
Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm? - cosmorocket
I work as a senior frontend developer in a company and have experience with backend stuff and devops, learning new things constantly. My colleague and friend is the team lead of our team at that company (10 members in the frontend department). Before working in the company I had a long successful path as a 100% remote freelancer (7 years of work).<p>The stuff we now work on in the company is quite complex - a realtime trading platform with tons of inner components, complex logic, large codebase. To me seems like we got quite experienced and gained precious expertise by the moment. We have the ability to extend our expertise to other fields as well.<p>Now I feel like my career path now is to establish something on my own and work on a product.<p>I talked to my colleague about his will to join me as a partner in growing our own business and it looks like we are on more or less the same page about what we want and should do.<p>Here is my plan:<p>1. Do preliminary research. Prepare the basement in form of a site with portfolio, our focus, expertise and articles.<p>2. Start looking for projects online to work on for companies as a contractor team. I will bring us some coins for the first time.<p>3. Setup the business processes and make the workflow stable and profitable.<p>4. Keep working as a team for clients and start working on our product ideas.<p>5. Switch from contract work to our products gradually.<p>Here are my questions:<p>- Willing to find projects for a small team (2-4 members) of developers&#x2F;designers should I look for larger projects in a different way?<p>- How do I identify that a company might be in need of a team like ours? I don’t want to spam everybody trying to catch a project.<p>- Should I prioritize our online sales channels over local ones?<p>- Should I partner up with firms like ours? Contact them and show our offer so that they could be interested in subcontracting with us?<p>- Should we have mentors&#x2F;coaches?<p>- Should I hire a salesperson to look for projects?
======
WhitneyLand
Here are some things to consider about consulting:

Sales/Selling is the last thing on your list and salesperson is only a maybe.
Reverse all of your priorities because selling and relationships are the most
difficult things to master for a consulting company and you will die without
those skills.

In consulting, tech talent < sales/relationship talent. In fact, if you're
great at the latter go ahead and get started now because there are lots of
great tech people who don't want to do it and will come work for you on a nice
contract rate.

To give you an example of this I once worked with a consultant who was a
technical rock star, and another consultant who was supposed to be technical
but was actually pretty below average. The below average guy was more
successful because he was great when talking with the customers and they loved
him. He knew enough to talk through problems at a high level, explained things
well, and made them feel comfortable that things we're on the right track. If
he didn't know something, no problem, he just went and found someone with the
answer.

Besides those soft skills he knew how to set and manage expectations. You may
be used to the best results winning, but if you don't manage and then exceed
expectations it doesn't matter. People love you when they expect 80 out of 100
and you deliver 88. They will not be happy and often fire you if expecting 100
out of 100 and you deliver 92. You will wonder how you just lost to a
competitor who is not "as good" as you.

Even if you have pretty good soft skills, do you want to spend time constantly
using them? I thought you liked the tech side? If you like both then great
because someone has to spends tons of time doing it to sell, maintain, and
expand the work and your success depends on how good they are at it.

For many people this will all be hard to believe, or they think it's
exaggerated, or that it's easy to just hire someone to do it. That's fine, I
hope you have great success. Drop me a line in a couple years to say how
things turned out.

~~~
amelius
> [•••] selling and relationships are the most difficult things to master for
> a consulting company and you will die without those skills.

How about outsourcing the sales part?

