
How to Find Consulting Clients - chrisa
https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients
======
11eleven
I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a
blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait
for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control
over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine
cycles.

I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work
with. This meant I was at least proactively putting myself in front of them,
instead of hoping they find me or remember me.

Came across this comment from another thread [1] that breaks it down a bit:

1\. Go to
[https://trends.builtwith.com/framework](https://trends.builtwith.com/framework)
to find websites that use the tech stack you specialize in.

2\. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the
tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)

3\. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with
relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The
goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your
email (step 5).

4\. Find the email format of these companies with
[https://hunter.io/](https://hunter.io/).

5\. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company
with a personalized 1-on-1 email.

The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of
what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or
vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is
stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to
use. Here's a template you can reference: [https://artofemails.com/new-
clients#developer](https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer)

There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to
build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer
help them bring some features or projects out of backlog.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098)

~~~
cosmie
> 2\. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have
> the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)

Another aspect of this is that large corporations have pretty byzantine
processes for hiring/vetting vendors. A freelancer acting as a sole proprietor
or single-member llc raises risk factors with being classified as an employee,
and will likely have to get routed through a third-party staffing firm for
legal coverage. Which adds friction and cost to hiring you. A multi-member llc
or incorporated entity, however, can sometimes be easier to get approval for.

You bypass all of those shenanigans by focusing on the small and mid sized
companies first.

~~~
gk1
If a decision-maker at a large corp wants to work with you, they'll find a way
to cut through the red tape.

When I consulted for a multi-national telecom company, the "paperwork" was
easier to go through than for some startups. I filled out one form, sent my
W-9, and configured auto-invoices to go to a designated email address.

As the scope grew and my invoices reached a certain number, they asked me to
fill out one more form. That's all.

~~~
cosmie
As you said, every capable manager learns how to work the system for when the
situation warrants it.

I currently work (as an employee) for a marketing agency doing analytics
consulting work, and we're frequently used as a backdoor to get around
internal controls, be it hiring specific subcontractors or unapproved
technology. Because the SOW that allowed for (and specified) that passthrough
cost gets approved by their legal team, it's an unofficial way for many of our
clients to both stay within the lines while simultaneously bypassing internal
roadblocks. A particular favorite example of mine was helping a client swap
out their janky WAF with Cloudflare, and using Cloudflare Workers to do some
magic header rewriting to solve a longstanding issue of theirs. It solved a
business-impacting issue that had been plaguing the marketing team, and the
client's networking team was super excited to work with me on it as they'd
been wanting kick the tires of Cloudflare but couldn't ever get it pushed
through.

That said, the situation I mentioned in the above comment is typically the
official process at many Big Corps (at least in the US, where the contractor
vs. employee classification is a very big deal[1]). Some Big Corps are less
risk averse, and virtually every Big Corp has tribal knowledge among the
management on how to get things done when they need to. But you can generally
avoid the issue entirely by focusing prospecting efforts downmarket at smaller
enterprises.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-
findlaw-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-
treat-c/dont-treat-contractors-like-employees-idUSTRE53063S20090401)

------
BrentOzar
The title is way off: he's talking about contractors, not consultants.

Short version: Consultants tell the client what to do. Contractors are brought
on to do what they're told.

The advice in the article is a lot about "do you need someone do to ___ task"
or "are you hiring an FTE, and could you do with a contractor instead" and
that's contracting, not consulting. It's still valuable advice, but you don't
find consulting clients this way.

~~~
jdale27
Assuming this semantic distinction holds, what are the practical consequences?
How do you find "consulting" clients?

