10 ms·

How to Find Consulting Clients

501 points by chrisa 7y ago

turk73 7y ago
How timely. Currently am frustrated by indy consulting. I have watched several colleagues successfully launch into independent consulting. Honestly, it's a mixed bag. They speak very positively about it, but when I ask more direct questions, I hear about trouble getting paid, Net60 and longer durations between checks, long periods between gigs (7 weeks was what one friend just reported). Every time I attempt to go indy, I land a good lead, go through the preliminary stages, and then the deal goes flat. It's almost like there's a blacklist out there and my name is on it for some reason. I know that is likely untrue and I scour Google with my name to see if some oddity comes up but really there's nothing. It should be no more difficult for me than others and yet it has been.
- blunt_asshole 7y ago
  > It's almost like there's a blacklist out there and my name is on it for some reason If you're getting that feeling due to your HN account, it's because you're shadowbanned. Only people with showdead will see your comments. It's actually really impressive how you've managed to write hundreds of comments to void for the last half a year without picking up on the hint. There's a good chance you're not picking up on hints IRL either. Maybe ask a blunt friend what they think of you? The industry is small and people talk.
  - rpedela 7y ago
    I can see his comment and I don't have "showdead" turned on?
    - blunt_asshole 7y ago
      Turn on showdead to see all the other comments that didn't show up. You can vouch (if you have >500 karma) for individual comments to make them not dead.
      - rpedela 7y ago
        Ah I didn't know that. Thanks.
- ossworkerrights 7y ago
  Depends on the country and the market in that country for contractors / consultants. The UK is pretty much boiling with demand, mainly around London, for software consultants. Hopefully the gov won't kill it with the upcoming IR35. Usually in the UK it would be recruiters that would find indie gigs for you, but you do need to have a skill for it (good mix of more than just a stack) and the agility to learn a client's code base fast, or to create one for greenfield projects. But like everything else, it takes time to build a rep.
  - burntoutfire 7y ago
    > Hopefully the gov won't kill it with the upcoming IR35. Isn't it already like decided? Almost everyone going into IR35 from April (I think?) 2020?
- andreygrehov 7y ago
  I second @blunt_asshole. Here is the screenshot of your profile: https://imgur.com/AjHUdO0 https://imgur.com/AjHUdO0
- rpedela 7y ago
  It can take time to learn how to close. The more you try, the better you will get at it. Also sometimes things happen that are completely out of your control. For example, I was negotiating an initial 5 figure contract but they were so impressed that they were talking about 7 figure contracts if the first one went well. Then I didn't hear from them for a month which was strange given the prior behavior. Turns out they were hacked via a third-party contractor, and the top executives made a knee-jerk decision to ban all third-party contracting. My contact person either resigned or fired because he signed the particular third-party that got hacked.
emilecantin 7y ago
He's spot-on with that last part: you only need a few. The same few contacts (4-5) have brought me more work than I can actually do, and I often have to say no. It's pretty hard maintaining a relationship with all of them, though: when you say no, they have to look elsewhere, and that's when the relationship can falter.
- fastbeef 7y ago
  This is actually a really good time to refer your client to a trusted contact from your network (you do have one, don't you?) scoring points with both the client and your contact.
- _jal 7y ago
  Do be careful. Becoming overly dependent on upstream "feeders" is what killed my company. It is a balance. Turning down work is dangerous, and the generally opposite of why you're in business. But giving other firms too much leverage will kill you just as dead as insufficient work. I started getting nervous when one company was over 50% of our income, but there was disagreement about urgency and what exactly to do about it with my partners, and we dithered until the bomb went off.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    All it takes is for someone at the client to take a new job elsewhere. Whoever replaces them will have different people who they know and different priorities.
  - jacobheric 7y ago
    I my experience, at least for an individual, I think saying no is exactly the opposite of dangerous. I’ve been contracting exclusively for 10 years and said yes about 6 times and no dozens or hundreds of times. As long as you say no frankly, with a reason, and offer some names of people who can help, people are happy with you and will more often than not ask again in the future. Saying no, especially for bad fit, is one of the most important parts of success I’ve had in consulting.
itomato 7y ago
I didn't see any advice on becoming a vendor or otherwise making inroads apart from cold calls on FTE reqs. RFPs? RFQs? This is all about "freelancing" and subcontracting, and may serve as a helpful intro to the person who isn't already in this (well-trod) labor market.
- chrisa 7y ago
