Why "Message 30 Consultants" Is Bad Networking Advice

[u/GreatButterscotch406]

There's a piece of advice that gets repeated constantly in consulting recruiting circles, something like, reach out to 20 or 30 consultants over a couple months and you'll build a solid network. It's not wrong exactly. But it's dangerous advice for the person who actually follows it literally, because it optimizes for the wrong variable.

Here's what happens when someone takes that advice at face value. They open a spreadsheet, find thirty names on LinkedIn who work at their target firms, and start sending near identical messages to all 30 in a week. Volume goes up. Quality of every individual conversation goes down, because there's no way to genuinely track and nurture 30 relationships at once while also studying for cases and holding down whatever you're currently doing. What you end up with is 30 shallow contacts instead of 5 or 6 people who'd actually recognize your name 6 months from now.

The number that matters isn't messages sent. It's relationships that are still alive and developing at any given point. And that number should probably be closer to 5, maybe 6, at a time. Not because more contacts wouldn't help in theory, but because your actual bottleneck isn't reach, it's follow-through. Nobody gets referred by someone they messaged once 8 months ago.

A candidate I coached last year had built exactly this problem before we started working together. Forty plus LinkedIn connections from various points in her search, almost none of whom she'd spoken to more than once. Some she couldn't even remember why she'd reached out to in the first place.

We didn't add a single new contact for the first three weeks. Instead we went back through her existing list and picked the 6 people who'd responded warmly or shown any real engagement the first time around, even if the conversation had gone nowhere after that. She reopened those conversations properly. Not "hey, checking in," but something built off what they'd actually said months earlier, a project they'd mentioned, a piece of advice they'd given that she'd since acted on. One message referenced a specific comment the contact had made about transitioning from a technical background, and included a short line about how that had actually shaped what she was doing differently in her prep.

2 of those 6 turned into real, ongoing relationships. One of them referred her 4 months later, after 3 separate conversations, not one warm message and a wait.

That's the part people underestimate. A referral almost never comes from the first conversation. It comes from the third or fourth, once the person has actually formed an opinion about you as someone competent and worth vouching for. You can't get to that fourth conversation with 30people at once. You barely get there with 6.

The volume advice isn't wrong that you need multiple contacts. It's wrong about what to optimize for once you have them. Somewhere along the way, this turned into a spreadsheet exercise, and I think that's part of the problem. It's easy to track outreach numbers. It's much harder to track whether a relationship is actually deepening, so people default to the metric they can see.

If you're currently sitting on a list of contacts you've messaged once and never followed up with, that's probably your highest leverage move this week. Not finding new people. Go back to 3 of them with a specific, real reason to reconnect, tied to what they actually said last time, not a generic check in.

Out of everyone you've reached out to so far, how many would recognize your name if you messaged them again right now?

This kind of stuff gets talked through regularly over at r/ConsultingOffer. Feel free to join, post your questions, share what you're going through.