
How to Find Consulting Clients - chrisa
https://www.breakintoconsulting.com/blog/2018/4/11/how-to-find-consulting-clients
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raleigh_user
For what its worth I can talk more about how I do it. I tried to start a SaaS
company, realized my CAC was out of control and started taking on consulting
clients as a way to fund the SaaS and pay my bills.

We've been doing the consulting portion for 3 months now and are on pace to
hit 10k (mostly mrr) this month.

I don't believe there is any super special process. I figured this out through
months of failing and piecing things together.

You should make content to establish yourself as an expert. I did for
recruiting. Over the course of 6 months I went from some random person who
knew nothing to an authority in the space.

By doing that, I get invited to speak and train teams across the US. Our
business is pretty simple. We make content, which helps our lead gen efforts
be more effective because people know who we are. Through that, we shoot for
20 meetings booked a month.

We try to close 5% of the opportunities we generate since we aren't really
sales people.

And then once clients are closed we work like hell to fulfill what we told
them we were going to do!

There really isn't a magic sauce. Its just about the volume needed for sales
(I struggled with this for awhile as an engineer).

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jacquesm
There is no bigger enemy of a SaaS company than a successful consulting play.
Good luck trying to re-focus on your SaaS project once the consulting company
brings in a large multiple (with much larger overhead). You are also
substantially reducing your chances of finding funding and as a side effect
are reducing your valuation, so unless you plan to self fund for the
foreseeable future you may want to re-consider the strategic impact of this
decision. If you can please do it under a different legal entity.

Also: a crisis in your consultancy department will further reduce your focus
on the SaaS part. A successful SaaS play with longer lead times and a hard to
reach market requires deep pockets or a very tight belt. Adding a consultancy
arm is akin to killing the SaaS project, only slowly.

~~~
goatherders
Agree. If you are going to consult then try and productize whatever it is you
are getting paid for as a consultant. Even if the back end is still people
powered, this layer of abstraction can go a long way in the consulting revenue
not being directly tied to your (or anyone) being hands-on directly involved.

~~~
jacquesm
Funny you should say that, I'm struggling with that exact problem right now.
And it's a tough one.

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hullsean
I've written quite a bit about this topic (www.iheavy.com)

Yes getting "out of the building" is important, and going out & meeting people
is key. All the time. Also don't hard sell people. Instead introduce one
person to another person. At first you are simply giving your connections. But
soon people see you as a go-to person, and will bring things to you. Also
people don't forget gifts of introductions & business you bring.

Another thing. Don't go to "peer" events with other engineers. These events
are useful to build your knowledge, but not work building your business.
Stronger leads come from business owners, managers & CTOs. Start going to
events outside your subject area of expertise. Go to pitch events, vc events,
startup events, entrepreneur events.

You will be surprised how valuable you will be in a non-tech business event.
This will also teach you to communicate better with non-tech folks. And share
what you know. Also ask people, "what events do you recommend?" Then go to
those events. And so on!

~~~
maxxxxx
Agreed. The successful consultants I knew have the ability to get along with
business people and understand their needs. The actual technology skills seems
secondary. You have to be good at tech but number one is people skills by far.

~~~
mathattack
This!

If you expect business people to cross the business/tech communication chasm,
you have a lot fewer options than if you are the one to cross it. Learning
their language helps you understand the value they get from your services,
which gives you more leverage on rates.

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theli0nheart
I've been doing software consulting for startups for ~10 years.

My best generic advice is to try to put yourself in the mind of your perfect
client/customer.

It can be easy to forget this, but they're just as desperate to find help as
you might be trying to find work. Think about where they might go—online or
offline—to find help, and go there. Rinse and repeat. You may not even meet
your actual client this way, but may meet someone who knows someone. That's
just about nearly as good.