  Yes - most of the people who ask me this are new to consulting/freelancing, so this is meant to be an intro for them. Once you're established, I find that people don't think about "finding new clients" so much as "winning new contracts" - which (as you point out) - is entirely different. If you're trying to win big projects (vs "find clients"), you probably have a small team already, and then yes, that's when you really get into RFPs, etc. In the beginning though - I would advise against going after big projects that need multiple rounds of selection, etc - and instead focus just on relationships. Then, once you have a small base of clients, you can decide to go bigger from there.
apercu 7y ago
I've used a lot of the same tactics. I find that although I like the "control" of direct projects, I do more and more subcontracted work because I can push a lot of the account and project management back to the company that subcontracts me, often this frees me up to just do the work, rather than all the activities around the work. Also, I tend to do 80% of my work with the same two clients - professional services firms that subcontract work to me. On one hand this is obviously a risk, but I know that I'm the most profitable consultant for one of the customers (significantly more profitable than their in-house consultants) and when I get in to a time crunch it is easier to deal with because a lot of the time it's a conflict between two of their projects and not one of their project s and one unrelated to them.
- TooCleverByHalf 7y ago
  > professional services firms that subcontract work to me How were you able to create these kinds of relationships with the professional services firms?
Arqu 7y ago
I went the boutique consultancy route just last week and brought on a couple of people into the mix. I pretty much agree that everybody kind of faces the same question and feelings. To be honest, I might have taken a small leap of faith as I pulled the trigger before securing a client. Though the only reason I felt comfortable with it is that I've been in the space enough to be pretty sure I can land a client in the first month or so (seems like it's happening). The best advice you can have is 'talk to people'. Most starters think you're BSing them, but nearly everybody fails to leverage their network. You can't go indie fresh from college but after a couple years and some projects it's easy enough. Talk, talk and talk some more. Don't be shy to send emails and chat people up on LinkedIn. Works wonders once you put yourself out there. Look at your contacts list now and you can surely find at least one that would be able to get you started with some work now or in the very near term. The reason everyone keeps iterating on the same 'general/bland advice' is that it really is the bread and butter of it. Talk more, can't say it enough. Be honest, be respectful, don't spam, but don't be shy to talk to strangers in your line of work. Not sure if this helps anyone, but just wanted to say it's easier than most of you think. You need a marketable skill, a minimal network and to talk. If you're doing honest work, things pick up on it's own. Known pitfalls - there's more to running a consultancy than just talking and working, admin work takes a lot of time as well. Plan for the extras.
- tootie 7y ago
  I'm curious how well this scales though. Are the kind of clients you're reaching out to small- to mid-size? I've spent a lot of time working at fairly large consulting agencies and the amount of time and resources that go into just pitching seem daunting to a newcomer.
  - Arqu 7y ago
    I guess I'm in a good position comming from a Co which scaled from ~30 to currently ~220 before I exited. Nearly 70% is from a growing personal network from a single guy. Another 15% come from direct referals outside that network. The last 15 are a mix of random circumstances and some cold outreach. Depending how you look at it ie. Building networks or just chatting people up can lead to very different outcomes. The above was mostly focused on the 'getting started' part. Though the 200+ setup is successfully run by a team of 7 or 8. Things change as you scale and the approach that works on smaller mumbers does not work on largers and vice versa. Feel free to ping me on email or otherwise if you'd like to chat.
BrentOzar 7y ago
The title is way off: he's talking about contractors, not consultants. Short version: Consultants tell the client what to do. Contractors are brought on to do what they're told. The advice in the article is a lot about "do you need someone do to ___ task" or "are you hiring an FTE, and could you do with a contractor instead" and that's contracting, not consulting. It's still valuable advice, but you don't find consulting clients this way.
- rpedela 7y ago
  If you are just getting started, I think it is good advice either way. What is most important at first is just having clients. Whether you are behaving as an executive or grunt doesn't matter. If someone has clients, then I think it is easier to transition to consulting from contracting. And giving talks, blog posts, etc is great advice for consulting and contracting at any stage.
- jdale27 7y ago
  Assuming this semantic distinction holds, what are the practical consequences? How do you find "consulting" clients? In fact, what is even the shape of a "consulting" engagement in software development, where I am telling the client what to do, instead of doing what I'm told? Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least something about what software needs to be built? Not trying to put up a strawman here, it's just that I've seen this distinction made elsewhere, but not clear on how it plays out in practice. I suspect the line between "consultant" and "contractor" isn't that bold.
  - kthejoker2 7y ago
    > Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least something about what software needs to be built? Yes? All the time. "I've heard about this thing called machine learning. Come assess how I can use it in my business." "We have a problem where orders are missing their commit dates and we need something built to find those earlier in our procurement process. Maybe our new cloud ERP can help...?" So they have some degree of knowledge around the success criteria (what) and the value (why) but even those need to be shaped up and agreed upon. And then the design considerations, approaches, tradeoffs, constraints, risks, options, etc. (the how) is somewhere between directionally correct and nonexistent.
11eleven 7y ago
I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles. I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at least proactively putting myself in front of them, instead of hoping they find me or remember me. Came across this comment from another thread [1] that breaks it down a bit: 1. Go to https://trends.builtwith.com/framework https://trends.builtwith.com/framework to find websites that use the tech stack you specialize in. 2. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs) 3. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5). 4. Find the email format of these companies with https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/. 5. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email. The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to use. Here's a template you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer help them bring some features or projects out of backlog. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs) I think some of the same magic involved in finding consulting clients draws parallels to getting large corporations to consider you for contract work?
  - throwaway35784 7y ago
gk1 7y ago
Here's my take on this, based on what worked or didn't for me in my first year: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-leads/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...
krm01 7y ago
The way we’ve been attracting Software companies to our UI/UX agency is through sideproject marketing. I wanted to write an article about this but here’s the tldr version of it: build small standalone projects that provide value and communicate the value you provide to potential customers. There are a few good articles about this but I feel sideproject marketing is highly underrated. You can use your skills as a developer/designer to market your service. Without feeling dirty about selling.
- jessems 7y ago
  Interesting! Can you share an example?
gumby 7y ago
Some of this advice is also good for just plain getting hired: giving talks, having visible evidence of what you can do. It can cause actual humans to contact you directly rather than recruiters. But it takes work and isn't for everyone.
josefresco 7y ago
I take issue with using "meetups" of other tech consultants as a way to get clients. I'd rather "network" (another uncool word for meetups) with potential leads, within an industry vertical than spend my time talking to other geeks.
- sgillen 7y ago
  I can see how going to a meetup for an interest orthogonal to your own could be fruitful. If I’m a hardware/embedded person and I go to a python meetup it’s possible someone works for a company who is looking for some one off embedded work. Though as you say, if you can directly find the people who are looking to hire you even better.
JoeMayoBot 7y ago
Good advice on getting out to meet other people in the community. You could call it marketing, but the positive effect on you and others has a less clinical perspective. It's especially important to be a part of the community, rather than just show up to meetings. e.g. Give presentations, help with organizing a meetup, socialize outside of the meetup (e.g. coffee, lunch, beers) with folks you like. You honestly don't ever know where your next gig is coming from, so getting out and enjoying this part of it can be worthwhile.
albertshin 7y ago
As an aside: I recently had an agency/contractor reach out via a LinkedIn connect request with the "personal message" being an ad for their services. I have a few startup things I've founded/co-founded on my profile, so I'm guessing this is a new way to "source" clients... that is until everyone starts doing this and I start just instinctively ignoring these messages or LinkedIn figures out this eats into their InMail revenue stream.
chasd00 7y ago
you'd be surprised how productive hanging around some bars near office parks during happy hour can be. Lots of conversations can be eavesdropped, find the right one, and then strike up a conversation and get a card in someone's hand.
shartshooter 7y ago
I started a consulting business doing CRM work on nights and weekend about five years back that’s now running close to $100k/mo. It all started from a former colleague who’d moved onto a new role and asked me to help them set up their CRM. This colleague talked to their friends, I started mentioning it in casual conversation and more referrals started pouring in. This process of working nights and weekends meant I could scale it without pressure. Your network will be your best asset early on because you have no brand awareness not evidence that you can do the job. Folks will be working with you because they know and trust you. We’re now at an inflection point where that method of driving business won’t scale as fast as we want so we’re now relying on channel relationships we’ve built with the CRM provider. We also work with consultants in related fields that don’t want to do CRM work which has been a huge boost to our bottom line as well. On the flip side I have a friend trying to break into devops consulting who couldn’t get a single customer despite relying heavily on his network so take both anecdotes with a grain of salt.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Hmm that's not what I expected. I always thought DevOps consulting would be an easier to break into because your professional network is also who you'd sell to. Because as a developer I know where to find tons of developers, I have a large network of developers. But the only type of software they or their employers want to buy is staff augmentation.
