If you have money and a successful business, or even better, successful investments and capital, you will be welcomed to the US rather quickly.
If you try any other route you are likely to be disappointed and frustrated.
If you can get a US company to sponsor your visa, that would be the next best way to live there. You would need to have some connections with a company that could advertise a job position that could basically only be filled by you - the company has to advertise the job position but prove to immigration that only you can fill the job's role, and that no US citizen can fill it satisfactorily.
The second option is possible but is getting more and more difficult these days. I don't know what kind of consulting you are involved with exactly, but for example, if you were a programmer with a deep understanding of underwater acoustics and sound propagation you could probably get a visa fairly quickly - IF - you had some contacts within a US company that needed someone with your skills.
Finding a job as just a random programmer though is likely to be very frustrating especially with many US companies using H1B visas to import cheap Indian/Chinese software programmers. Most of them are not very skilled but some of them are brilliant and you are up against them if your field is too general. Now may be a good time to create a show-piece project to prove your value. Considering you're on this site I would advise doing something related to sonar / sound analysis, naval strategy or tactics, logistics, etc. If you can get a niche company interested in your project, they will bend over backwards to make the visa process go smoothly, and the government will likely speed through your application if they see you are being groomed for work in key defense related technology.
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