Consulting is high variance, particularly when consultants underinvest in marketing/sales. It's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of; we're all in business here

Consulting is high variance, particularly when consultants underinvest in marketing/sales. It's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of; we're all in business here (some more straightforwardly than others). There is nothing wrong with making customers being hard; it's the fun, necessary hard that, combined with making customers happy, is why business drives the world forward. Since consulting is high variance, at any given time some people perceive "the market" as being on fire and some perceive it as being in a slump, but for small consulting firms, your kite flies in basically all weather conditions. what's the best thing to do when you have long stretches without solid work? Do more sales and marketing. Not kidding. Take every happy client you have from the last two years. Send them each an email asking them how business is going and whether $FOO is still working up to their expectations. Follow up gracefully if they don't respond. After reconnecting, get them on a call to talk about their plans over next 3~6 months. Talk yourself into those plans. If you cannot talk yourself into those plans, ask if they will introduce you to 2~3 people who should have something like $FOO in their own business. I've been working a lot lately on Raspberry Pi, off-grid tech, power monitoring, etc. Awesome projects. I mean nothing untoward with the following observation: generally, when you're solving problems for customers who are not plugged into the power grid, you're solving problems for people who don't exactly have signing authority for a $20k engagement starting next week. (I can imagine there are industrial applications for which this is not true! If you've got those leads, ignore this observation.) I might consider, if you're looking for technical skills to expand your business opportunity, whether these are the skills you want to develop or whether you want to develop ones which select for clients who have expensive problems that they'll happily pay to solve.