
How I Find Consulting Clients - gk1
https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-leads/
======
antonkm
Networking works if you do it right. Made $300k my first year from 0 using
only physical networks and around $5k spending money. I'm a web developer in
Sweden.

For me to join a network the network has to match these criteria:

* It markets itself as exclusive

* It costs money (say $2k/y for small businesses and scaling prices depending on number of employees)

* Participants are owners or at C-level

The networks are often dinners where the participants get to know each other
in friendly settings. I aim for networks with high middle age where I stick
out as the younger (am mid-thirties) professional which connects tech with
business needs (my niche).

While at a network, do not talk about yourself. Ask about others businesses
and interests. These sells take between 6-12 months and are based on trust.

You also need to come prepared.

* Dress as expected.

* Have a web page with referrals so when leads get a bit nosy and Google you you're #1 in search and the page provides the lead with info about great work you've done. I have about 100 visits / mo to my page (my weird name helps for the #1 pos). 90% are primed leads.

* Know your oneliners. Prepare examples of things you can provide. Make them sound natural. Say it without selling in an informal way.

It's about being systematic and selecting only the networks where your dream
leads go to. Hoping to get into invite only networks further on.

~~~
fersab
Great job!

However, i would like to point out that the Consulting "climate", in Sweden is
very, very good and it is super-easy to find a client. Few searches and groups
on linked-in will yield interviews, and there are plenty of brokers that deal
with independent contractors.

With that in mind 300k is a nice job still for one guy!

~~~
antonkm
I consider myself to be more than one person, since I have a network of dev
friends. So these contacts help and I'd not be able to do those numbers
without people acting as my reference.

Agree about interviews and brokers. I however have no interest on using
brokers or being employed. Have gotten some really nice offers since I started
consulting, Sweden is great for such opportunities.

Starting Q1 2018 I have a 90% chance landing a ~500k SEK job from an informal
Facebook posting. I have no experience with dealing with clients outside of
Sweden. Maybe my advice isn't applicable to the US?

------
dizzystar
As someone who does consulting, I find it interesting to read how others do
it. There is a lot of advice, but I like how this article is upfront: find
what works for you.

The initial leap is understanding how money and expectations balance each
other out. This comes with tripping up hard at first, but it gets easier as
time goes on.

For me, it comes down to giving that first hour to the client to really drill
into the issue and having them see that you aren't trying to screw them over.
Unfortunately, many clients have been taken hard by prior programmers, and
your goal should be making the buck stop with you. They rebut you, but that's
just them figuring out your honesty, and you don't convince them by saying
"yes" to everything.

Even on your best, you can't satisfy everyone, but those that you do satisfy
are, more often than not, willing to refer you or give more work down the
line.

------
Radim
For us, the door opened with open source.

We maintain a few semi-popular Python packages for machine learning, which
brings in enough leads to keep a team of data scientists booked for months in
advance.

(Funnily enough, the actual work is mostly unrelated to the open source
itself.)

We've been gradually increasing the project size and value, now working with
companies like Amazon, Autodesk or Hearst.

Helped:

\- hot domain (machine learning)

\- positioning as problem solvers (rather than tech X vs tech Y), _solving in
context_

\- sales (me) being able to speak both the technical and business language

Waste of time (as far as leadgen):

\- conference sponsorships, online ads (newsletter banners, PPC), professional
marketing agencies

\- any sort of academic partnerships or consortium projects

\- fancy website, social media

~~~
WolfOliver
I do not have experience with it, but open source as a marketing instrument
seems to be an interesting instrument. Not only for the company but also for
the employees working on it. That is way I think employees are extra motivated
when working on Open Source projects.

------
finkin1
tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what
works for you."

I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have
a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging
to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from
referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I
started sending out about 50 cold emails per month as an exercise, and have
found a number of great long-term clients. It's a low probability game for
sure, but it takes me maybe 1-2 hours per month and if I get a response I can
generally determine if there's a good fit within a few back and forth emails.

~~~
thestepafter
Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold
emails to?

~~~
mlevental
i'm not this guy but this is a useful framework for sending cold emails:

[https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-
bootstr...](https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-
bootstrapping-a-saas-startup-from-scratch-by-yourself-part-1-4d834e1df8c1)

------
samfisher83
Here is the gist of what I got from the article.

Things that worked:

-Blogging

-Referrals through blogging

-Posting comments on HNs

Things that didn't work

-Networking Events

-Participate in marketing or consulting communities

-Partner with agencies or other consultants

-Hound people

-Cold outreach

-Advertising

-Handing out business cards

~~~
philbarr
Except that networking events definitely DID work because he says that the
first gig he got was through someone he met at a networking event.