In fact, what is even the shape of a "consulting" engagement in software
development, where I am telling the client what to do, instead of doing what
I'm told? Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at
least something about what software needs to be built? Not trying to put up a
strawman here, it's just that I've seen this distinction made elsewhere, but
not clear on how it plays out in practice. I suspect the line between
"consultant" and "contractor" isn't that bold.

~~~
BrentOzar
> Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least
> something about what software needs to be built?

Absolutely - that's what I do in the database realm. One common request is,
"How should I re-architect this system to fix the problems we're having
today?" Another common one is, "How should we be storing this data to retrieve
it more quickly?"

This type of work tends to be very senior, very architectural. Another way to
think about it is by billable rate - at my rate, clients don't want to pay me
to _do_ the work. They just want to bring me in for short periods to tell them
what work needs to be done, and how, and they have their existing teams (or
contractors) execute the plan. It's not usually cost-effective to hire me to
do it (although, for the right teams and projects, I cut deals.)

------
shartshooter
I started a consulting business doing CRM work on nights and weekend about
five years back that’s now running close to $100k/mo.

It all started from a former colleague who’d moved onto a new role and asked
me to help them set up their CRM. This colleague talked to their friends, I
started mentioning it in casual conversation and more referrals started
pouring in.

This process of working nights and weekends meant I could scale it without
pressure.

Your network will be your best asset early on because you have no brand
awareness not evidence that you can do the job. Folks will be working with you
because they know and trust you.

We’re now at an inflection point where that method of driving business won’t
scale as fast as we want so we’re now relying on channel relationships we’ve
built with the CRM provider. We also work with consultants in related fields
that don’t want to do CRM work which has been a huge boost to our bottom line
as well.

On the flip side I have a friend trying to break into devops consulting who
couldn’t get a single customer despite relying heavily on his network so take
both anecdotes with a grain of salt.

~~~
jlu
Out of curiosity, what does CRM consulting look like? Is it autonomous job
(configuring servers and applications) or face to to face to work?

~~~
shartshooter
Both. You've got to work with the client to get an understanding of how they
want to use their CRM, guide them on best practices and then pull the levers
to configure things correctly. You can niche out and focus on one of the three
areas but we find solving issues end-to-end is what our customers are looking
for. They want us to come to them with issues we've found, best practices on
solving them(as they apply to THEIR business) and to also take the steps to
put it all in place.

All of our work is remote so there's no face-to-face per se but we do come on-
site or take them out to lunch every quarter or two

~~~
jlu
Appreciate for sharing the insight!

------
Arqu
I went the boutique consultancy route just last week and brought on a couple
of people into the mix.

I pretty much agree that everybody kind of faces the same question and
feelings. To be honest, I might have taken a small leap of faith as I pulled
the trigger before securing a client. Though the only reason I felt
comfortable with it is that I've been in the space enough to be pretty sure I
can land a client in the first month or so (seems like it's happening).

The best advice you can have is 'talk to people'. Most starters think you're
BSing them, but nearly everybody fails to leverage their network. You can't go
indie fresh from college but after a couple years and some projects it's easy
enough.

Talk, talk and talk some more. Don't be shy to send emails and chat people up
on LinkedIn. Works wonders once you put yourself out there. Look at your
contacts list now and you can surely find at least one that would be able to
get you started with some work now or in the very near term.

The reason everyone keeps iterating on the same 'general/bland advice' is that
it really is the bread and butter of it. Talk more, can't say it enough. Be
honest, be respectful, don't spam, but don't be shy to talk to strangers in
your line of work.

Not sure if this helps anyone, but just wanted to say it's easier than most of
you think. You need a marketable skill, a minimal network and to talk. If
you're doing honest work, things pick up on it's own.

Known pitfalls - there's more to running a consultancy than just talking and
working, admin work takes a lot of time as well. Plan for the extras.

~~~
tootie
I'm curious how well this scales though. Are the kind of clients you're
reaching out to small- to mid-size? I've spent a lot of time working at fairly
large consulting agencies and the amount of time and resources that go into
just pitching seem daunting to a newcomer.

~~~
Arqu
I guess I'm in a good position comming from a Co which scaled from ~30 to
currently ~220 before I exited. Nearly 70% is from a growing personal network
from a single guy. Another 15% come from direct referals outside that network.
The last 15 are a mix of random circumstances and some cold outreach.

Depending how you look at it ie. Building networks or just chatting people up
can lead to very different outcomes. The above was mostly focused on the
'getting started' part. Though the 200+ setup is successfully run by a team of
7 or 8.

Things change as you scale and the approach that works on smaller mumbers does
not work on largers and vice versa.