  - shartshooter 7y ago
    It's possible he's terrible at devops, terrible at selling himself or was generally barking up the wrong tree. I wouldn't recommend taking my comment as a nudge away from getting into devops consulting but just that a friend I know struggled with it
- jlu 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, what does CRM consulting look like? Is it autonomous job (configuring servers and applications) or face to to face to work?
camping-monitor 7y ago
I have been thinking about this for a long time. If anybody is interested in building a consulting agency with me, feel free to ping me at ideavalid@icloud.com
rcconf 7y ago
I've been able to scale consulting to about 20-35k / mo as a single developer.I've gotten all of my clients through word-of-mouth and I've spend zero dollars in marketing. The trick being that I always try to do the best work and communicate instantly with my clients. I.e, if a client e-mails me, or sends me a text, I respond in about one second. They seem to love that. I try to be as honest and forthcoming with each client and I've basically hit a cap now in being able to add any new ones and deliver the experience I want to each client. Scaling is the most difficult part for me right now since all my clients are quite varied. Some of them are web apps, other mobile apps and others just pure cybersecurity. They're so vastly different from each other that it's a bit difficult to hire someone who can handle the diverse amount of work. Also, I think for the amount of work I do, I should probably have much bigger retainers, so some clients are $1,250 / month, but jesus is that hard. It should probably be at least $5,000 /month. For me tho, I've learned so much about business and my technical skills have skyrocketed. I honestly feel like I can tackle any problem in the world and it's a powerful feeling. I make decisions based on the problem its self and have no loyalty really to a specific technology. I understand why a client may want to use WordPress and why a client may want to use Kubernetes. Some clients want to just do servers using Linux and that's okay. I've learned that more basic technology (like bash) can be hugely beneficial to trying to write your own solution. When you're under time constraints, you start to have some pretty creative solutions, and not the creative where it breaks later, the creative where it does exactly what it needs to do, but it's done in 1 hour instead of 1 month. The best advice I could give is to basically be brutally honest with each client, do the best work that you can and always reply in a timely manner, regardless of what's happening in your life. So many consulting companies are slow to reply, or don't really care about their clients on a personal level that clients will really love you if you spend time thinking about their business on a personal level, being responsive and just being honest when you're overloaded in work. It is a stressful business tho and I'm in the alpha stages of a product I'm working on based on the problems I've seen over the years. It'll be interesting to move from consulting to a SaaS product. The transition being the consulting provides the funding to be able to work on the SaaS and then hopefully the recurring revenue outpaces consulting eventually and I live a less stressful life!
- cloudartisans 7y ago
gremlinsinc 7y ago
Curious anybody use Facebook or google ads to find freelance or consulting clients? I'm finally building up some cash stores after a summer drought, but I'm working 70 hour weeks at $25/hour, trying to finish up the 25/hour gig as my other client is $40 and I'd like to get back up to my normal rates of $60-70/hour. I've been doing laravel/fullstack since 2013 and vue since 2016. I also know basic devops stuff. How to use aws. I've even used ML recently with aws/rekognition and python/nltk-rake. I'm horrible at selling myself but I can't take another < 60k year - when I know I'm worth more than 100k.
msadowski 7y ago
Very good article! The only point that I don't agree with is about not freelancing websites. When I started consulting/contacting 1.5 years ago I did start with a freelance site and at this time about 90% of my jobs still come from there. I would much rather have clients from outside of the platform but I don't find it easy to close them. I need to point out that I'm in a very niche field (at least on Upwork); On average month I see about 3-5 quality jobs I can apply to and quite often I see them getting less than 5 proposals. I expect this wouldn't be a case for web development projects.
stevenicr 7y ago
Would like to see a new write of of resources that are good for running a consulting shop these days. Sure I have some things bookmarked from previous HN threads like open-source- contracts to use, contracts, communication tools, project management, milestone sharing, invoicing and such perhaps? demo - sketch mockup sharing and such? whats the popular freelance tech stack these days if one was going to go this route today?

