I recently sat down with Erin Skirrow, a Canadian ergonomist who left clinical rehabilitation to build her own consulting practice. Her story is one I think every ergonomist, whether you’re in Toronto, London, Sydney, or São Paulo, needs to hear. Not because it’s a rags-to-riches tale, but precisely because it isn’t. It’s slow. It’s honest. And it’s full of the kind of lessons that don’t make it into textbooks.

What Erin Skirrow described mirrors something I see constantly in our community: brilliant clinicians with deep expertise who struggle not with the science of ergonomics, but with the business of ergonomics. And that gap, between clinical competence and commercial sustainability, is what this article is really about.

This isn’t just a recap of a podcast episode. It’s a deeper exploration of what it takes to succeed as an ergonomics professional in 2025 and beyond, no matter where in the world you’re practicing.

The Gap That Started Everything

Erin Skirrow’s journey began with a simple but powerful observation: she was helping people recover in the clinic, then sending them back to the exact workstations that caused their injuries in the first place. They’d come back. Different names, same problems. The reactive cycle of rehabilitation without upstream intervention is something every clinician recognizes but few act on.

What made Erin move was shadowing a Canadian Certified Professional Ergonomist (CCPE). She described watching this ergonomist walk into a workstation and, without even speaking to the worker, identify the majority of their symptoms. Erin called it “magical.” But as she later realized, it wasn’t magic, it was systems thinking. That ability to see the whole picture, to understand how tasks, tools, behaviors, and environments interact, is what separates a good ergonomist from someone who just adjusts chair heights.

A Global Market That’s Growing...Whether You’re Ready or Not

Before we go further into Erin's story, let’s zoom out. The global ergonomic consulting market was valued at roughly $900 million in 2025 and is projected to approach $1.6 billion by 2034, growing at nearly 6% annually. The broader ergonomic products market is on a similar trajectory, projected to reach over $22 billion by the early 2030s. The ergonomic engineering services market alone is estimated at approximately $5 billion in 2025, growing at around 7% annually.

What’s driving this? Several converging forces that are operating simultaneously around the world:

• The post-pandemic normalization of hybrid and remote work has created millions of unassessed home workstations. Over 42% of the global workforce now works in some form of hybrid arrangement.
• Governments in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia are tightening workplace health regulations, making ergonomic assessments not just nice-to-have but mandatory in many sectors.
• Musculoskeletal disorders remain the leading cause of work-related disability globally. In the US alone, ergonomic-related injuries cost businesses over $20 billion annually according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• The Asia-Pacific region is experiencing the fastest growth in ergonomic awareness and adoption, driven by rapid industrialization and rising corporate wellness budgets.

In other words, the demand for what you do is not shrinking. It’s accelerating.

The question is whether you’re positioned to capture it.

The Bootstrapper’s Path: Why Slow Growth Isn’t a Failure

Here’s where Erin's story diverges from the fantasy most people carry into entrepreneurship. She didn’t quit her job on a Monday and have a full client roster by Friday. In her first year of consulting, she did roughly half a dozen assessments. Total.

This is completely normal, and the research backs it up. A 2025 Gusto study on new business formation found that nearly half of solopreneurs started their businesses with less than $5,000. Yet 77% reported profitability within their first year. The key wasn’t that they made a fortune immediately, it’s that they kept costs low, stayed lean, and reinvested their time wisely.

The bootstrapping literature consistently shows a pattern that Erin lived out without ever reading a business textbook: bootstrapped businesses that prioritize financial discipline and customer-focused service often outperform venture-backed companies in long-term profitability and sustainability. Research published in peer-reviewed journals has found that while bootstrapped startups grow more slowly initially, they develop stronger customer relationships, more sustainable unit economics, and greater founder autonomy.

Erin was doing all of this instinctively. She wasn’t spending money on a fancy website or expensive marketing. She was investing her time in the thing that actually builds a consulting business: relationships and quality work.

What Every Ergonomist Should Build Before They Have Clients

One of the most insightful things Erin shared was her advice to build your systems first. Before you’re busy. Before you have 40 assessments on your plate and no template for any of them. This is counterintuitive for most clinicians, who are trained to be reactive, someone comes in with a problem, you solve it. But business doesn’t reward reactivity. It rewards preparation.

