For almost two decades I was a consultant. I charged by the hour, the client paid, I solved the problem, and the next day I moved on to another client. When I founded A Todo Sol in 2020 my brain changed completely. Suddenly, not invoicing for a month stopped being a personal decision and started meaning that several families couldn't pay their rent. This article is what I learned moving from consultant to founder of an installation company with an in-house team, when I already knew how to do all the technical work myself.
If you're thinking about jumping from freelance to founder, or from consultant to entrepreneur in your own sector, this text is for you. It isn't a motivational article. It isn't a list of LinkedIn tips. It's the real lessons that cost me money, time and a few sleepless nights to learn.
Why I decided to found A Todo Sol
For years I advised solar installers in Italy and later in Spain. My job was helping them build efficient commercial operations, design lead funnels, optimise their ad campaigns, correct their technical calculations when needed. I charged a monthly fee or per project. Those who listened prospered. Those who didn't always found an excuse to blame the market, Google Ads, or "Spanish clients who don't understand photovoltaics".
In 2019 I had a conversation with an installer I'd been advising for a year and a half. I'd asked him five times to rebuild his online savings calculator because it was confusing and gave unrealistic numbers that created impossible expectations. He wouldn't do it. He argued that "my clients don't understand detailed numbers". That week, for the third time, one of his clients complained publicly on Google Maps that the promised saving wasn't being delivered. The installer asked me for advice on how to reply to the review. I answered: "start by admitting you're responsible".
Leaving that meeting, in the car, I had a realisation that took me nine months to process: I was investing my time fixing companies whose owners didn't want them fixed. I was paid well for it, but my work had no real impact because in the end it always depended on someone who didn't share my way of understanding the business.
That night, at home, I made a list. Everything the installers I advised did wrong. Everything I would do differently if it were my company. I discovered I had very strong opinions about every aspect — from the lead process to the installation protocol, including how to talk to clients on the phone. Strong, data-based opinions. But none of my clients were willing to implement even half of them.
The decision was simple in the end: if I have such clear opinions about how this business should work, I should execute them myself. I founded A Todo Sol on 7 February 2020. A month later, the world went into lockdown. That wasn't part of the plan.
First change: your time is no longer yours
As a consultant, your time is the resource you sell. The more efficient you are, the more you bill per hour. If you take a day off, it's because you want to. If you don't feel like working on Friday, you don't work on Friday. Your clients respect you because they depend on your technical skill, and that skill isn't easily replaced.
As founder of a company with a team, that changes radically. The first employee I hired was an installation technician. The day I committed to paying him at the end of the month, my time stopped being mine. If on Friday evening I felt like resting but there was a problem on an installation, I couldn't rest. Not because someone was forcing me, but because that person depended on the company generating income for his salary. And I was the only one who could solve that problem. Friday evening ceased to exist as a category.
In the first six months, I worked about 75 hours a week. Not out of heroism, but because the alternative was not paying salaries. And during those six months I discovered something nobody had told me: the myth of the entrepreneur who "works to not work anymore" is a comfortable lie. Founding a company doesn't mean more freedom; it means swapping one kind of restriction (answering to a boss) for another (answering to fifteen people who depend on you).
Today, six years later, A Todo Sol has its own team, standardised processes and an operation that runs without my daily intervention. But the first two years were the definition of voluntary slavery. Anyone who thinks founding a company is a path to personal freedom has never founded one.
Second change: the hard decisions are emotional, not technical
When I was a consultant, important decisions were technical. Migrate to cloud or stay on-prem? Python or Java for this backend? BGP or EIGRP in this datacenter? Complex decisions, yes, but with objective criteria. You could argue, build proofs of concept, take the decision based on data.
As a founder, the hardest decisions are emotional. Firing an employee who isn't performing but who's been with you for two years and has a family. Saying no to a client who offers you a big project but you know will be hell for your team. Accepting that a supplier who's also a personal friend is raising prices 15% and you have to switch. Hiring someone for a management role when you don't even really know what to ask them because you've never managed that kind of profile.
Nobody prepares you for these decisions. And when you're technical, your initial instinct is to treat everything as a technical problem: apply a framework, make a decision matrix, look for the "optimal solution". It took me months to understand that those frameworks don't work when the input is a person. Firing someone isn't a decision you optimise with Excel. It's a decision that hurts and that you have to learn to take even when it hurts, because the alternative — not taking it — harms more people (the rest of the team, the client, yourself).
The first firing I had to do I processed for two weeks before sitting down with the employee. It kept me up at night. When I finally did it, the conversation lasted twenty minutes and was less dramatic than I'd feared — the employee already knew he wasn't fitting, and almost thanked me for telling him the truth. But the weight before was real. Technicians aren't trained for this. And yet, it's the most important part of a founder's job.
Third change: what you know is worth zero without a team to execute it
Here's an ego check all technical founders receive sooner or later. During the first months of A Todo Sol, I did almost all critical tasks myself: I spoke to clients, sized installations, supervised assembly, drafted contracts, reviewed invoices, wrote the website content. My senior-technician ego was saying: "if I don't do it, it won't come out right". That was true in the short term. But it was also a bottleneck preventing the company from growing.
The crisis moment came when I closed a batch of 25 installations in one month. It had never happened before. It was physically impossible for me to supervise everything personally. I had two options: reject some of the contracts and stay in my comfort zone, or really delegate and accept that some things would come out worse than if I did them. I chose the second.