501 points by chrisa 7y ago

How timely. Currently am frustrated by indy consulting. I have watched several colleagues successfully launch into independent consulting. Honestly, it's a mixed bag. They speak very positively about it, but when I ask more direct questions, I hear about trouble getting paid, Net60 and longer durations between checks, long periods between gigs (7 weeks was what one friend just reported). Every time I attempt to go indy, I land a good lead, go through the preliminary stages, and then the deal goes flat. It's almost like there's a blacklist out there and my name is on it for some reason. I know that is likely untrue and I scour Google with my name to see if some oddity comes up but really there's nothing. It should be no more difficult for me than others and yet it has been.

blunt_asshole 7y ago
> It's almost like there's a blacklist out there and my name is on it for some reason If you're getting that feeling due to your HN account, it's because you're shadowbanned. Only people with showdead will see your comments. It's actually really impressive how you've managed to write hundreds of comments to void for the last half a year without picking up on the hint. There's a good chance you're not picking up on hints IRL either. Maybe ask a blunt friend what they think of you? The industry is small and people talk.
- rpedela 7y ago
  I can see his comment and I don't have "showdead" turned on?
  - blunt_asshole 7y ago
    Turn on showdead to see all the other comments that didn't show up. You can vouch (if you have >500 karma) for individual comments to make them not dead.
    - rpedela 7y ago
      Ah I didn't know that. Thanks.
ossworkerrights 7y ago
Depends on the country and the market in that country for contractors / consultants. The UK is pretty much boiling with demand, mainly around London, for software consultants. Hopefully the gov won't kill it with the upcoming IR35. Usually in the UK it would be recruiters that would find indie gigs for you, but you do need to have a skill for it (good mix of more than just a stack) and the agility to learn a client's code base fast, or to create one for greenfield projects. But like everything else, it takes time to build a rep.
- burntoutfire 7y ago
  > Hopefully the gov won't kill it with the upcoming IR35. Isn't it already like decided? Almost everyone going into IR35 from April (I think?) 2020?
andreygrehov 7y ago
I second @blunt_asshole. Here is the screenshot of your profile: https://imgur.com/AjHUdO0 https://imgur.com/AjHUdO0
rpedela 7y ago
It can take time to learn how to close. The more you try, the better you will get at it. Also sometimes things happen that are completely out of your control. For example, I was negotiating an initial 5 figure contract but they were so impressed that they were talking about 7 figure contracts if the first one went well. Then I didn't hear from them for a month which was strange given the prior behavior. Turns out they were hacked via a third-party contractor, and the top executives made a knee-jerk decision to ban all third-party contracting. My contact person either resigned or fired because he signed the particular third-party that got hacked.

emilecantin 7y ago

He's spot-on with that last part: you only need a few. The same few contacts (4-5) have brought me more work than I can actually do, and I often have to say no. It's pretty hard maintaining a relationship with all of them, though: when you say no, they have to look elsewhere, and that's when the relationship can falter.

fastbeef 7y ago
This is actually a really good time to refer your client to a trusted contact from your network (you do have one, don't you?) scoring points with both the client and your contact.
_jal 7y ago
Do be careful. Becoming overly dependent on upstream "feeders" is what killed my company. It is a balance. Turning down work is dangerous, and the generally opposite of why you're in business. But giving other firms too much leverage will kill you just as dead as insufficient work. I started getting nervous when one company was over 50% of our income, but there was disagreement about urgency and what exactly to do about it with my partners, and we dithered until the bomb went off.
- ghaff 7y ago
  All it takes is for someone at the client to take a new job elsewhere. Whoever replaces them will have different people who they know and different priorities.
- jacobheric 7y ago
  I my experience, at least for an individual, I think saying no is exactly the opposite of dangerous. I’ve been contracting exclusively for 10 years and said yes about 6 times and no dozens or hundreds of times. As long as you say no frankly, with a reason, and offer some names of people who can help, people are happy with you and will more often than not ask again in the future. Saying no, especially for bad fit, is one of the most important parts of success I’ve had in consulting.

itomato 7y ago

I didn't see any advice on becoming a vendor or otherwise making inroads apart from cold calls on FTE reqs. RFPs? RFQs? This is all about "freelancing" and subcontracting, and may serve as a helpful intro to the person who isn't already in this (well-trod) labor market.

