns into a crisis instead of a bad quarter.
2. A paying client, or a pipeline signal you can trust
You don't need a full book of business to quit — but you need more than optimism. The bar is either one paying client already engaged, or two or three conversations that have moved past "this sounds interesting" into something concrete: a scoping call scheduled, a verbal yes pending a proposal, a specific start date being discussed. "A few people said they'd hire me" at a networking event is not a pipeline signal. A prospect asking when you can start is.
3. A real niche — not "I do a bit of everything"
Generalist positioning is the quiet reason a lot of new consultants' pipelines dry up around month three. A real niche is a sentence a stranger could repeat back accurately: "she does pricing strategy for B2B SaaS companies under $10M ARR," not "he helps businesses grow." If you can't describe your niche in one specific sentence right now, that's worth fixing before you quit, not after — it's the difference between referrals that convert and introductions that go nowhere.
4. The legal and logistics basics, actually done
This is the boring item on the list, which is exactly why it gets skipped and then causes a scramble in week one. Before your last paycheck: register a business entity (an LLC is standard for most solo consultants), open a separate business bank account, and have an invoice template and a contract template ready to send. You don't need a lawyer on retainer — you need to not be improvising your first invoice the same week you're trying to deliver client work.
Sarah, marketing consultant, current salary $95,000.Monthly expenses: $4,200. Savings: $28,000 — that's 6.7 months of runway, above the floor.
Pipeline: one signed client at a $3,500/month retainer, plus a second prospect who's asked for a proposal after two scoping calls. The signed retainer alone covers 83% of her monthly expenses before she's billed a single hour beyond it.
Niche: "email lifecycle marketing for DTC subscription brands" — specific enough that the client who signed her found her through a referral that used almost that exact phrase.
Logistics: LLC filed six weeks earlier, business checking account open, invoice and contract templates ready. She gave notice the week the second proposal went out — not before the checklist was complete, and not long after either.
What doesn't belong on the checklist
Waiting until you feel ready isn't on this list on purpose. Feeling ready and being underwritten are different things, and consultants who wait for the first tend to wait indefinitely. If your runway, your pipeline signal, your niche, and your logistics are all checked, the remaining hesitation is just nerves — and nerves aren't a reason to keep collecting a paycheck for work you've already decided to leave.
Once that first client is signed, the next document you need is the proposal that makes it official — see the independent consultant proposal template for what to lead with when there's no firm or letterhead behind your name yet.