Here’s a framework I’d recommend based on Erin's experience and what I’ve seen work across hundreds of ergonomics professionals:

Your Systems Checklist: Build These Before You Need Them

1. A standardized assessment template that covers your core service offerings (office, industrial, healthcare: whatever your focus is). Don’t try to cover everything. Erin's biggest regret was saying yes to everything early on and creating a different template for every single engagement.
2. A clear pricing structure with defined scope boundaries. Know exactly what’s included in each tier of service and what constitutes scope creep. Erin underpriced her services for years because of imposter syndrome, even with extensive clinical experience behind him.
3. A report template that’s clean, professional, and easy for non-ergonomists to read. Your report is your calling card. It’s the thing clients forward to their colleagues and bosses. If it’s hard to read, your referrals dry up.
4. A simple intake process. How does a client first engage with you? What information do you need before an assessment? How do you follow up? Map this out once, and you’ll save hundreds of hours over the life of your practice.
5. A 60-second elevator pitch. Erin admitted she struggled with this early on. If you can’t explain what you do and why it matters in under a minute, you’ll lose every networking opportunity that comes your way.

These systems are portable. If you move cities, change niches, or scale your business, they come with you. They’re the foundation everything else is built on.

Collaboration Over Competition: A Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing Erin did when she relocated was reach out to every single local ergonomist in the new city. Not to compete with them, rather to collaborate. She offered to subcontract when they were busy, knowing she’d earn less per assessment but gain something more valuable: connections, trust, and local knowledge.

This flies in the face of traditional competitive thinking, but it’s supported by decades of research on collaborative entrepreneurship. Studies on professional service firms consistently show that practitioners who build peer networks grow faster than those who operate in isolation. The mechanism is straightforward: referrals, shared knowledge, capacity balancing, and reputation building all compound over time.

Erin described meeting regularly with other ergonomists to “talk shop”, aka sharing equipment recommendations, discussing challenging assessments, and bouncing ideas off each other. She said it’s one of the things he missed most about working in a larger organization and something he’s been intentional about recreating as an independent consultant.

How to Build a Collaborative Network in Your Market

• Identify every ergonomist and related professional (occupational therapists, physiotherapists, disability managers) in your region. Reach out personally. Not with a sales pitch, with genuine curiosity.
• Offer to be a capacity resource. When another ergonomist is overwhelmed with work, be the person they call. You build trust and get exposure to their client base.
• Create or join a local peer group that meets regularly. Even quarterly is enough. Share case studies (anonymized), discuss new equipment, and troubleshoot together.
• Extend this globally through professional associations, online communities, and conferences. The ergonomics world is smaller than you think, and your next big opportunity may come from a connection in another country entirely.

This approach requires maturity and professional boundaries. As Erin acknowledged, sometimes you’re bidding on the same job. But transparency, clear communication, and a shared commitment to helping people goes a long way toward keeping those relationships healthy.

The Cyclical Nature of Consulting: Expect It, Plan for It

One of the most important truths Erin shared is that consulting revenue is not linear. It’s cyclical. There are busy months and quiet months, and the quiet months used to cause her enormous anxiety.

This is universal in professional services. Budget cycles, fiscal year-end spending, seasonal hiring patterns, all of these create natural ebbs and flows in demand. The 2024 Prosal Consultant Survey found that consultants spend roughly 51% of their time on billable work, 26% on business development, and 23% on administrative tasks. Those ratios shift dramatically during slow periods, and that’s actually a feature, not a bug.

Erin learned to use quiet months strategically: refining her report templates, strengthening relationships, working on her processes, and doing the business development work that pays off months later. The entrepreneurs who survive the first few years are consistently the ones who treat slow periods as investment periods rather than panic periods.

What to Do During Slow Months

• Audit and improve your assessment templates and report formats. When things get busy, you won’t have time for this.
• Reach out to dormant contacts. A simple check-in email or LinkedIn message can reignite a relationship that leads to work six months later.
• Invest in professional development. Take a course, attend a webinar, or read a research paper that deepens your expertise in a niche area.
• Review your pricing. Are you still charging what you were worth two years ago? Slow months are a good time to recalibrate.

Pricing, Scope, and the Imposter Syndrome Trap

Erin was candid about underpricing her services early on. Even with years of clinical experience as a Kinesiologist and Clinical Exercise Physiologist, stepping out on her own triggered imposter syndrome, that nagging feeling of “have I earned the right to be here?”

This is an epidemic among clinicians-turned-consultants. You’re clinically excellent, but you’ve never had to put a dollar figure on your own expertise before. Someone else always did that for you. And when you’re forced to do it yourself, the instinct is to go low, to make it easy for the client to say yes.

The problem is that underpricing doesn’t just hurt your income. It signals lower value to the market. It attracts price-sensitive clients who are the hardest to retain and the most likely to question your recommendations. And it sets a precedent that’s painful to walk back.

