Personally, I'm very strong on the social networking side. And I love the engineering side, too. Part of the attraction to consulting for me is in meeting and

Personally, I'm very strong on the social networking side. And I love the engineering side, too. Part of the attraction to consulting for me is in meeting and getting to know new people. Especially, C-level. I've always done best reporting to or working directly with senior management or owners. Spending too much time in one can leave the other feeling under-utilized. I'm guessing I'll end up needing to have engineers on contract and have 70:30 business dev to engineering ratio or something. I'm not sure but that ratio seems about right given how much time the social networking side needs to keep money coming in consistently. Plus, there's the downtime needed to make the mental switch from one to the other. Or maybe just contract out all the work and do my various hobby projects on the side to satisfy the engineer in me. Edit: Cold Calling: Things I learned in a non-tech venture. Visualizations, and rehearsals (mental and physical) of each step of the calling process were very, very helpful. One click dialing straight off a spreadsheet of cold contacts made things easier, too. After getting through the first 100 or so numbers dialing started to give me a rush. Fear was starting to be replaced by excitement. Very curious experience. One other thing. I was told to expect, and found, roughly speaking, half of the numbers I dialed on an industry specific list of small to medium sized companies, no one answered. Another quarter were busy or couldn't talk and it really had nothing to do with me. These numbers held across a few different industries. Since I was rather likely to NOT reach someone for a conversation I found it much easier to dial.