I recently started a company providing contract system administration work, honestly the first contract was a reference from when I was working for salary and w

I recently started a company providing contract system administration work, honestly the first contract was a reference from when I was working for salary and word of mouth caused it to spread from there. I think the key things to think about are as follows. 0. Do some market research, what does your competition charge? What do you offer that they don't? If you don't have a way to differentiate yourself how can you package what you offer to make it seem better than what they are offering, if you can't dazzle with brilliance baffle with bullshit. 1. What do your customers want? You know what they need, but what do they want? Designers often seem to design to impress other designers, programmers enjoy pulling neat hacks that other programmers admire, and system admins love building cool stuff that integrates some of the latest automation, but are these things what your customers want? If it is great! Just make sure to gut check yourself when you put together what services you offer to make sure you aren't just following your own fantasies of what you wish work was like. Now that you know what they want figure out how to sell them on the cool stuff you enjoy doing as well as long as it doesn't get in the way of the initial goals they have. Yes you may know better than them in regards to what they need in some respects but they know their business case better than you, if you can meet in the middle you will get plenty of referrals. 2. Advertise, advertise, advertise. I used a combination of spotify ads and google ad words initially. The number one thing to remember about adwords is, don't lock yourself into just the keywords you think should work. Find out what business people would type into google when searching and target those words. 3. This is something a lot of people might disagree with but, I over book myself, not to the extent that the work suffers but to the extend that my work home life blurs and it's mildly stressful. You never know when a client might flake out and having that cushion will save you when your clients nephew takes a course on youtube and thinks he is now a $your_job_here. I make my money over a 6 month time period and then take 6 months off. I have a much closer relationship to my children and my spouse and over all I'm much happier, the ability to travel is really nice as well. Keep your main revenue stream until you can at least get a few paying clients then shove off but remember you will need to think about health insurance if you are in the U.S. (I infer from the title you are in London) if you do have to worry about insurance and are in the U.S. you can look into http://www.freelancersunion.org/ http://www.freelancersunion.org/ consider it leverage when buying insurance. Also keep in mind there is significant overhead from book keeping I was shocked at the number of hours it took, I said screw it and automated the whole process. Also keep in mind they can pay contract workers so well for a few reasons, it's results based, they don't have to pay for insurance or other benefits, there is no training budget involved. Still it's the best decision you can make, you are your own master though and it feels amazing. Good luck!