~~~
spydum
The great irony in tech is that we all rail on tech outsourcing, but no qualms
about it elsewhere (marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc). I get it if you
aren't quite big enough for a full time person, but just remember incentives
are usually against you.

~~~
tedmiston
Outsourcing is a useful and necessary skill for entrepreneurs. Outsourced dev
has a bad reputation overall but there are also good devs in other countries.
That said most business work is far less complicated than dev work, and the
risks of doing it wrong are lower.

If a dev turned entrepreneur values their time @ $100/hr and a 10-hour
business task can be outsourced with a 15-minute description to someone else
for $15/hr, it's the "right" decision.

------
PeterisP
I'd rather go entirely opposite.

1\. Get clients and start working for them. If you don't have more than one
clear customer who already wants you, you're not ready for anything further in
this list.

2\. Incorporate and handle the core legal and financial stuff (only when #1 is
solidly working!)

3\. Setup the business processes and workflow;

4\. Start aggressively looking for more projects - not online, though. The
projects available there are not the projects you want.

5\. "Prepare the basement in form of a site with portfolio, our focus,
expertise and articles." \- this is fluff that can wait, it's a bit useful for
marketing but not strictly necessary. You won't get clients from cold sales or
random advertising anyway, you'll get them by personal contacts and word of
mouth where this won't matter much; and if you won't get clients from personal
contacts and word of mouth, then you'll fail anyway and this won't help you.
The connections and reputation to get offline clients is your primary
competency as a consulting team, so work hard on that. The technical skills of
your team are important but clearly in the second place, they're necessary but
not sufficient for success; there's a good reason why successful consulting
businesses usually are started only after a decade or two in the industry as
that's one of the few ways how a new company can get the required reputation
to get started on decent contracts.

6\. Hire a salesperson to look for projects when your existing projects can
cover multiple full-time developers, i.e. when your business is working and
you've decided that you want to scale to a larger volume. Before that, you'll
have to do the sales yourself, as your own personal reputation and expertise
will be the main reason why others hire your company; you'll have to convince
customers that you/your company has expert skills and that you can do things
that they can't do in-house and a salesperson can't really do that until you
have a solid reputation and lots of prior clients.

~~~
derefr
Here's a question—if you have

> more than one clear customer who already wants you

...but they only want you _as a full-time contractor_ (i.e. an employee-in-
all-but-name), is there a good way to convince them to pay for your expertise
on a consulting-as-needed basis instead?

It's easy to "become a consultant" if what you really mean is signing on for
fixed-length engagements to produce low-level piece-work (as e.g. an artist,
or a programmer, or a content writer), but how do I break into consulting as,
say, a distributed-systems scaling expert? I'm offered many opportunities by
large firms to just work for them on a full-time basis as a systems
architect—but I'd much rather be coming into businesses and increasing the
competency of _their own_ staff to do such jobs, so that they (eventually)
don't need me.

In my experience, large businesses are interested in such engagements, but
only want to hire other large businesses—consulting _firms_ —to do it. And
small businesses or startups are iffy on the concept of hiring consultants at
all, preferring instead to bring all manner of expertise for one-off tasks in-
house (though this myopia never seems to extend to thinking they need to
employ their own accountant or lawyer, oddly enough.)

~~~
PeterisP
There's a big difference between a contractor and a consultant, and I'm not
speaking about the difference between full time contracting and some variable
hours contracting. In consulting you want to ensure an arms-length separation
and work on a deliverables-only basis with the understanding that the
deliverables can be worked on by your team, not exclusively you; i.e. that
your hours, schedule, work environment, tools, software, work organization,
who does what, how many and which people are involved, subcontracting, etc are
all decided and managed by you with only reasonable limitations caused by
requirements of confidentialty/NDA's and the billing setup. Of course, some
tasks are a bad fit for that, and it's reasonable to want an employee or a
full time contractor for that, but if you don't want that then you most likely
shouldn't convince them, but you should accept that this task is not what you
want - perhaps the same company will have other tasks later where they will
want consulting services.

Yes, if you want to be in consulting business, that means that you have to
work as if you were a consulting firm, even if you are a single person. It
carries some overhead, so charge accordingly. Some form of incorporation tends
to help and give an aura of being a larger team even if you're not, but for
people who know you it only changes billing/legal/tax factors, not the job
itself.

Yes, small businesses and startups are iffy about hiring consultants, and
probably rightly so - the nature of such services simply isn't a good fit for
them. Again, you shouldn't convince anyone, you should either accept that
small businesses and startups won't be your target audience (and thus avoid
networking with them but focus on larger companies who are actually likely to
be customers) or discard the concept of consulting and accept to work as full
time contractor or employee or co-founder or service provider or any other
relationship style that works well for their situation.

------
chrisrohlf
I built and sold (acquihired) a small successful security consultancy from
2011-2014. My experience is seen through the lens of security consulting. I
should really write all this down in a longer form but heres the important
take aways in my experience and my answer to some of the questions listed.

1) Your tech skills matter less than you think they do. Customers want good
work of course but they also need a reliable partner who will answer the phone
and provide guidance beyond just handing over code or a report. Be
professional above all else.

2) Don't fool yourself that you're only consulting while you build a product.
Its two entirely separate types of businesses. If you try to do both you run
the risk of doing them both poorly.

3) Figure out your growth plan before even thinking about a sales person. You
probably wont need one for awhile.

4) Yes you want mentors, preferably people who have built something similar to
what you're trying to build now. Even better if they failed at it.

5) Don't rush into subcontracting. You will lock yourself out of big contracts
that way. Large companies want a varied list of vendors to choose from. Only
do this when it makes strategic sense for your longer term plans.

A small consultancy is a great lifestyle business. Be realistic about your
goals for it. Scaling up a consultancy is mostly limited by how many experts
you can hire. And if you do your job right its only a matter of time before
your best people start their own thing.

