No team, no guest pipeline, and every hour you spend is an hour you did not bill. What a show looks like when you are the entire firm.
By Will Nash
9 November 2026
Running a show as an independent consultant is a different problem from running one inside a firm, and most advice is written for the firm.
You have no team to absorb the production, no marketing person to promote it, and no pipeline of colleagues to interview. Every hour you put in is an hour you did not bill. Those constraints should decide the shape of the whole thing.
You do not need a guest
The default assumption is that a podcast means interviews, which for a solo consultant means chasing people, coordinating diaries, and rescheduling twice. It is the single largest cost in the format and it is optional.
We ran a listening study earlier this year with 160 people to test exactly this. We re-edited episodes so the guest spoke alone, without the interview questions around them, and that version held attention past ninety seconds about as well as the two-handed original. Among people who had turned down every conventional interview clip we offered, just under a third stayed with the solo one.
That was one edit rather than a production process proven at scale, so take it that far and no further. But it does suggest the interview is a convention rather than a requirement, which matters most to the person who would have to arrange all those diaries.
Cover the narrow thing you are known for
A solo consultant's advantage is specificity. You are not trying to represent a firm with eleven practice areas, so you can make a show about one subject, for one kind of buyer, and be the obvious person on it.
The test is whether a listener could describe your show in one sentence that includes what you do. If they cannot, you have made a general business podcast, and there are already a great many of those.
Pick a cadence you can hold in a bad month
This is where solo shows die. Weekly is easy to sustain in the two weeks after launch and almost impossible in the month when a client project overruns.
Fortnightly is safer. A season of eight episodes with a stated end is safer still, because it finishes rather than lapses, and you can decide afterwards whether to do another with the benefit of having done one.
Be honest about the hours
A short episode is not a short job if you do everything yourself: deciding the subject, recording, editing, writing the description, publishing, and telling people it exists. The recording is the smallest part.
Which is the real argument for getting help with the production rather than the thinking. The part worth your time is having something to say and saying it. The part worth handing over is everything after you stop talking.
What it does for a business of one
It does the work a first meeting used to do. A prospect who has heard you think about their problem for twenty minutes arrives at a call already knowing how you approach things, which shortens the conversation and filters out the people you would have disagreed with anyway.
It also travels. An episode gets forwarded within an organisation in a way a capability document does not, which is how a single contact becomes three.
Where this does not help
If you are fully booked and content to stay that way, this is a cost with no return attached. Audio is a way of reaching people you have not met, and that only matters if you want to.
If most of your work arrives through one or two referral partners, spend the time on them instead. A show is a slow instrument and it will not outperform a relationship that is already producing.
In short
Drop the assumption that you need guests, pick one narrow subject you are genuinely known for, and choose a cadence that survives a bad month. Then hand over as much of the production as you can afford, because the part that cannot be delegated is the thinking.
We are an AI-native podcast agency, and a fair number of the people we work with are one person. We take on everything after the talking, which is where the hours actually go. If you are running solo and want the production handled, get in touch.