Pricing Principles for Ergonomics Consultants

1. Price based on the value you deliver, not the hours you spend. An experienced ergonomist who resolves a problem in 90 minutes is delivering more value than an inexperienced one who takes four hours.
2. Define your scope in writing before every engagement. What’s included, what’s not, and what triggers an additional charge. This protects you and sets professional expectations.
3. Start with fewer services, delivered excellently, rather than a broad menu delivered inconsistently. Erin wished she’d done this from the beginning.
4. Raise your prices when you have evidence of demand. If you’re consistently booked three weeks out, you’re underpriced.
5. Look at what other professionals with comparable credentials charge in your market. You don’t have to match them, but you should know where you sit.

Research on service-based bootstrapped businesses reinforces this point. Firms that establish clear scope boundaries and value-based pricing early tend to be more profitable and experience less client churn than those that compete on price alone.

Marketing That Actually Works: Visibility, Credibility, and Word of Mouth

Erin's perspective on marketing evolved significantly over the course of building her business. Early on, she thought marketing meant promoting her services, working on her website, maybe running some ads. Over time, she came to see marketing as something much more fundamental: visibility and credibility.

This shift in thinking is consistent with what the research shows about professional service marketing. In a 2024 survey by Prosal and Tufts University of nearly 500 consultants, the data showed that referrals and relationship-based business development consistently outperform digital marketing and advertising for solo and small consulting firms. The consultants with the highest revenue weren’t the ones with the best websites—they were the ones with the strongest networks.

A Marketing Framework for Ergonomists at Any Stage

Foundation Layer: Do Excellent Work

This sounds obvious, but it’s worth stating explicitly. Your best marketing asset is a brilliant assessment and a clear, well-written report. Every report you send is a marketing document. Every satisfied client is a potential referral source. Erin described this as the “best kept secret” of growing a practice, that the quality of your deliverables is the marketing strategy most people overlook.

Relationship Layer: Be Visible in Professional Networks

This means staying active in your professional associations, attending events (even virtual ones), connecting with related professionals on LinkedIn, and being the person who shares useful insights rather than just selling services. Erin found LinkedIn particularly helpful despite not being a “social media person.”

Content Layer: Share Your Expertise

Write occasional LinkedIn posts about what you’re seeing in the field. Give presentations to local business groups. Create a simple resource that demonstrates your knowledge. You don’t need to become a content machine, but consistent, modest visibility builds compounding trust.

Don’t Wait for Perfection

Erin's first business asset was a business card. That’s it. No website, no branding guide, no social media strategy. Just a card and a logo. He added things over time as the business grew. If you’re waiting for your website to be perfect before you start networking and taking clients, you’re wasting the most valuable time in your business’s life.

Global Perspectives: What Ergonomists Can Learn from Different Markets

One of the things that fascinates me about the ergonomics profession is how differently it’s structured around the world, yet how universal the challenges are. Whether you’re in North America, Europe, Australia, or emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, the same themes keep surfacing.

Regulatory Environment Shapes Opportunity

In Europe, particularly in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Germany, ergonomic assessments are often mandated by law. This creates a more predictable demand pipeline but also more competition and price pressure. In the UK and Australia, workplace health and safety regulations create strong demand but leave room for differentiation. In North America, the landscape is more fragmented, some jurisdictions have robust requirements, others leave it entirely to the employer’s discretion. Understanding your local regulatory environment is step one in positioning your business.

The Remote Work Revolution Is a Global Equalizer

The explosion of remote and hybrid work since 2020 has created an enormous, largely untapped market for home office ergonomics. This is true everywhere. Companies that never thought about ergonomics when employees sat in a corporate office are now grappling with liability and productivity concerns around kitchen-table workstations. If you’re not offering remote assessment services, you’re leaving a significant market on the table.

Emerging Markets Are the Next Frontier

The Asia-Pacific region is expected to see the fastest growth in ergonomic product and service adoption over the next decade. Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa are also showing increasing awareness, driven by multinational companies importing their workplace health standards into local operations. If you’re multilingual or have connections in these regions, there’s a real first-mover advantage available.

Professional Certification Varies Widely

The credential landscape for ergonomists is a patchwork globally. Canada has the CCPE designation, the US has the CPE through BCPE, Europe has EUR.Erg, and Australia has CPE through HFESA. These differences create both barriers and opportunities. If you hold a recognized credential, make sure you’re communicating its significance to clients who may not understand the landscape. If you’re working toward certification, know that it’s one of the clearest signals of credibility in this profession.

Thoughtful Insights: What the Entrepreneurship Literature Tells Us About Surviving Year One Through Five

Let me step back from ergonomics for a moment and share some broader findings from the entrepreneurship and bootstrapping literature that I think every ergonomics professional should internalize.