And the rest was basically, "be lucky".

~~~
jandrese
That gig was a lifeline, but didn't make him successful. It wasn't until he
started getting visibility with the actual founders that he started to feel
like he could do this as a job. Most of the don'ts are events where founders
are too busy to attend or are swamped and it's almost impossible to stand out.

Really his takeaway is to make a name for yourself and the offers will roll
in. Figure out a way to increase your stature or you'll never make it as a
consultant. That's what all of the blog posts and hacker news articles were
for, getting people who matter to know his name.

------
gk1
Hi, today I added an update to this two-year-old post and in the spirit of
"shipping fast" I published it without spending too much time on editing. Let
me know if you find typos, have questions that the post doesn't answer, or if
something in the post doesn't hold water.

~~~
needcaffeine
You know...I’ve never thought of shipping fast as being applicable to
blogging. In some ways my blog posts fall victim to the “waterfall”
development model and never end up shipping. Thank you for helping me think of
that in this way.

~~~
gk1
That's exactly the problem I used to have. So I decided to just publish an MVP
and then iterate on it later if a) I have something more to add, or b) the
post starts getting a lot of attention. In this case both are true, so here I
am touching it up on the fly.

~~~
reificator
For me it's an issue of "If I had time I'd have written a shorter letter".

------
htormey
Apart from writing blog posts another good way to get clients is to give
relevant high quality talks at meetups and conferences.

This has worked for me on multiple occasions. Pretty much every conference I
have spoken at as a consultant has resulted in several leads or a contract.

------
crdb
In our case:

    
    
        - Referrals from the network (e.g. VC to portfolio)
        - Cold outreach, once
        - (mostly) old colleagues getting a new job and asking us for help
    

Anecdotally, I am so frustrated with the high number of low quality job
applicants that I've started contacting top answerers on StackOverflow whose
answers meet our standards. It's a great signal as the people we chatted to
that way were always motivated, experienced and professional... and usually
only available on a contracting basis.

------
kfk
This is interesting. I am planning to start doing consulting into the
analytics industry and started a blog 6 months ago. So far, just by adding a
"free call" page and writing few blog posts, I got a couple of leads. It's not
much, but it's encouraging. I am now in the process of writing an ebook which
I will sell for $100 or so and see what happens there. I do plan to test
online ads for the ebook. The idea would be to use the ebook to build a
customer base for consulting, let's see. Writing an ebook it's not easy, but
it is helping me a lot to better understand my potential customers and define
my consulting product a bit more.

------
wordpressdev
I have started to give consulting a serious go since 2nd quarter of this year
as income from my own products are drying up. So far, I have tried following
venues to attract potential clients:

\- UpWork (sending at least 20 proposals per month) \- Social Media (LinkedIn,
Reddit, Facebook & Twitter) \- Blog

So far getting major work from UpWork with one client from Reddit and FB each.
Blog gets views but no conversions yet.

------
galfarragem
I would say that in the end there are only 2 ways:

\- network with, or better, befriend _potential_ clients. Knowing your market
is crutial.

\- make good work to get future referrals and speak about it (blog, forums,
public speaking) to get leads.

The optimal percentage of these 2 approaches depends on your personality and
the stage of your consultancy (just starting, long time in the market, etc).
As anecdotes, one friend, as an housing architect (and the best seller I ever
met) finds his clients _always_ during nightlife. By the other hand, my
father, as a tradesman, gets clients only by referrals. After 30y it's more
than enough for him. He doesn't even has any online presence.

------
globcal
There is no easy way. I have worked in different spheres and understand that
to make any business work well it needs to be capable of becoming a full-flung
manifestation with an office space and receptionist (ready to work around the
clock for global ideals) that can canter and monitor networks like Facebook,
Twitter and more. You never know from where a client will try to reach you.

------
sytelus
Just curious, what do you use as your blogging platform? Any specific
templates/themes?

~~~
gk1
It’s Jekyll hosted on Netlify. The theme is the default Jekyll theme with a
few small modifications.

------
xstartup
I was a business owner before I became a tech guy. Living in a country with
good rule of law and meeting customers face to face will help you get your
first consulting clients much faster.

I recommend being honest about the proposed solution and the time frame
required to meet those expectations. Customer usually doesn't know what they
need. They ask for a perfect solution. But you gotta show them why the pursuit
of chasing perfection is futile for their business, specially in tech where
doubling a seemingly simple metric might end up accounting for 10x the
engineering cost.

Here is an example, some time back I contracted a customer with 10K clients in
production delivering 400-500 average RPS. The customer wanted real time stats
which is hard to do with that much data as it included many dimensions, I
proposed a solution which was 10x cheaper and had a delay of 1 minute. The
business owner initially wanted 1 second delay but at the end was happy with
my solution.

You might not be so confident while talking with the customers but that's ok,
just take the problem home, think over it and come back with a solution. As a
business owner, I never really wanted a rockstar, I just wanted someone who I
can rely upon and you'll be amazed how many failed to deliver just that. You
might think that the people with money can always find better folks who can
solve their problem faster with a better solution but that's not what happens
in practise. I always had all money but still failed to find solutions to my
problem. Yea, well that's my own experience :)