Feel free to ping me on email or otherwise if you'd like to chat.

------
emilecantin
He's spot-on with that last part: you only need a few. The same few contacts
(4-5) have brought me more work than I can actually do, and I often have to
say no. It's pretty hard maintaining a relationship with all of them, though:
when you say no, they have to look elsewhere, and that's when the relationship
can falter.

~~~
_jal
Do be careful. Becoming overly dependent on upstream "feeders" is what killed
my company.

It is a balance. Turning down work is dangerous, and the generally opposite of
why you're in business. But giving other firms too much leverage will kill you
just as dead as insufficient work. I started getting nervous when one company
was over 50% of our income, but there was disagreement about urgency and what
exactly to do about it with my partners, and we dithered until the bomb went
off.

~~~
jacobheric
I my experience, at least for an individual, I think saying no is exactly the
opposite of dangerous. I’ve been contracting exclusively for 10 years and said
yes about 6 times and no dozens or hundreds of times. As long as you say no
frankly, with a reason, and offer some names of people who can help, people
are happy with you and will more often than not ask again in the future.
Saying no, especially for bad fit, is one of the most important parts of
success I’ve had in consulting.

~~~
JamesBarney
"and offer some names of people who can help"

For people who are reading this quickly, this is the magic that makes saying
no ok. If you are just turning down client requests they'll stop asking. Most
people are extremely busy so they really appreciate having a "go-to guy" they
can send any requests even vaguely related to what you do.

------
apercu
I've used a lot of the same tactics. I find that although I like the "control"
of direct projects, I do more and more subcontracted work because I can push a
lot of the account and project management back to the company that
subcontracts me, often this frees me up to just do the work, rather than all
the activities around the work.

Also, I tend to do 80% of my work with the same two clients - professional
services firms that subcontract work to me. On one hand this is obviously a
risk, but I know that I'm the most profitable consultant for one of the
customers (significantly more profitable than their in-house consultants) and
when I get in to a time crunch it is easier to deal with because a lot of the
time it's a conflict between two of their projects and not one of their
project s and one unrelated to them.

~~~
TooCleverByHalf
> professional services firms that subcontract work to me

How were you able to create these kinds of relationships with the professional
services firms?

------
gk1
Here's my take on this, based on what worked or didn't for me in my first
year: [https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-
consulting-l...](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-
leads/)

------
josefresco
I take issue with using "meetups" of other tech consultants as a way to get
clients. I'd rather "network" (another _uncool_ word for meetups) with
potential leads, within an industry vertical than spend my time talking to
other geeks.

~~~
sgillen
I can see how going to a meetup for an interest orthogonal to your own could
be fruitful. If I’m a hardware/embedded person and I go to a python meetup
it’s possible someone works for a company who is looking for some one off
embedded work.

Though as you say, if you can directly find the people who are looking to hire
you even better.

------
JoeMayoBot
Good advice on getting out to meet other people in the community. You could
call it marketing, but the positive effect on you and others has a less
clinical perspective. It's especially important to be a part of the community,
rather than just show up to meetings. e.g. Give presentations, help with
organizing a meetup, socialize outside of the meetup (e.g. coffee, lunch,
beers) with folks you like. You honestly don't ever know where your next gig
is coming from, so getting out and enjoying this part of it can be worthwhile.

------
msadowski
Very good article! The only point that I don't agree with is about not
freelancing websites.

When I started consulting/contacting 1.5 years ago I did start with a
freelance site and at this time about 90% of my jobs still come from there. I
would much rather have clients from outside of the platform but I don't find
it easy to close them.

I need to point out that I'm in a very niche field (at least on Upwork); On
average month I see about 3-5 quality jobs I can apply to and quite often I
see them getting less than 5 proposals. I expect this wouldn't be a case for
web development projects.

------
itomato
I didn't see any advice on becoming a vendor or otherwise making inroads apart
from cold calls on FTE reqs.

RFPs? RFQs?

This is all about "freelancing" and subcontracting, and may serve as a helpful
intro to the person who isn't already in this (well-trod) labor market.