1. The Solopreneur Economy Is Booming, And You’re Part of It

Data from the US Census Bureau shows that 5.2 million new business applications were filed in 2024 alone. An Intuit QuickBooks study found that 56% of solopreneurs surveyed started their businesses after 2020, with over half citing the desire to be their own boss as the primary motivation. Nearly two-thirds of professional service startups launched without employees. You’re not alone in this journey, and the infrastructure to support solo businesses has never been better.

2. The First Revenue Is the Hardest

The bootstrapping literature emphasizes that going from $0 to $1 in revenue is the single hardest transition in any business. Everything after that is iteration. One bootstrapped founder described the journey as needing to find people who have a problem you can solve and then solving it, even imperfectly. Erin did exactly this by starting with a handful of subcontracting engagements and building from there.

3. Financial Discipline Beats Growth Hacking

Research on bootstrapped versus venture-funded companies consistently shows that financial discipline, keeping overhead low, reinvesting profits wisely, and growing at a sustainable pace produces better long-term outcomes than aggressive growth funded by external capital. For ergonomics consultants, this means you don’t need a $10,000 website, a coworking space membership, or an expensive CRM to start. You need a phone, a laptop, a good template, and the willingness to pick up the phone.

4. Time Management Is the Universal Challenge

Across every survey of solopreneurs and independent consultants, time management consistently ranks as the top challenge. The Gusto 2025 study found that 41% of solopreneurs cited it as a major pain point, rising to 43% in professional services specifically. The answer isn’t working more hours, it’s building systems (there’s that word again) that reduce the cognitive and administrative load of running your business, so you can focus your energy on the high-value work that generates revenue and referrals.

5. Profitability Comes Faster Than You Think - If You Stay Lean

The Gusto research found that 77% of solopreneurs reported profitability in their first year, and 93% expected to be profitable in their second. The caveat is that these are businesses that started lean, nearly half with under $5,000. The lesson for ergonomists is clear: don’t over-invest in infrastructure before you have clients. Invest in relationships and quality, and let the business tell you when it’s time to spend.

The Master Checklist: What Professional Ergonomists Need to Succeed

Drawing from Erin's experience, global market trends, and the research literature, here’s a comprehensive checklist for ergonomists at any stage of their career:

Foundational Skills

• Deep clinical or technical knowledge in your area of practice. This is non-negotiable and the basis for everything else. (Check out our resources here)
• Systems thinking, the ability to see beyond the chair and the monitor to understand tasks, behaviors, organizational culture, and environmental factors.
• Strong written communication. Your reports are your reputation.
• A 60-second elevator pitch you can deliver naturally and confidently.

Business Infrastructure

• Standardized templates for assessments, reports, invoices, and client intake.
• Clear pricing with defined scope boundaries.
• A simple but functional web presence (even a one-page site with your services, credentials, and contact info is enough to start).
• Professional liability insurance appropriate to your jurisdiction.
• A basic understanding of business finances: revenue, expenses, profit margins, and tax obligations.

Relationship Capital

• Active connections with other ergonomists in your region, framed as collaboration, not competition. (Check out what we can offer professional ergonomists)
• Relationships with adjacent professionals: occupational therapists, physiotherapists, disability managers, occupational health nurses, and safety officers.
• Engagement with your professional association(s) and relevant certifying body.
• A growing network of satisfied clients who can and will refer you.

Growth Mindset

• Willingness to start small and build gradually. Half a dozen assessments in year one is not failure, it’s foundation.
• Comfort with the cyclical nature of consulting revenue. Quiet months are investment months.
• Commitment to ongoing learning, both clinically and commercially.
• The emotional resilience to push through imposter syndrome and self-doubt.
• Openness to feedback and willingness to refine your processes continuously.

Final Thoughts: The Work Matters More Than You Think

I want to close with something Erin said that stuck with me. She described walking away from an assessment and being on a “high for the day.” That feeling of having genuinely helped someone, having made their workday a little bit better, a little bit more comfortable, a little bit safer, is what drives this profession.

It’s easy to get lost in the business side of things. Pricing, marketing, templates, LinkedIn strategies, they all matter. But they’re in service of something bigger. The reason this market is growing globally isn’t because of clever marketing. It’s because the work we do changes people’s lives. Every workstation you assess, every recommendation you make, every report you write is an intervention that prevents someone from ending up in a clinic.

That’s the gap Erin saw at the beginning of her career. And it’s the gap that professional ergonomists around the world have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to fill.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been doing this for twenty years, the fundamentals haven’t changed: do excellent work, build genuine relationships, and never stop learning. Everything else is just tactics.