~~~
geekybiz
\--> Don't fool yourself that you're only consulting while you build a
product. Its two entirely separate types of businesses. If you try to do both
you run the risk of doing them both poorly.

Can you please comprehend some more on #2 above - esp how/ why/ what you think
are difficulties taking this route?

~~~
djangowithme
What about using the process, resources, and scheduling expertise that you
aquire from building products for others on your own project? Having the know
how to complete projects is why people hire you're firm, so hiring yourself
could be a great way to build a product on the development / design side in a
cost effective manner.

------
philiphodgen
Might I suggest Step 0?

0.1 Start marketing. Something as prosaic as a blog, if necessary. Demonstrate
your capability. (Capability does not mean technical skill. It means your
empathy with another human to understand his/her pain, and show him/her that
you care. You demonstrate caring by talking simply and clearly. If someone
understands you, they feel good about themselves. If you are talking simply
and clearly, that means you have taken the time to really give a shit about
the other person).

0.2 Get a customer. For really really cheap if necessary. Train people to give
you a small amount of money in return for some help.

. . . onward and upward.

I personally would not take on a partner and employees for a while. I can tell
you from personal experience that it is a profound psychic burden to be
responsible for other people eating and paying the rent. In addition, the HR
component of having employees is pure, unadulterated shit swimming in a pool
of pee. It's as if our government wants to discourage employment. California
(where I am) is the worst.

~~~
bitexploder
Don't work for cheap unless you have to. Word of mouth matters and cheaper
customers are in a totally different market segment.

It is very tempting, and easy to do as a one man shop, but it dramatically
undervalues what you produce and you can end up trapped in that lower tier of
work and pricing model and have a hard time escaping. (opportunity cost, etc)

patio11 has written openly about his efforts here and I think it is well worth
it to review as well.

Experience: partner at a small, but growing infosec consulting shop.

~~~
scardine
Mandatory reading: win without pitching manifesto

I was skeptical for too long about this kind of advice and I've paid my fair
share in lost opportunities. It really, really works.

[http://www.winwithoutpitching.com/the-
manifesto/](http://www.winwithoutpitching.com/the-manifesto/)

