Make sure you are really good at what you want to consult on. Find your niche. It helps if you've been doing the same thing as an employee for a while so you al

Make sure you are really good at what you want to consult on. Find your niche. It helps if you've been doing the same thing as an employee for a while so you already have references. Or if possible start doing it "on the side" for a while to build up some experience. For me my niche is making already built PoC projects ready for production and scaling those. So I target small startups typically with 1 to 5 developers with a PoC built, some traction and a good funding round so they can bring me in with my experience to stabilize/deploy/scale their product and build proper development, testing and deployment practices. I've been doing that for years, first as an employee, then combined consulting with employee work and since 2015 switched to full time consulting. I have built up a network of investors and people in the local startup scene and whenever my current contracts are almost finished I start pinging those contacts for more companies that fit the criteria.