Early-stage consultants and founders should aim for 65% utilization or less, not maxing out their schedule. Keep baseline income covered, then build on top of that. The spare time develops your brand, which pays off faster long-term than squeezing every hour.
When you're starting out, it's okay to just want to fill your pipe. I talk a lot about strategy and the elevated and the whatever, and those things can all be really useful, and I hope they help serve you too. But when you are just getting started out, it is often the case that you don't really have customers yet. You don't have your clients yet. You're just working to get them in the door. It's okay to say that you want to start by just getting them in the door. It's okay to say, I want to get to a certain level of income as a base case, and then I want to be stacking on top of that. My key advice here is try to keep your utilization below, say, 65% when you're in that initial phase. Don't put yourself in a position where you need to be working all the time just to be making your nut. This will give you room to be able to develop your brand equity early, which will pay dividends much quicker than you can imagine.