~~~
ced
What's the gist of it?

~~~
scardine
Most beginners think the power is in the hands of the client because he has
the money.

This is a framework with 12 simple principles to reclaim the high ground in
the client relationship, beat back the pitch and win new business without
first having to part with your thinking for free. It enables stronger
practices amid the forces of commoditization.

Of course Blair Enns is a better writer than me (English is not even my native
language), but there we go:

1) specialize (another common rookie mistake is to position yourself as a
generalist)

2) replace presentations with conversations

3) diagnose before prescribing

4) rethink the meaning of "to sell"

5) do with words what you used to do with paper (never again spend a night
writhing a detailed quote for free)

6) be selective (don't waste your time with the wrong client)

7) build expertise fast (specialization helps)

8) do not solve problems before being paid (never let the client "pick your
brain")

9) address money issues early (if you are unable to talk about money you will
make no money)

10) refuse to work at a loss (be ready to fire abusive clients)

11) charge more

12) hold your head high

------
Murkin
\- Short intro:

Spent 2 years as freelance and 4.5 years building a 20 people consulting
company (1). During this time met dozens of CEOs of various size consulting
companies to share knowledge and learn.

\- The why:

Think hard and long before you get into this field.

1\. Turning into a product company statistically never happens.

2\. You will become profitable only after a year+ (most consulting companies
get stuck at 3-6 people and are NOT profitable). Profitable = you earn more
than working full time for someone else.

3\. With each year you will spend more time managing and less developing.

4\. Its not like a startup - but you will have highs, lows, worries and
sleepless nights.

5\. Its all about building a name - takes years.

6\. If you want to build your own product, stop reading here and don't even
start with consulting.

7\. Location matters - you didn't mention yours.

~~~
pacomerh
People mention this a lot. 'You need to learn to communicate better, and it's
more important than tech skills'. I see that 500tech offers high skill
services (courses and solutions). Are these services outsourced then?

~~~
Murkin
I would say that is exactly the opposite of running a good consultancy.

There are a few places that are basically business people subcontracting
others. Their game is usually "We are cheap" with sub-par quality and endless
chasing after (non returning) clients.

The most successful outfits usually are founded by strong tech people who also
do the sales. (As in our case, everything is in house)

------
tptacek
Did this before (Matasano). Doing it now (Latacora). Answers:

\- The two most important words in your business plan are "segmentation" and
"qualification". While being open to lots of different kinds of projects, try
to pick 1 or 2 kinds of projects that you can standardize and package. It's
easier to succeed selling a couple things well than it is to succeed selling
everything just adequately.

\- Pick a kind of customer you want to work with. Aim on the higher-end side.
Build collateral that will appeal to those customers: case studies, how-tos,
industry news bulletins, open source packages. Find places to meet those kinds
of customers and introduce yourself to them. You'll get wildly different
answers on how well cold-calling and cold emails work (nobody will disagree
that LinkedIn private messages do not work). My take is: if you're good at
cold calling, cold call; otherwise, don't bother.

\- Which you prioritize depends on where you are, but I'd prioritize content
and collateral that you can use either locally or online. Again: build
packaging around just a few offerings, and try to make that packaging unique.
It should feel producty, and the way in which you turn your team into a
product should communicate something interesting about your worldview.

\- I don't think you should sell yourselves an available subcontractor. For
the subs, good sub relationships are bought, not sold: if you advertise
yourself as being willing to sub, you're communicating something about your
willingness to get rolled. Your best sub relationships will come from bumping
into people at shared large clients.

\- No, don't have mentors or coaches, at least in a formal way.

\- No, _do not_ hire a salesperson. The world of employed account managers is
divided into good salespeople, who can work anywhere they want to and don't
want to work for your small consulting firm, and bad salespeople whose real
talent is selling people like you on getting paid a salary without helping the
business. It's incredibly hard to hire and manage a sales team and most
consulting shops --- let alone the young ones --- don't have sales teams. The
ones that do tend to have been founded in part by a salesperson. Since that's
not you, good news: you're many years away from having to worry about this.
Act like salespeople don't exist.

Bonus advice:

\- Bill weekly, or at worst daily. Never bill hourly.

\- Raise your rates.

~~~
tedmiston
Can you elaborate on these two bits?

> It should feel producty, and the way in which you turn your team into a
> product should communicate something interesting about your worldview.

> Bill weekly, or at worst daily. Never bill hourly.

Do you mean bill hourly but only working in full-day blocks? Or that your
clients agree to pay you on a daily / weekly rate without a number of hours
defined. This seems like a tough proposition for businesses to accept.