~~~
chrisa
Yes - most of the people who ask me this are new to consulting/freelancing, so
this is meant to be an intro for them.

Once you're established, I find that people don't think about "finding new
clients" so much as "winning new contracts" \- which (as you point out) - is
entirely different.

If you're trying to win big projects (vs "find clients"), you probably have a
small team already, and then yes, that's when you really get into RFPs, etc.

In the beginning though - I would advise against going after big projects that
need multiple rounds of selection, etc - and instead focus just on
relationships. Then, once you have a small base of clients, you can decide to
go bigger from there.

------
gremlinsinc
Curious anybody use Facebook or google ads to find freelance or consulting
clients? I'm finally building up some cash stores after a summer drought, but
I'm working 70 hour weeks at $25/hour, trying to finish up the 25/hour gig as
my other client is $40 and I'd like to get back up to my normal rates of
$60-70/hour.

I've been doing laravel/fullstack since 2013 and vue since 2016. I also know
basic devops stuff. How to use aws. I've even used ML recently with
aws/rekognition and python/nltk-rake. I'm horrible at selling myself but I
can't take another < 60k year - when I know I'm worth more than 100k.

------
krm01
The way we’ve been attracting Software companies to our UI/UX agency is
through sideproject marketing. I wanted to write an article about this but
here’s the tldr version of it: build small standalone projects that provide
value and communicate the value you provide to potential customers. There are
a few good articles about this but I feel sideproject marketing is highly
underrated. You can use your skills as a developer/designer to market your
service. Without feeling dirty about selling.

~~~
jessems
Interesting! Can you share an example?

------
albertshin
As an aside: I recently had an agency/contractor reach out via a LinkedIn
connect request with the "personal message" being an ad for their services. I
have a few startup things I've founded/co-founded on my profile, so I'm
guessing this is a new way to "source" clients... that is until everyone
starts doing this and I start just instinctively ignoring these messages or
LinkedIn figures out this eats into their InMail revenue stream.

------
stevenicr
Would like to see a new write of of resources that are good for running a
consulting shop these days.

Sure I have some things bookmarked from previous HN threads like open-source-
contracts to use, contracts, communication tools, project management,
milestone sharing, invoicing and such perhaps? demo - sketch mockup sharing
and such?

whats the popular freelance tech stack these days if one was going to go this
route today?

------
rcconf
I've been able to scale consulting to about 20-35k / mo as a single
developer.I've gotten all of my clients through word-of-mouth and I've spend
zero dollars in marketing. The trick being that I always try to do the best
work and communicate instantly with my clients. I.e, if a client e-mails me,
or sends me a text, I respond in about one second. They seem to love that.

I try to be as honest and forthcoming with each client and I've basically hit
a cap now in being able to add any new ones and deliver the experience I want
to each client. Scaling is the most difficult part for me right now since all
my clients are quite varied. Some of them are web apps, other mobile apps and
others just pure cybersecurity. They're so vastly different from each other
that it's a bit difficult to hire someone who can handle the diverse amount of
work. Also, I think for the amount of work I do, I should probably have much
bigger retainers, so some clients are $1,250 / month, but jesus is that hard.
It should probably be at least $5,000 /month.

For me tho, I've learned so much about business and my technical skills have
skyrocketed. I honestly feel like I can tackle any problem in the world and
it's a powerful feeling. I make decisions based on the problem its self and
have no loyalty really to a specific technology. I understand why a client may
want to use WordPress and why a client may want to use Kubernetes. Some
clients want to just do servers using Linux and that's okay. I've learned that
more basic technology (like bash) can be hugely beneficial to trying to write
your own solution. When you're under time constraints, you start to have some
pretty creative solutions, and not the creative where it breaks later, the
creative where it does exactly what it needs to do, but it's done in 1 hour
instead of 1 month.

The best advice I could give is to basically be brutally honest with each
client, do the best work that you can and always reply in a timely manner,
regardless of what's happening in your life. So many consulting companies are
slow to reply, or don't really care about their clients on a personal level
that clients will really love you if you spend time thinking about their
business on a personal level, being responsive and just being honest when
you're overloaded in work.

It is a stressful business tho and I'm in the alpha stages of a product I'm
working on based on the problems I've seen over the years. It'll be
interesting to move from consulting to a SaaS product. The transition being
the consulting provides the funding to be able to work on the SaaS and then
hopefully the recurring revenue outpaces consulting eventually and I live a
less stressful life!

