0.3 Entry conditions, honestly stated

Four things are widely believed to be required and are not: an MBA, a big-firm background, a large network at the start, and seniority. Each helps. None is a gate, and treating them as gates keeps capable people out of a profession they would be good at.

Four things are actually required.

Written clarity. The output of this job is writing. Someone who cannot produce a clear page cannot do it. This is also the most improvable of the four, which is why the programme asks you to write every week from Level 0 onward.
Comfort being the least knowledgeable person in the room about the client's own operations. You will always know less about their business than they do. Beginners find this humiliating and compensate by talking. Your contribution is a different kind of knowing, not a larger amount of the same kind.
Tolerance for unresolved ambiguity. Most engagements are ill-defined for the first third. People who need clarity before they can begin find this genuinely painful, and it does not get much better with experience. It becomes familiar rather than comfortable.
Willingness to be disliked briefly. Findings that change nothing are comfortable and worthless. If no one has ever been annoyed by your work, you have probably not said anything.

On money, since it decides this for most people

Consulting income is lumpy and back-loaded. The first year is usually worse than employment, sometimes considerably. The third year is usually better. Anyone entering should plan for a period of low and irregular income and should not treat month three as evidence of anything at all.

The specific trap is that the first year contains a lot of unpaid work that feels like progress: proposals, scoping calls, coffee meetings, favours. This work is necessary and it is not income, and confusing the two is how people conclude at month eight that they are nearly there when they are not.

What a realistic first eighteen months looks like

Numbers vary by market. The shape does not.

Period	Typical pattern	The mistake made here
Months 1 to 4	Little or no paid work. Heavy unpaid: positioning, first conversations, one or two free or near-free engagements taken for the reference.	Concluding the practice has failed. Four months is not a signal.
Months 5 to 9	First paid work, usually subcontracted or from an existing relationship. Income irregular and below target.	Raising rates too early, or taking anything at any price out of relief.
Months 10 to 14	Second and third engagements. First referral arrives. Utilisation is genuinely poor and this is normal.	Failing to keep selling while delivering, which produces the month 15 gap.
Months 15 to 18	Either a gap caused by not selling while busy, or the beginning of a pipeline. Which one happens is almost entirely determined by behaviour in months 10 to 14.	Treating the gap as market conditions rather than as a consequence.

The single most common failure

Not lack of skill and not lack of demand. It is stopping all business development the moment delivery work arrives, producing a feast and famine cycle that eventually catches the practice at a moment when reserves are low, forcing acceptance of bad work at bad rates, which consumes the next quarter, which prevents business development. Book a fixed, non-negotiable block each week for pipeline from the first month, and defend it exactly as you would a client meeting.

Writing clarity is trainable and here is the drill

Take anything you have written. Cut 30 percent of the words without losing any content. Then cut another 20 percent. The first cut removes filler. The second forces you to make choices about what the piece is actually saying, which is where the improvement lives. Do this weekly for three months and the effect on client-facing work is substantial and visible.