(The thoughts from your experience are super helpful.)

~~~
patio11
Hourly/weekly billing are entirely standard in industry, and most good clients
will not balk at them. The business does not want your butt in a seat for 480
minutes a day; they want increased revenue or reduced costs. They will not
micromanaged the distance between your butt and your seat at one minute
increments _unless_ you structure your affairs such that they're required to.

Note that all of your professional analogies doing the same work for the same
clients in a W-2 fashion are salaried, not hourly. They don't fill out
timecards or send a report to their boss every week saying "64 minutes for
project planning meeting" either.

As to how much work actually gets done in a day, part of the deal is that the
business is buying an adult professional who is committed to delivering
efficiently on the stated objectives in the SoW. That bounces around a little
bit; most days it resembles a standard work day at the client's site (at least
in my business).

~~~
tedmiston
Thank you. So to clarify, are you backing up this approach with SoWs defined
in terms of scope? My current work has less upfront definition more like
"figure out how to build a system that does X or features 1, 2, 3" and is
billed hourly. I'd like to experiment with other models that lead to simpler
invoicing.

------
umarniz
4 years of consulting experience here with a similar situation to yours.

Step 5 is elusive and almost impossible. Lost 2 products to the services
mindset with further strain by partners to bring in capital by doing services.
The chicken-egg issue becomes much harder when you are working hand to mouth.

The problem roots from 2 main things, services/consultation mindset and in-
consistent projects.

The people who outsource or consult other teams to build their solutions start
with a bidding process which inherently means that the cheaper and faster the
better. This sole focus on cheap/fast is fun at the start as you become
creative to work with tight deadlines and I atleast started doing more
automation than ever before but can be useless considering how varying the
projects are in nature and how the clients sole motivation is to be cheap &
fast. This results in repetitive unchallenging work which is highly
demotivating.

Inconsistent Projects. Our first year we landed a huge chain of projects from
a massive global brand giving us enough capital to last a couple of years. But
with clients there is no guarantee, we couldn't display most projects we did
in the first 2 years cause their launches were delayed and NDAs were signed
which means nothing to show as portfolio of big names. Finally when we could,
most of our project contacts were going dry meaning more inconsistency.

For your question of sales, we had business developers who would get
commission for each project who would spam companies to get us in the door.
Mainly marketing agencies or contractors who would sub-contract us projects.
The only reason we could get a lot of projects was because one of our business
dev was an industry veteran wanting to do exactly what we were doing and we
worked together though giving up high margins.