Once you have a few stable clients, that's where a good network comes into
play. Do good work, be nice, and tell people what you do, and the work will
keep coming in (and likely in amounts greater than you can handle).

~~~
dcosson
Can I ask what kind of work do you usually do for startups?

Are these companies that have minimal funding and no or very few full-time
engineers, and you're building them a prototype to help them get off the
ground? Or are you doing something very specialized, like setting up a
Kubernetes cluster or something and training the team to maintain it after you
leave?

Or, are these companies that have existing well-functioning engineering teams,
and you basically join the team building product features alongside them but
as a consultant?

Just asking because I've worked at a lot of startups but haven't ever been in
a situation where we've hired a consultant. So I'm curious what the working
relationship is like, I feel like there might be some friction between full-
time employees who are often super committed, working long hours, maybe taking
a pay cut to work there, and a consultant who's just in for a few months.

~~~
theli0nheart
Most of my clients are non-technical founders. My role is generally that of an
early stage CTO.

I do pretty much everything on the technical side to get the product off the
ground and scale it, from wireframing, to writing the code, and ultimately
helping build the team or onboarding a FT CTO or VP Eng. My period of
involvement varies from about 6 months (generally takes at least this long to
find a good CTO candidate) to 4-5 years, at which point I'm usually leading
the tech team.

~~~
irremediable
Do you do this for several companies at once?

And how do they pay you, if not with equity to offset low co-founder salary?

Really intrigued to know; I wasn't aware this was a model that worked.

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pknerd
Pretty much agreed with blogging part and niche as fellow HN'ers mentioned
below.

I (re)started my tech blog after several years and made it more active and
discussed things which were kind of like a "niche" that is web scraping and
automation. I wrote posts how things are done and put code on Github. At one
side I was building my Github and on other hand my SEO optimized posts
attracted Google and eventually developers and..site/business owners too that
helped me to get contractual work.

The biggest issue with us, techies, is that we don't know how to sell
ourselves. Blogging could be pretty effective to get consulting work.

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a_c
Another aspect I find useful is to think about how to position yourself. Do
you advertise yourself as a technology expert or do you describe what you do
in common language? e.g. "We build website with angular" vs "We build website
for jewellery brand" is very likely to influence what kind of client you will
get

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lkgrindy
This feels very derivative of an article ([https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-
learned-to-get-consulting-l...](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-
get-consulting-leads/)) that I’ve seen reposted a couple times.

~~~
letdatboicook
yeah bro, I thought of your article too - since I've read your shit I've
started a "ghost" campaign of starting my own firm.

Right now I'm at ~$2k a month and also I've increased my rate thanks to your
work.

This article is not "shitty" but it def was inspired by your article

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netskrill
Run a meetup group. There are/were 2 guys who ran the Ruby on Rails meetup
group in Houston, and were constantly being asked by companies who were trying
to look for RoR devs to hire but would often just ask them to do short-term
work. I think their abandoning the group now....but someone should snatch up
the opportunity.

~~~
raleigh_user
I originally had a meetup group and it being local really limited the
opportunities. I then switched to building an online Facebook group and scaled
that. All of what I do can be done remote so it didn't make sense to limit
geographically.

If there is no requirement to be onsite, I'd steer clear of meetup. For the
same effort you can grow something across the US/outside/etc

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erikb
Yes, from jobs, from luck, from university, from parents people actually can
have so many contacts that they don't have to worry about finding clients.
That's a core prerequisit for consulting. If you don't have that, your best
approach is working for the biggest company that will take you 5+ years while
trying to spend a lot of time with customers and partner companies.

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exolymph
I wrote a blog post about this once, from the perspective of a freelance
writer: [https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2016/12/find-clients-
freelanc...](https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2016/12/find-clients-
freelancer.html)

Your personal network is the most important thing, in my experience.

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tudorizer
As someone who is just starting consulting, after 10+ years of development and
a few product experiments, I thank you for sharing this article!

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jen729w
TL;DR: it’s one of those sites that pretends to give you useful information
but is actually just an email address harvester.

Don’t bother.

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chrisa
I'm sorry you feel that way! Yes, there is an email opt-in form there; but my
goal really is to help people who are trying to get started in consulting. I
have a lot more content planned, so I wanted a way to contact people who were
interested. Hopefully the content that is there is still helpful to you, even
if you don't want to give your email address.

~~~
madez
You can show your content to the people who were interested by putting it on
your website. It's that easy!