~~~
cloudartisans
My trouble has been that I automate everything and document it so well, that I
basically "code myself out of a job."

I also strive for instant response time (my wife hates that) and often, I'll
already be working on a client issue that the servers emailed/paged me about
by the time the client gets in touch (that definitely impresses them).

So, the typical pattern is this: I meet a new client, understand their needs,
build a RESTful API back-end (Python, Django, Terraform, AWS), automate any
internal processes and/or build internal tools, and then support their front-
end team in building their web/mobile apps that consume the API.

Usually, it's a few days to a couple of weeks of full-time work, and then my
hours drop off a cliff: either 1) the client's team takes over completely, or
2) if I stay on, any subsequent feature or issue takes just minutes for me to
do, so then I'm back to square one, looking for the next client. So far, I've
been lucky enough to make all the clients happy and have them become "clients
for life," but that "life," added up between all the existing clients, is just
a few billable hours a week.

Any advice for me to break this pattern?

~~~
rcconf
It sounds like you are doing $10k-$20k jobs in a few days or weeks.

Charge way more than you're charging. If you're successfully building our
their entire backend, their internal tools and their automation in a few
weeks, you should be charging for a few months instead of a few weeks.

In your case, it sounds like project work is better for you. I wouldn't
recommend that you work hourly since that's probably where you're being
burned. If you quote a REST API, automation system and internal tools for
$10k-$30k and you finish it in 2 weeks, then you're golden and so is the
startup since they just saved a lot of time.

I would highly recommend that you get on retainers with your clients. If they
appreciate your work, and need help from time-to-time, you shouldn't be
charged for 1 hour whenever they need you. They should pay for you to be
available for them, so perhaps try to get on $500 - $1000 / month retainers.
They may only need you a few times a month, but you're not billing them for
$100-$200 for 1 hour of work, what a bad deal for you (and a great deal for
them!)

------
gumby
Some of this advice is also good for just plain getting hired: giving talks,
having visible evidence of what you can do. It can cause actual humans to
contact you directly rather than recruiters.

But it takes work and isn't for everyone.

------
camping-monitor
I have been thinking about this for a long time. If anybody is interested in
building a consulting agency with me, feel free to ping me at
ideavalid@icloud.com

------
chasd00
you'd be surprised how productive hanging around some bars near office parks
during happy hour can be. Lots of conversations can be eavesdropped, find the
right one, and then strike up a conversation and get a card in someone's hand.

------
turk73
How timely. Currently am frustrated by indy consulting. I have watched several
colleagues successfully launch into independent consulting. Honestly, it's a
mixed bag. They speak very positively about it, but when I ask more direct
questions, I hear about trouble getting paid, Net60 and longer durations
between checks, long periods between gigs (7 weeks was what one friend just
reported).

Every time I attempt to go indy, I land a good lead, go through the
preliminary stages, and then the deal goes flat. It's almost like there's a
blacklist out there and my name is on it for some reason. I know that is
likely untrue and I scour Google with my name to see if some oddity comes up
but really there's nothing. It should be no more difficult for me than others
and yet it has been.

~~~
blunt_asshole
> It's almost like there's a blacklist out there and my name is on it for some
> reason

If you're getting that feeling due to your HN account, it's because you're
shadowbanned. Only people with showdead will see your comments. It's actually
really impressive how you've managed to write hundreds of comments to void for
the last half a year without picking up on the hint.

There's a good chance you're not picking up on hints IRL either. Maybe ask a
blunt friend what they think of you? The industry is small and people talk.

~~~
rpedela
I can see his comment and I don't have "showdead" turned on?

~~~
blunt_asshole
Turn on showdead to see all the other comments that didn't show up. You can
vouch (if you have >500 karma) for individual comments to make them not dead.

~~~
rpedela
Ah I didn't know that. Thanks.