If your end goal is to build products, i would recommend go straight with a
product. Find something you love to build, take out weekends for it with your
team and try to get it into an accelerator for more advice/exposure.

~~~
lmenus
Hi Umar, I believe I have sent you a LinkedIn message, please check, thank
you!

------
kleinsch
Been freelancing for years, spent some time working with a guy that used to
run a design consulting firm. I was thinking about starting a dev consulting
firm, and his suggestions on how to find project were:

Identify complementing firms, see about partnering with them to do the stuff
they don't do. Partner with a design firm to do the dev part of their gigs.
Partner with a marketing firm to do dev work on App campaigns. Etc.

Identify much larger competing firms, see if they can toss you the projects
that are too small for them. If you're a 20M/year big consulting firm, a $15K
project might not be worth the hassle, so if you know the people that review
the projects, they can refer people to you when they turn them down.

------
somecallitblues
From my own experience: do not build a product until you find someone to pay
for it. Unless you are really cashed up but even then you need a customer to
drive it.

Take everything you can at the beginning and occasionally charge in beer for
small things that took 20 minutes. Some of my biggest jobs came from some of
those customers.

If you get along well with your colleague then partner up. You'll help each
other out when going gets hard.

Don't be afraid to make drastic changes, like abandoning a product that
doesn't sell.

Creative agencies without inhouse devs are your bread and butter until you get
that recurring revenue from your products.

Expect to productize the most random stuff you would never think off.

Excel is your biggest competitor.

Go for it! Good luck!

------
alberth
Wait, you need to understand your risks. Consulting services has some
extremely difficulty challenges unlike most businesses.

1\. Cash flow / making payroll will be a constant issue.

Even when you win a gig, you won't be paid for 45-60 until after you start.
And that will be trailing your work. Do you have enough cash reserves to float
2 months salary.

Now think about when you grow your team and now you have 10 employees, do you
have enough cash reserves to pay 10 employees for 2 months until you receive
your first installment check?

2\. Sales cycles can be long and costly

Keep in mind you won't win all sales cycles. And sales cycles might take 6-12
months to win. During that time you'll probably have to fly to the customer,
pay for travel,etc.

No of this pre-sales expenses are reimbursable. It's just a cost of business.
Do you have enough cash reserves.

3\. What to do when you don't have billable work?

For ever day you don't have billable work, you still have to pay your staff.
Do you have enough cash reserves to pay your staff for months on end without
billable work?

TLDR; consulting requires huge cash reverses. Also keep in mind it's hard to
get credit lines in consulting businesses because you don't have inventory
assets.

------
nodesocket
I just founded Elastic Byte (shameless plug
[https://elasticbyte.net](https://elasticbyte.net)) which is a DevOps-as-a-
service and infrastructure consulting startup.

The biggest challenge in starting a consulting business is indeed building
relationships and selling. It is very different than running my other company
a traditional web SaaS. I'm spending lots of time in CRM (managing inbound
leads), communication with leads, and setting up phone calls and Google
Hangouts. It is absolutely critical though that YOU do these tasks to start.
Don't try and hire a sales guy too early and push everything off to him. You
must interact with the clients at the start to discover pain points,
processes, and pattern matching.

In terms of partnerships, I'd say don't get bogged down in that. Companies
will reach out wanting you to use or pitch their products, all good, but don't
waste time setting up partnership meetings yet.

~~~
adamqureshi
I have a TINY consultancy. I have a gig based set up. I am in NYC and there is
a LOT of work here. I can't promise anything but maybe we should talk. I have
maybe 3-4 clients who are growing and keep asking me about moving to AWS / DO
manage infrastructure , etc...

~~~
mrg3_2013
Typically do these gigs require one to be physically present onsite ? I ask
because I too am on the fence to try AWS consulting, but don't want to on-site
type consulting [i.e you need to be at their site from start-to-finish]

------
devdad
I've been doing digital consultancy for about a year now in my own firm. Me
and my co-founder started with a client from connections we made when we were
salaried consultants, and took it from there.

Here's what I've learned since I started that I haven't seen others mention.

\- Paid networks are great. We pay about 2-4k USD / year for gold memberships.
The companies there only send their executive branches or other people with
deciding power, so you'll meet relevant business contacts from the start.
We've gotten business worth ~35k from these in two months, so 31k+ with ten
months to go of the year for a 4k investment.

\- Being able to speak in front audiences will give you leads. We generally
just speak about digital stuff to our paid networks.

\- The more people see you as a friend, the more likely you are to get big
referrals. I go running with the CEO of large company in our field and we've
become friends. About 200k coming from his referrals this year.

~~~
ollieglass
Could you say some more about paid networks? Which networks are you a member
of, why and how did you join them?

~~~
devdad
Chamber of Commerce is an international organization. Networks for local
science and technology.

------
bigmanwalter
Welcome to the dark side :)

Starting a services firm is all about building up a client base that can
sustain you. Your big challenge is to get into the best referral circles, as
the best projects come via word of mouth.

My suggestion is to take whatever you can get at first. Take as many coffee
meetings as possible and network like crazy. You never know where your first
big lead will come from.

Expect most potential clients to be sceptical of your ability to deliver until
you have portfolio pieces that are of both a similar level of complexity to
the clients' needs as well as written in similar technologies. Clients will be
sceptical of anything that you wrote while still employed unfortunately.

For me, this meant that I had to take projects at a loss or on razor thin
margins at the beginning. I was strategic about it though and this allowed me
to build up the type of portfolio I needed to get my ideal contracts.

Online markets are very competitive. Expect to be up against 200 other
bidders. It can be fruitful, but I consider it to be a full time job in
itself.

Until you're established, you'll need to follow up on every potential sales
channel you can think of. If you have sufficient capital to float sales
people, it's always a great thing to have, but be careful as employees will
spend your money faster than you make it at first. Contractors, freelancers,
and commission only sales can help you out here.

I found most of my first clients by announcing my availability to my network.
There may be some less saturated job boards on Facebook that are localized to
your specific city as well.

You may need to take on smaller projects than you would like at first. It will
feel useless but it is actually valuable networking. Some of my 1 day projects
have turned into handsome referrals :)

Get as much mentorship and help as you can find. There will be hard times
before the operation is running smoothly.

If you ever want to chat about it, you can hit me up at eric@dualgravity.com