The first months of real delegation were a controlled disaster. Things I would have done in two hours took my team five. They made mistakes I wouldn't have made. I had to redo three installations in the first four months because the sizing was wrong. But I did something crucial: I documented every mistake, created checklists, trained the team on the reasoning behind each technical decision, and resisted the temptation to go back to doing it all myself. Six months later, the team started executing with the quality I was looking for. Twelve months later, in some areas, better than me.
The lesson was hard: a founder's technical knowledge is only worth something if it can be transferred to the team. If you can't write it, teach it, document it and have someone else execute it, that knowledge is a bottleneck, not an asset. Technical founders who don't learn to transfer become luxury employees of their own company. I was close to being one during the first year.
The myth of the technical entrepreneur
In Spain and Italy there's a widespread myth: the ideal entrepreneur is a technician who "dares to build something". The garage, the code, the magic. The idea is that if you can program well enough, or if you know enough engineering, everything else you learn on the go. I've read it in a thousand articles and heard it on many podcasts.
It's a half-truth, and the part that isn't told kills more startups than it should. Yes, you need a technical foundation to build a differentiated product or service. But the technical part is about 20% of a founder's job after the first year. The remaining 80% is: dealing with people (employees, clients, suppliers, partners, investors, family), making decisions with incomplete information, managing your own mental state, selling honestly, and navigating an administrative and fiscal maze nobody teaches you.
If you don't learn that 80%, it doesn't matter how good your product is. The company will die for non-technical reasons. I've seen it again and again. Brilliant engineers with brilliant ideas whose companies close because they can't fire someone, or can't say "no" to a toxic client, or can't hire a second person without feeling jealous.
What an MBA taught me that my 20 years of code hadn't
In February 2020, the same month I founded A Todo Sol, I finished my ThePowerMBA with honours. I'd started the programme a year earlier, when I was still a pure consultant. The timing wasn't accidental: I already sensed I was going to found something and wanted to prepare.
Before doing that MBA I had the typical self-taught-technician opinion: "MBAs are waffle, generic finance, management theories that don't work in real life". I was partly right — there are MBAs like that — but I was wrong overall. What that programme taught me, and that was worth every hour invested:
- Basic financial models: understanding what a balance sheet, P&L, cash flow, amortisation and liquidity ratio are. Things engineers take for granted but few really know how to read. Without this, asking for a bank loan or negotiating with an investor is impossible.
- Unit economics: the discipline of calculating exactly how much it costs to acquire a client, how much to serve them, and how much margin is left. This metric decides whether a company can grow or not. I applied it intuitively as a consultant but never formalised it.
- Lean startup and MVP: the concept that the first version of a product or service should be as small as possible and validated with real clients before investing in scaling. Obvious when you write it, surprisingly hard to apply when you're a technician and want everything to be "perfect" before showing it.
- Structured negotiation and persuasion: specific techniques for difficult conversations with clients, suppliers and employees. No magic, no tricks, just a common language to express interests, limits and commitments. Saves me hours every week now.
- Operational leadership: how to motivate a team, give feedback, set clear expectations. Things technicians tend to ignore because we feel uncomfortable doing them, but which are literally the job of whoever runs a company.
Can all this be learned without an MBA? Yes, probably. But it takes ten years of reading scattered books, and you make the mistakes in random order. A good structured programme gives you the map of the most common mistakes and tells you "watch out for this, this and this". That's the real advantage.
Advice for consultants thinking about founding something
If you're a senior consultant right now — freelance or employed at a boutique — and you're thinking about jumping to founding your own thing, here are five pieces of advice I wish I'd heard before 7 February 2020:
- Start small, but start real. Don't wait for the perfect product or the 50-page business plan. Make a minimal offer, find three real clients, and measure. What you learn from three real clients in two months is worth more than what you learn from two years of planning.
- Calculate your personal runway before jumping. Count how many months you can live without invoicing a cent. Multiply by 1.5 (everything always takes longer than you think). If the result is less than 12 months, don't found yet. Keep saving or keep freelancing until you have it.
- Hire your first employee before thinking about it too much. A technician's instinct is to stay alone as long as possible to "save money". That instinct will kill you. Hiring the first person is the hardest psychological step and also the most necessary. You can't build a company alone.
- Learn to sell without smoke. Senior technical consultants tend to hate salespeople. When you become a founder, you have to become a salesperson. But an honest one, who explains what they can and can't do, who states prices without beating around the bush, who doesn't promise the impossible. That school of sales is rare and valuable.
- Accept that you're going to suffer. The first two years will be hard. You'll have weeks when you'll think about quitting. You'll have nights when you wake up at 4 am thinking about an invoice. If you're not willing to go through that, don't found. Go back to being freelance or employed. It's a valid and honest decision, and you'll have avoided destroying money and health for no reason.
Conclusion
Founding A Todo Sol was, without a doubt, the hardest and most profitable decision of my professional life. Hard because it forced me to learn things I didn't want to learn, to change habits I'd had since I was twenty, to face my own limits as a technician and as a person. Profitable because six years later the company invoices and employs more than a dozen people, has a reputation in the sector, and lets me work on the technical projects that really interest me — no longer as an external consultant but as someone who decides from inside.
If you're a consultant and you're asking yourself whether to jump, my final advice is this: don't do it for money, because as a founder you'll earn less per hour for at least two years. Don't do it for freedom, because you'll have less freedom than you have now. Do it only if you have a concrete vision of how your sector should work and you're willing to cross the two-year desert to implement it. If you don't have that vision, stay where you are. Senior consulting is a good life and owes nothing to anyone.
But if you have that vision — if you read this and think "I know exactly how I'd do it differently" — then you've probably already made the decision before reading me. In that case, start small, hire early, accept the suffering, and don't lose your honesty. The rest are details.