The 6 Solo Business Models (And How to Pick Yours)
Each one determines how you price, who you serve, and where you’ll get stuck.
Six Models, Six Sets of Tradeoffs
Most solos back into a business model without realizing they’re making a choice. They take on whatever work comes their way. They price based on what feels reasonable. They build a business by default instead of by design.
That’s how you end up three years in, doing work that drains you, wondering why things feel stuck.
The fix isn’t a rebrand. It’s understanding that there are six distinct models available to you as a solo. Each one determines how you spend your time, how you price, how many clients you can serve, and where you’ll eventually hit a ceiling. Each one comes with real tradeoffs. The point is to deliberately choose those trade-offs rather than discover them the hard way.
I learned this by testing many of these models. (The hard way.)
When I went solo, I started as a fractional CMO for early-stage startups. I enjoyed working with the founders and early teams. But I realized I didn’t love being the entire marketing department. These companies didn’t need a fractional CMO yet. They needed guidance and expertise to know what decisions to make and what good looks like. And they needed trusted specialist executors, whether full-time hires, freelancers, or agencies, to do the work.
So I tested other models. For a while, I thought I’d build a case study agency. I had a few clients running through the process with a contractor working under my brand. But I realized I didn’t want to run an agency. Hiring, managing a team, and owning production. Not for me.
Then I tested a matchmaking service. Connect companies looking for freelancers and agencies with the right ones. Take a referral cut. I thought it could become the whole business. But it didn’t align with the work I actually love doing. I love connecting people, but I also love teaching, coaching, and helping people get results. Matchmaking didn’t do that.
Eventually, I landed on an advisory model. It fits the work I’m best at and enjoy the most. But I would have gotten there much sooner if I’d understood the different models and their trade-offs from the beginning.
One note: “freelancer” isn’t on this list. In my opinion, freelancing isn’t a business model. Freelancers take orders and compete on price. Every model below involves selling judgment, not just hours.
The 6 Solo Business Models
There are six distinct ways to structure a solo B2B services business. Each one creates different expectations for buyers, different constraints for you, and different ceilings on what you can build.
Fractional
A fractional fills a team gap on a part-time basis. You sit inside the company. You attend their meetings. You manage their people. You’re treated like a member of the team, just not full-time.
Phoebe Noce, a member of the 10x Solo community, runs Stellar PMM, a fractional product marketing practice. She works with three SaaS clients at a time, generating $20-25K per month. She embeds in each company, fills the PMM gap, and operates on a monthly flat rate with a capped hour ceiling.
The key feature of the fractional model is that you’re inside the org chart. The key constraint is that your time is directly tied to your income. Three clients is roughly the ceiling before quality starts to drop.
Interim
An interim looks similar to a fractional on the surface, but the intent is different. An interim takes over a role temporarily with a defined end date. The goal is to stabilize, build, and hand off to a permanent hire.
Elena Verna, former Head of Growth at Amplitude and Miro, is known for this approach. She takes interim growth leadership roles, typically for about a year, with an explicit succession plan built in from day one. When the permanent hire starts, she transitions out.
The distinction matters for how you structure your business. A fractional is ongoing and part-time. An interim is full-time (or close to it) and temporary. That changes how you price, how many clients you can serve, and what your pipeline needs to look like. You’re not building a book of concurrent clients. You’re lining up the next role before the current one ends.
Consultant
A consultant diagnoses problems and builds solutions, but doesn’t embed in the org. You’re brought in for your expertise on a specific problem. You do the work, deliver it, and move on.
Two members of the 10x Solo community show how differently this can look.
Evan Kubitschek runs Grow Rogue, a marketing operations consultancy. He works on retainer ($5-9K+/month) to fix what he calls the “foundational operations gap” at B2B tech companies. Database health, lead scoring, CRM integrations. He prices based on the complexity of the system’s problems, not the hours. He’s intentionally solo, hitting ~$50K/month with no employees and no agency ambitions.