~~~
Jhsto
I recently started freelancing after moving out from Bay Area to a different
continent. I used to network a lot in Bay Area and thus I have had good luck
finding people who would be interested in my services. However, I have needed
to turn down potential clients because they have essentially said that they
would like to hire me as an employee. I am young and it seems like most
companies are looking to hire me in order to comb me into something useful for
them.

Most people here tend to be parallel entrepreneurs rather than serial ones --
they have a half of a dozen projects going on at the same time. For this
reason, I would not want to commit to a project to which even the CEO does not
seem to have much time for. Some companies also seem to lack the much-spoken
thing in Bay Area of product and/or market focus, which would make my role
ubiquitous, which is not what I want. Although, because of my young age and
mainly software expertise, I don't want to directly say that I think their way
of running the business is bad. I do think that most of the companies are able
to make it into a profitable business, but for me to engage into payroll
positions, I would want something riskier than that.

Have you found the same kind of struggles early into your service firm? Would
you have any tips on how to pitch these companies into buying what they want
as contract work instead of hiring me as an employee? Any nice way to tell
these people that I don't believe in the way they are running the business?

~~~
bigmanwalter
I encounter this situation constantly. The economics of outsourcing doesn't
always work out for every project. As a consultant, you'll be charging 2-3x
the hourly rate of an employee, and the company is giving up the benefit of
having in-house expertise on their own product.

If you're okay with working for one client full time for the duration of a
contract, my advice would be to work with a few recruiters. They'll take a 30%
cut, but as they know about some of the best contracts it is often worth your
while. Their clients are using contractors to deal with spikes in their
workload, or for projects where they don't expect to need you in 6 months.

Another route is in finding clients who want you to manage the full project.
Things like building MVPs or building Version 1 of an app. Usually they have a
limited budget and aren't looking to take on the risk of an employee. These
clients don't generally have any in-house technical expertise. In order to bag
this type of client, I have found that having a solid project template to work
from and speed up development is a must. It took me almost 2 months to fully
set up my build pipeline and get a start project up and running just the way I
like it (don't hate my just because I'm a perfectionist.) But now I can kick
off projects with a running start. Deliver a fully functioning app in under a
week, albeit with only the first couple features, and your client will be
happy to pay your rate for the duration of the project.

Finally, the last route I know of is to specialize in a hot technology.
AngularJS seems to be popular in my area. A lot projects were started with the
thinking that Angular would do all the hard work for them, and now they are
neck deep in spaghetti written by a junior. If you can market yourself as an
Angular expert, they will be willing to pay higher rates as well as put up
with the fact you aren't sticking around. But you need to have a hard-to-find
talent for this power dynamic to exist. A friend of mine is a Haskell
freelancer and finds it gives him good leverage.

------
sandworm101
Do you want to create your own product or do you want to consult?

My customers are sick of consultants who are really just pitch men for
products, products they probably do not need. When i consult i openly say that
i am not tied to any product, that while i do suggest and evaluate products i
never accept comissions. That's pure consulting. The client comes first.

The other type of consulting is to offer consulting services as a way of
getting your foot in the door. These are the people that bid low (or free)
with the goal of selling product later. I dislike this approach. I find it
dishonest and so do my clients.

