Leaving big consulting for a one-person foundry

I'd been circling the idea of going independent for a couple of years. In 2026, after five years at IBM Consulting, I stopped circling and started Foundry Tabor.

There's a genre of post where someone announces they're "going independent" and it reads like a press release. I'd rather tell you what the move looks like from the inside: what the big-firm years teach you, what the money looks like once you're the whole firm, and what I'd tell someone thinking about it.

What big-firm consulting actually teaches you

I spent a long time in rooms with federal agencies, large retailers, school systems, logistics companies. NIH. The Air Force. A school system with nearly 900,000 students. Real stakes, real scale, real constraints.

The skill you build isn't technical. It's reading an organization. Figuring out who actually makes decisions versus who is listed as making them. What the political cost of a given technical choice is. Which "requirement" is a requirement, and which is one director's preference wearing a costume.

You learn to deliver something defensible inside a system that isn't optimized for delivering things. That skill is enormously valuable and almost entirely invisible on a resume.

The thing you don't build is proximity. On a big program you're one of forty people on an account, with three layers between you and anyone whose problem you're solving. You write the component. Someone else writes the deck. Someone else presents the deck. If the thing works, you hear about it secondhand two quarters later.

I got good at that arrangement. I never stopped noticing it.

The economics nobody explains until you're out

Here's what the bill rate math looks like from the other side.

The client pays a number. You receive a meaningfully smaller number. The gap covers sales, recruiting, benefits, management, real estate, bench time, and margin. That isn't theft. Those things cost money, and a large firm genuinely provides them.

But once you're the whole firm, you find out how much of that apparatus you actually need. Sales is a mailing list and people who've worked with you. Recruiting is not a category. Real estate is a room in my house. Bench time is the thing you manage carefully and price for.

What's left is a rate that's lower than what the client was paying, higher than what I was taking home, and honest in both directions.

The part that's harder than the math: the floor is gone. No bench. Nobody to route me to the next engagement when one ends. Every month, I have to have already solved the month after it. That's a different kind of tiring than being overworked on a large program, and I'd be underrating it if I didn't say so.

Why "foundry"

The name comes from Mount Tabor, a dormant cinder cone sitting inside Portland city limits. A volcano with a park on it. I liked the idea of something geological and quiet that used to be violent.

But foundry is the load-bearing word. A foundry is small, it takes raw material, and it produces a finished thing with a specific shape. It's not a factory and it's not an agency. No assembly line, no account team, no bench of interchangeable resources. There's a specific person making a specific thing for a specific client, and you can go talk to him.

That's the entire pitch. It's less a marketing position than an accurate description of the operation.

What the work actually is now

Mostly front-end architecture in React and TypeScript and Salesforce platform work, and increasingly the overlap between the two. Companies with a real CRM commitment who need someone who can write a proper component and knows what a governor limit is.

The clients are agencies who need embedded senior help without adding headcount.

The shape of the day is different in ways I didn't anticipate. I write more than I used to: estimates, scope notes, explanations of why an approach is wrong. Nobody translates for me anymore, which also means I don't get misrepresented anymore. That trade has been entirely worth it.

Would I recommend it

To someone with years of enterprise delivery behind them, at least one client relationship that would follow them, and the runway to absorb a slow quarter: yes, without much hesitation. The skills transfer better than you'd expect, and the overhead you thought you needed mostly isn't.

To someone three years in, hoping independence will fix a job they don't like: probably not yet. Independence doesn't fix the work. It removes the people standing between you and it. That's only an improvement if you like the work.

I like the work.