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I help software developers build meaningful careers with purpose.
Unlike others - who recommend chasing big salaries, jobs at elite companies (FAANG), or grinding interview prep - I mentor developers toward fulfilling, balanced software careers.
My goal is to help you work on software that makes the world a better place.
People ask me all the time about freelancing consulting, starting your own business, being your own boss.
I've done it. I've taken consulting contracts. I've even done it full time. I've been a full time consultant. And it's really hard, actually. It's difficult. You have to find all of your contracts. You have to be a small business owner and everything that comes with it. But the trade off is you do get a lot of flexibility and a lot of control over what you're working on and who you work with.
So today, let's dive into how I would start from scratch if I were starting a consulting business.
when you're starting a consulting business, it can be difficult to know where to start. What should I build? Who should I build it? Four. And the best thing I know to help you solve that problem is to talk to people. You're going to have to go out and talk with people.
You're a small business owner now, you can't build a consulting business from your bedroom in isolation without talking to other people. You're going to have to go out and learn about their problems. And then once you learn about some problems, take some notes. So take really detailed notes. Use the exact words that they used in your notes, because that will all come back later when you're pitching the solution to the problem.
problem. Next, you've got to choose a niche. Now, a lot of people will say, I'm a generalist, I'm a jack of all trades, I can do anything. That's great. But if you want to have a successful consulting business, I strongly recommend that you pick a niche to work in.
Now, this niche could be a horizontal niche. Like, let's say I'm an expert in unit test. Testing in Python, and I help teams with their testing practices and help them implement testing best practices. And I could do that for any number of companies. It doesn't matter what the company builds with their software.
I'm an expert in unit testing. I can go help any of them. That's called a horizontal niche. And then there are vertical niches, which are roughly industry aligned. So you could be an expert in aviation or in healthcare, and you would help aviation companies with their software. So horizontal versus vertical is important, and there's all sorts of things to think about with positioning and which one might be a better fit for you.
But at the end of the day, the important thing is that you pick a niche.
Now, here's something worth thinking about. What should you sell? The way I see it, there's basically three different options that we can get into here. The first is a product. A product is something that you build and then you sell. The result of that thing, it's usually you can think of it as an app or just some piece of code that runs and that helps your target market.
And you don't need to do anything to sell another one to a new client. Then there are services. So app is a product, and then we've got services which you would generally sell by the hour. At least a lot of consultants sell their services by the hour. It's doing custom work for somebody and going in and working their project.
There's reasons to think that actually hourly billing is not that great. And we'll talk a little bit later about value based price. Thing, but more on that in a minute. Okay, so there's products, there's services that you sell custom to clients. And then the thing that I like to think about when I'm working on a consulting contract is a productized service.
So how can I build myself the foundation to help clients? And then each contract or client engagement is just a matter of marrying whatever that client has to the foundation that I already have? How can I turn even my soft skills, my consulting, my expertise into a product that I can then repeatably provide to customers over and over again instead of having to do everything custom and bespoke?
So that's something worth thinking about. Are you going to sell a product? In which case you're probably a software business. Not really a consulting business. Are you going to sell a service?
Usually. Hourly. But there's some reason to think that selling value based services is a good way to go as a consultant. Or are you going to sell a productized service? Are you going to package your services in such a way that they're repeatable with a system for new clients?
the next thing to think about is how are you going to get your clients and how do I get my first client? Now, in order to have a successful business idea, I would say actually you should aim for getting three clients. Your first three clients really validates your business idea that it's valuable in the marketplace.
Place and that you can do it successfully. The first client or the second client might be a fluke, might be your network pulling some strings for you. So you get some people. But once you've got three clients, you know that you're on to something. Three people that pay you to do something.
So how do you get those three clients? Well, you could start with your network, and that's where I would recommend, especially those people that you talked to in the very first step when you were trying to find a problem that you wanted to solve. Go back to them and show them what you're thinking about and ask them, would this be valuable to you?
Would you pay for it? So that's one. Next, you could ask for introductions to other people in your network. So ask your network for introductions to anybody who they might think finds your new product or service valuable. I would also spend some time working on inbound marketing, which means creating a blog, an.
Email list, some type of content. Maybe you have a YouTube channel or you're just posting on LinkedIn, anything like that, that allows people to discover you. So that's important. And I would say an email list is especially important. You want to keep in touch with people in the industry and your prospects on a regular basis.
You want to be a name that they know and that comes to mind when thinking about these topics. Next, I would say join some of the online communities in your niche. So if you've picked a vertical specialization especially, you'll be able to find all sorts of industry groups that you could join.
But even in some horizontal specializations as well, you might be able to find niche groups online that talk about the specialization that you've decided on. And then finally, I would say there's all sorts of job boards and freelance sites that you can go through to find clients. Those clients tend to be hit or miss.
And I would say don't base. Your entire consulting practice on these job boards and freelance sites, but they can be really useful for finding those first few clients.
okay, so you found some clients and you know what you want to sell them. Let's talk about delivery. So the first thing I would say is, once you've decided with you've gone through the sales pitch with the client and they say, yes, we want to do it, the first thing is to create a contract between you and the client.
Keep the scope of that contract quite small in the beginning. So let's narrow down our focus to. One or two things that are going to create value for that client quickly and provide that early value that could then lead to an ongoing engagement. But I would say scope your contracts quite small at the beginning.
Next, I would also say focus on outcomes and not on technical implementation. So clients generally don't really care about how you're going to do it. They care what you're going to for the bottom line of the business. So are you increasing revenue? Are you decreasing expense for them? Or are you somehow helping to mitigate risk for them as well?
Whether that's cybersecurity or data cleanliness, there's all sorts of ways that you might be able to sell the outcomes that you expect from your consulting without
needing to focus on the technical implementation of how you're going to do it.
And then my final piece of advice is that you should price your services based on their value to the client, instead of pricing your services based on some arbitrary hourly rate.
Your value is in the outcomes you produce for the company. And so you should want to align your consulting practice with creating those outcomes. Now, when you work hourly, your
incentives are to
work as many hours as possible on this problem. And you see this with consultants that they just bill. They bill bill more and more hours on these problems that should be fairly small and simple to fix or or straightforward to implement. And the reason is because they make money when they build more hours
instead. It would be great if you could align your consulting practice with creating value for the company. And it doesn't matter how long it takes you to create that value. When you do, you get paid. So a good rule of thumb might be something like if I think that this feature I'm helping to develop for this company could be worth $50,000 in revenue to the company, then I'll say let me multiply it by let's just random number 10%, and I'll charge $5,000 for that feature.
And it doesn't matter how long it takes me to build that feature. It's worth it for the company if they spend $5,000 and get $50,000 in value?
so I know that was a lot. And this is just kind of a crash course in starting a consulting business. There's much more detail we could go into on all of these points. But I do want to impress on you something here at the end, which is there's no such thing as a get rich quick scheme.
There are a lot of steps to starting a good business. It will take a lot of work. You'll have to constantly be iterating on your business model, constantly talking to new people, pitching new business and outside of luck and winning the lottery, free money really just doesn't exist. You're going to have to work for it to get the results that you are hoping for.
it. So it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be a lot of work, and you will constantly be learning. But I think there's a lot of value in learning how to your own small business, to doing a little bit of consulting to understand how consulting works and getting that kind of perspective of an outside consultant on the business.
And even if you go back to Salaried employment after you try consulting, it would definitely be worth it, in my opinion. So there's the high level of review, and there's a ton more for you to figure out and learn and get clients and start building out your business. It's exciting.
It'll be a big challenge, but let me know in the comments below or send me an email how it goes with your new consulting venture. See you in the next one.