Lee Densmer runs Globia Content Marketing with a completely different structure. She sells fixed-scope, three-month engagements at $15-20K. She helps marketing leaders define their content strategy, establish priorities, train their teams, and then she exits. No ongoing retainer. No embedding. She deliberately rejected the fractional model because long engagements became stale and created ambiguity around value.
Same model. Very different businesses. The through-line: neither one sits inside the client’s org. They work on the business, not in it.
Advisor
An advisor sells ongoing access to their judgment, not their hands. You’re not doing the work. You’re helping the client make better decisions about the work.
This is the model I landed on after testing several others. Here’s how it works in practice: I start with 2-3 months of hands-on consulting. Think of it as a copilot phase. We build the foundations together. Audience, offer, messaging, channels. Then the engagement shifts to a lighter advisory mode. Weekly calls, metrics review, sounding board, introductions. Month-to-month after the initial period. Most clients stay 8-12 months. Some have been with me for over two years.
The advisor model trades depth for leverage. You don’t own the execution. You influence the direction. That means you can serve more clients at once, but it only works if you’ve built enough credibility that people will pay for your perspective without requiring you to do the work yourself.
Coach
A coach works with the person, not the company. The engagement is about developing the individual’s skills, frameworks, or decision-making. The company might pay for it, but the work is centered on the human being across from you.
Andrew Capland, who runs Delivering Value, is a good example. He coaches product and growth leaders through structured programs with a defined curriculum. The client is buying development for themselves, not a deliverable for their company.
The test for whether you’re coaching or consulting: is the work centered on building the person’s capability, or on solving the company’s problem? If it’s the person you’re coaching.
Micro-Agency
An agency owner builds a team to deliver work at scale. You’re not the one doing the execution. You’re the one selling it, managing it, and making sure quality stays high.
Justin Vajko runs Dialog Video Marketing, a micro agency that produces short-form video content for consultants and experts. He interviews clients remotely, and his team of contractors turns those conversations into clips. Productized subscriptions at $900-$1,300/month.
Justin doesn’t edit videos. He doesn’t need to. He built a system that delivers consistent output without requiring his hands-on involvement in every project. That’s the key distinction: an agency owner sells execution delivered by others, not by themselves.
How the 6 Models Compare
Where the Model Breaks Down
The most common problem isn’t picking the wrong model. It’s operating in one model while thinking you’re in another. You say you’re a fractional but refuse to attend internal meetings. That’s consulting. You call yourself a consultant, but spend most of your time on weekly check-ins and guidance. That’s advising.
The mismatch creates friction. You price based on the wrong structure. You take on scope that doesn’t fit. And you burn energy fighting your own model rather than working within one that fits.
I’ve written before that changing your title isn’t the same as changing your business constraints. Titles are labels. Constraints are structural. The model is determined by how you operate, not what you call yourself.
Your Model Should Match the Business You Want to Run
Every solo I’ve profiled made a deliberate choice. Not based on what sounded best on LinkedIn. Based on the business they wanted to live inside of. None of their choices is right or wrong. But each one comes with tradeoffs that compound over time.
Your model determines your pricing structure, your client capacity, and the ceiling you’ll eventually hit. It also determines which marketing channels are even available to you. A productized agency can run paid ads and content marketing. A high-touch advisory practice usually grows through referrals and thought leadership. The model comes first. The growth strategy follows.
If you’ve written a 10x Lighthouse goal or a near-term vision for your business, your model should be able to get you there. When I wrote mine, I realized my advisory model alone wouldn’t reach it. That wasn’t a reason to abandon it. It was a signal that I’d need to layer something on top of it. It was one of the reasons I chose to launch the 10x Solo community. The model showed me the ceiling. The vision showed me I’d need to break through it.
Pick the model that matches the business you want to run. The tradeoffs are unavoidable. The choice is not.
Keep building,
Garrett
P.S. Many of the solos profiled in this post are members of 10x Solo, the private community I run for full-time B2B consultants, fractionals, and micro-agency owners. Members get access to detailed case studies on how each of these businesses actually works: pricing, client capacity, what they tried, what they dropped, and why. If you’re trying to figure out which model fits the business you want to build, this is a good place to do it. Apply here.
Have questions? Ask me in a comment below. 👇