chrisa 7y ago
Yes - most of the people who ask me this are new to consulting/freelancing, so this is meant to be an intro for them. Once you're established, I find that people don't think about "finding new clients" so much as "winning new contracts" - which (as you point out) - is entirely different. If you're trying to win big projects (vs "find clients"), you probably have a small team already, and then yes, that's when you really get into RFPs, etc. In the beginning though - I would advise against going after big projects that need multiple rounds of selection, etc - and instead focus just on relationships. Then, once you have a small base of clients, you can decide to go bigger from there.

apercu 7y ago

I've used a lot of the same tactics. I find that although I like the "control" of direct projects, I do more and more subcontracted work because I can push a lot of the account and project management back to the company that subcontracts me, often this frees me up to just do the work, rather than all the activities around the work. Also, I tend to do 80% of my work with the same two clients - professional services firms that subcontract work to me. On one hand this is obviously a risk, but I know that I'm the most profitable consultant for one of the customers (significantly more profitable than their in-house consultants) and when I get in to a time crunch it is easier to deal with because a lot of the time it's a conflict between two of their projects and not one of their project s and one unrelated to them.

TooCleverByHalf 7y ago
> professional services firms that subcontract work to me How were you able to create these kinds of relationships with the professional services firms?

Arqu 7y ago

I went the boutique consultancy route just last week and brought on a couple of people into the mix. I pretty much agree that everybody kind of faces the same question and feelings. To be honest, I might have taken a small leap of faith as I pulled the trigger before securing a client. Though the only reason I felt comfortable with it is that I've been in the space enough to be pretty sure I can land a client in the first month or so (seems like it's happening). The best advice you can have is 'talk to people'. Most starters think you're BSing them, but nearly everybody fails to leverage their network. You can't go indie fresh from college but after a couple years and some projects it's easy enough. Talk, talk and talk some more. Don't be shy to send emails and chat people up on LinkedIn. Works wonders once you put yourself out there. Look at your contacts list now and you can surely find at least one that would be able to get you started with some work now or in the very near term. The reason everyone keeps iterating on the same 'general/bland advice' is that it really is the bread and butter of it. Talk more, can't say it enough. Be honest, be respectful, don't spam, but don't be shy to talk to strangers in your line of work. Not sure if this helps anyone, but just wanted to say it's easier than most of you think. You need a marketable skill, a minimal network and to talk. If you're doing honest work, things pick up on it's own. Known pitfalls - there's more to running a consultancy than just talking and working, admin work takes a lot of time as well. Plan for the extras.

tootie 7y ago
I'm curious how well this scales though. Are the kind of clients you're reaching out to small- to mid-size? I've spent a lot of time working at fairly large consulting agencies and the amount of time and resources that go into just pitching seem daunting to a newcomer.
- Arqu 7y ago
  I guess I'm in a good position comming from a Co which scaled from ~30 to currently ~220 before I exited. Nearly 70% is from a growing personal network from a single guy. Another 15% come from direct referals outside that network. The last 15 are a mix of random circumstances and some cold outreach. Depending how you look at it ie. Building networks or just chatting people up can lead to very different outcomes. The above was mostly focused on the 'getting started' part. Though the 200+ setup is successfully run by a team of 7 or 8. Things change as you scale and the approach that works on smaller mumbers does not work on largers and vice versa. Feel free to ping me on email or otherwise if you'd like to chat.

BrentOzar 7y ago

The title is way off: he's talking about contractors, not consultants. Short version: Consultants tell the client what to do. Contractors are brought on to do what they're told. The advice in the article is a lot about "do you need someone do to ___ task" or "are you hiring an FTE, and could you do with a contractor instead" and that's contracting, not consulting. It's still valuable advice, but you don't find consulting clients this way.

