3 ms·

This. This is a full time job. Trying to get leads via LinkedIn? Twitter? Ain’t going to work - preaching to the choir. One needs to reach outside of their netw

This. This is a full time job. Trying to get leads via LinkedIn? Twitter? Ain’t going to work - preaching to the choir. One needs to reach outside of their network. This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Alternatively, one does contracting sourced through headhunters but that’s not really consulting. It’s all about talking to people, building rapport, establishing trust. Often talks lead nowhere for months or years. Talk to people about their problems, suggest solutions, show your value, but don’t share how. Next point, without people on standby, some engagements are unreachable because the client will not engage if: a) you have no perm employees, b) you are too small, as in, what if you go under 6 months down the line or some bigger client paying more comes around. It can be rewarding but it’s a tough market to be in. Competition is huge and there’s always someone with prices lower than yours but positioned better than you at a given point in time.

As_You_Wish 4y ago
>This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Right. I've always told people to do 2 things to always have a job and lots of job offers all the time: 1) public speaking at events and conferences. 2) public writing. I know a guy, did SQL stuff, and if there was a group of 2 people that got together for a local users group, he'd travel 200 miles to give a presentation in front of them. He'd been doing it for years, as in decades. The guy got 4 - 5 job offers every day. He had his computer there and showed me the offers coming into his email. And of course, if you do a lot of writing for any kind of journal or blog, and get published, that's also going to explode your contacts. . When you publicly speak or write, it establishes you as an industry leader, even if there are people more technically knowledgeable than you are.
abrichr 4y ago
> ...show your value, but don’t share how. Can you please elaborate on this point? Are you saying that if you create an open source solution, people won't pay you to implement or support it for their use case?
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  I like this question. The contrary. IMO, this is one of the best ways to go about it. However, the solution should not give away your secret sauce. Look at examples, two come to my mind: Ory and Yugabyte. Their solutions are mostly open source and both are examples or healthy businesses operating on an open source foundation. But not all bits are open source. Not all knowledge gathered by the org is shared for free. In both cases, the value is open source, the how isn't. The premise is: "this is what can be done, you, the client, can do it roughly like this and this". There's a lot of space to fill between individual "this". That space is your secret sauce, the "how". For the "how", the client needs to engage. The client must have a way to learn the "how" but it's important that the client knows the price of the "how" and is contractually obliged to keep the "how" knowledge internal.
bruce511 4y ago
Becoming an "authority" can help as well. Having a public, professional, persona can help with credibility. I started off doing training, which progressed to a book, which progressed to more training, which progressed to a free weekly webinar where I answer questions. In my tiny niche, prospective clients "know my name". If I'm asked to supply credentials it's easy to do, and there's usually someone on their team who's heard of me. It helps skip over the "can he do the work" part of the negotiation. Customers are happier to do projects, and pay more, if they are confident the project will actually succeed. Typically its not their own money they are depending, but project failures hurt their upstream reputation.

As_You_Wish 4y ago

>This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Right. I've always told people to do 2 things to always have a job and lots of job offers all the time: 1) public speaking at events and conferences. 2) public writing. I know a guy, did SQL stuff, and if there was a group of 2 people that got together for a local users group, he'd travel 200 miles to give a presentation in front of them. He'd been doing it for years, as in decades. The guy got 4 - 5 job offers every day. He had his computer there and showed me the offers coming into his email. And of course, if you do a lot of writing for any kind of journal or blog, and get published, that's also going to explode your contacts. . When you publicly speak or write, it establishes you as an industry leader, even if there are people more technically knowledgeable than you are.

abrichr 4y ago

> ...show your value, but don’t share how. Can you please elaborate on this point? Are you saying that if you create an open source solution, people won't pay you to implement or support it for their use case?

rad_gruchalski 4y ago
I like this question. The contrary. IMO, this is one of the best ways to go about it. However, the solution should not give away your secret sauce. Look at examples, two come to my mind: Ory and Yugabyte. Their solutions are mostly open source and both are examples or healthy businesses operating on an open source foundation. But not all bits are open source. Not all knowledge gathered by the org is shared for free. In both cases, the value is open source, the how isn't. The premise is: "this is what can be done, you, the client, can do it roughly like this and this". There's a lot of space to fill between individual "this". That space is your secret sauce, the "how". For the "how", the client needs to engage. The client must have a way to learn the "how" but it's important that the client knows the price of the "how" and is contractually obliged to keep the "how" knowledge internal.

bruce511 4y ago

Becoming an "authority" can help as well. Having a public, professional, persona can help with credibility. I started off doing training, which progressed to a book, which progressed to more training, which progressed to a free weekly webinar where I answer questions. In my tiny niche, prospective clients "know my name". If I'm asked to supply credentials it's easy to do, and there's usually someone on their team who's heard of me. It helps skip over the "can he do the work" part of the negotiation. Customers are happier to do projects, and pay more, if they are confident the project will actually succeed. Typically its not their own money they are depending, but project failures hurt their upstream reputation.