rpedela 7y ago
If you are just getting started, I think it is good advice either way. What is most important at first is just having clients. Whether you are behaving as an executive or grunt doesn't matter. If someone has clients, then I think it is easier to transition to consulting from contracting. And giving talks, blog posts, etc is great advice for consulting and contracting at any stage.
jdale27 7y ago
Assuming this semantic distinction holds, what are the practical consequences? How do you find "consulting" clients? In fact, what is even the shape of a "consulting" engagement in software development, where I am telling the client what to do, instead of doing what I'm told? Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least something about what software needs to be built? Not trying to put up a strawman here, it's just that I've seen this distinction made elsewhere, but not clear on how it plays out in practice. I suspect the line between "consultant" and "contractor" isn't that bold.
- kthejoker2 7y ago
  > Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least something about what software needs to be built? Yes? All the time. "I've heard about this thing called machine learning. Come assess how I can use it in my business." "We have a problem where orders are missing their commit dates and we need something built to find those earlier in our procurement process. Maybe our new cloud ERP can help...?" So they have some degree of knowledge around the success criteria (what) and the value (why) but even those need to be shaped up and agreed upon. And then the design considerations, approaches, tradeoffs, constraints, risks, options, etc. (the how) is somewhere between directionally correct and nonexistent.

11eleven 7y ago

I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles. I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at least proactively putting myself in front of them, instead of hoping they find me or remember me. Came across this comment from another thread [1] that breaks it down a bit: 1. Go to https://trends.builtwith.com/framework https://trends.builtwith.com/framework to find websites that use the tech stack you specialize in. 2. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs) 3. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5). 4. Find the email format of these companies with https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/. 5. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email. The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to use. Here's a template you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer help them bring some features or projects out of backlog. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs) I think some of the same magic involved in finding consulting clients draws parallels to getting large corporations to consider you for contract work?
- throwaway35784 7y ago

gk1 7y ago

Here's my take on this, based on what worked or didn't for me in my first year: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-leads/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...

krm01 7y ago

The way we’ve been attracting Software companies to our UI/UX agency is through sideproject marketing. I wanted to write an article about this but here’s the tldr version of it: build small standalone projects that provide value and communicate the value you provide to potential customers. There are a few good articles about this but I feel sideproject marketing is highly underrated. You can use your skills as a developer/designer to market your service. Without feeling dirty about selling.

jessems 7y ago
Interesting! Can you share an example?

gumby 7y ago

Some of this advice is also good for just plain getting hired: giving talks, having visible evidence of what you can do. It can cause actual humans to contact you directly rather than recruiters. But it takes work and isn't for everyone.

josefresco 7y ago

I take issue with using "meetups" of other tech consultants as a way to get clients. I'd rather "network" (another uncool word for meetups) with potential leads, within an industry vertical than spend my time talking to other geeks.

sgillen 7y ago
I can see how going to a meetup for an interest orthogonal to your own could be fruitful. If I’m a hardware/embedded person and I go to a python meetup it’s possible someone works for a company who is looking for some one off embedded work. Though as you say, if you can directly find the people who are looking to hire you even better.

JoeMayoBot 7y ago

Good advice on getting out to meet other people in the community. You could call it marketing, but the positive effect on you and others has a less clinical perspective. It's especially important to be a part of the community, rather than just show up to meetings. e.g. Give presentations, help with organizing a meetup, socialize outside of the meetup (e.g. coffee, lunch, beers) with folks you like. You honestly don't ever know where your next gig is coming from, so getting out and enjoying this part of it can be worthwhile.

albertshin 7y ago

As an aside: I recently had an agency/contractor reach out via a LinkedIn connect request with the "personal message" being an ad for their services. I have a few startup things I've founded/co-founded on my profile, so I'm guessing this is a new way to "source" clients... that is until everyone starts doing this and I start just instinctively ignoring these messages or LinkedIn figures out this eats into their InMail revenue stream.

chasd00 7y ago

you'd be surprised how productive hanging around some bars near office parks during happy hour can be. Lots of conversations can be eavesdropped, find the right one, and then strike up a conversation and get a card in someone's hand.

shartshooter 7y ago

I started a consulting business doing CRM work on nights and weekend about five years back that’s now running close to $100k/mo. It all started from a former colleague who’d moved onto a new role and asked me to help them set up their CRM. This colleague talked to their friends, I started mentioning it in casual conversation and more referrals started pouring in. This process of working nights and weekends meant I could scale it without pressure. Your network will be your best asset early on because you have no brand awareness not evidence that you can do the job. Folks will be working with you because they know and trust you. We’re now at an inflection point where that method of driving business won’t scale as fast as we want so we’re now relying on channel relationships we’ve built with the CRM provider. We also work with consultants in related fields that don’t want to do CRM work which has been a huge boost to our bottom line as well. On the flip side I have a friend trying to break into devops consulting who couldn’t get a single customer despite relying heavily on his network so take both anecdotes with a grain of salt.

JamesBarney 7y ago
Hmm that's not what I expected. I always thought DevOps consulting would be an easier to break into because your professional network is also who you'd sell to. Because as a developer I know where to find tons of developers, I have a large network of developers. But the only type of software they or their employers want to buy is staff augmentation.
- shartshooter 7y ago
  It's possible he's terrible at devops, terrible at selling himself or was generally barking up the wrong tree. I wouldn't recommend taking my comment as a nudge away from getting into devops consulting but just that a friend I know struggled with it
jlu 7y ago
Out of curiosity, what does CRM consulting look like? Is it autonomous job (configuring servers and applications) or face to to face to work?

camping-monitor 7y ago

I have been thinking about this for a long time. If anybody is interested in building a consulting agency with me, feel free to ping me at ideavalid@icloud.com

rcconf 7y ago

I've been able to scale consulting to about 20-35k / mo as a single developer.I've gotten all of my clients through word-of-mouth and I've spend zero dollars in marketing. The trick being that I always try to do the best work and communicate instantly with my clients. I.e, if a client e-mails me, or sends me a text, I respond in about one second. They seem to love that. I try to be as honest and forthcoming with each client and I've basically hit a cap now in being able to add any new ones and deliver the experience I want to each client. Scaling is the most difficult part for me right now since all my clients are quite varied. Some of them are web apps, other mobile apps and others just pure cybersecurity. They're so vastly different from each other that it's a bit difficult to hire someone who can handle the diverse amount of work. Also, I think for the amount of work I do, I should probably have much bigger retainers, so some clients are $1,250 / month, but jesus is that hard. It should probably be at least $5,000 /month. For me tho, I've learned so much about business and my technical skills have skyrocketed. I honestly feel like I can tackle any problem in the world and it's a powerful feeling. I make decisions based on the problem its self and have no loyalty really to a specific technology. I understand why a client may want to use WordPress and why a client may want to use Kubernetes. Some clients want to just do servers using Linux and that's okay. I've learned that more basic technology (like bash) can be hugely beneficial to trying to write your own solution. When you're under time constraints, you start to have some pretty creative solutions, and not the creative where it breaks later, the creative where it does exactly what it needs to do, but it's done in 1 hour instead of 1 month. The best advice I could give is to basically be brutally honest with each client, do the best work that you can and always reply in a timely manner, regardless of what's happening in your life. So many consulting companies are slow to reply, or don't really care about their clients on a personal level that clients will really love you if you spend time thinking about their business on a personal level, being responsive and just being honest when you're overloaded in work. It is a stressful business tho and I'm in the alpha stages of a product I'm working on based on the problems I've seen over the years. It'll be interesting to move from consulting to a SaaS product. The transition being the consulting provides the funding to be able to work on the SaaS and then hopefully the recurring revenue outpaces consulting eventually and I live a less stressful life!

cloudartisans 7y ago

gremlinsinc 7y ago

Curious anybody use Facebook or google ads to find freelance or consulting clients? I'm finally building up some cash stores after a summer drought, but I'm working 70 hour weeks at $25/hour, trying to finish up the 25/hour gig as my other client is $40 and I'd like to get back up to my normal rates of $60-70/hour. I've been doing laravel/fullstack since 2013 and vue since 2016. I also know basic devops stuff. How to use aws. I've even used ML recently with aws/rekognition and python/nltk-rake. I'm horrible at selling myself but I can't take another < 60k year - when I know I'm worth more than 100k.

msadowski 7y ago

Very good article! The only point that I don't agree with is about not freelancing websites. When I started consulting/contacting 1.5 years ago I did start with a freelance site and at this time about 90% of my jobs still come from there. I would much rather have clients from outside of the platform but I don't find it easy to close them. I need to point out that I'm in a very niche field (at least on Upwork); On average month I see about 3-5 quality jobs I can apply to and quite often I see them getting less than 5 proposals. I expect this wouldn't be a case for web development projects.

stevenicr 7y ago

Would like to see a new write of of resources that are good for running a consulting shop these days. Sure I have some things bookmarked from previous HN threads like open-source- contracts to use, contracts, communication tools, project management, milestone sharing, invoicing and such perhaps? demo - sketch mockup sharing and such? whats the popular freelance tech stack these days if one was going to go this route today?