~~~
intrasight
That is one of the big challenges to consulting these days - trying to be
"independent". In every IT space there are consultants that represent
products. They get a lot of consulting leads from the product companies, and
in return they are always looking for opportunities to plug a product. I'm not
saying there is anything wrong with that - IT consulting doesn't happen in a
technology vacuum. In fact for a new consultant there is probably no better
"network" then the product network. For example, I'm doing more and more cloud
computing consulting. It probably would make sense for me to join the
technology partner networks of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

~~~
sandworm101
Much depends on the type of consulting. I do legal stuff, mostly compliance
and privacy issues. Hypothetically, if someone asked me which cloud service
best complied with a new EU data directive I would recommend one. I might be
wrong. Maybe that cloud wasn't the best. Everyone makes mistakes. But if i
make that mistake and my client finds out I was taking a kickback from the
cloud I recommended, then it doesn't look like a simple mistake. Now it is
negligence. That sort of consulting is different than more technical work
where the real issue is whether a recommended service or product functions as
expected.

A common request of me is to recommend a pen-testing or scanning service (pci,
iso, dfars and such). I often write out requirements and even negotiate
pricing for such clients. Any kickback whatsoever would be a disservice.

~~~
intrasight
Consultants resell the products from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The client
will know that the reseller is getting a cut. It's not a "kickback". I would
doubt that these cloud vendors could even offer a "kickback" (but then again,
I could be naive).

But I do get your point. There are several types of IT consultants:

1\. Those that help choose a vendor. They should be independent.

2\. Those that hold a vendor's feet to the fire. I would claim that a good
reseller could still do that.

3\. Those that are really just outsourced warm bodies of the vendor. Don't
expect much if any independent thinking.

------
smdz
> Setup the business processes and make the workflow stable and profitable.

This should be the top priority. You personally don't want to be tied up to
any client/project. You could help developers as time permits. But your
priority should be about getting projects, hiring, managing cashflow keeping
it profitable. Not very "engineer-ish". If you are a hardcore developer - you
will (almost) hate doing this. Assuming you can get high value projects -
executing those projects while keeping the customer and the team happy - is a
perpetual challenge.

> Should I prioritize our online sales channels over local ones?

Local ones are always better and surprisingly easier compared to online sales
that are highly competitive. The only discomfort is to actually move out of
your office and meet people in person. The exception is if local ones are
financially infeasible. You should also do online sales - And people (top
5-10%) do earn money from online projects too, so do not let myths discourage
you from going online.

> Should I hire a salesperson to look for projects?

After some time - Yes. You should be the first sales person for your firm.
Later you will be able to define sales-team profile that you need

> Should we have mentors/coaches?

I believe the answer is Yes in longer term. And by this time you would have
been already successful but the growth might feel stagnant (or just boring).

> Switch from contract work to our products gradually.

A product guy is usually always good at consulting - but moving from
consulting to products is pretty difficult. And it's definitely not because of
the lack of execution capability.

If your goal is to do products - do just that and don't get into consulting.
And it is easier to start validating, building product as an employee -
compared to owning a consulting firm.

------
adrianmacneil
Decide whether you want to start a consulting firm or work on a product. Then
do that. Don't start a consulting firm with the idea that you will work on
products in your "spare" time.

If you want to work on product ideas, you are much better doing that while you
still have a day job, rather than trying to do it while you are also worrying
about where your next contract is going to come from.

------
bitexploder
I started this journey 3 years ago. Information security consulting, but the
challenges are largely the same.

I could write a book about this. You can find me pretty easily (search my hn
handle in Google, find my company, mail info@, and we can exchange other
contact info), and I will happily talk with you via voice chat, my time is
limited to get this out.

3\. is hard, if you are primarily a technology person do not assume that
because you are good at tech you can just figure all this business stuff (you
can, but ... it is non-trivial)

4\. This is a beautiful idea, but much harder than it sounds. I have seen it
done successfully and can tell you how I have been a part of a team that made
this happen

5\. See 4.

Sales: Another book-worthy topic. Basically, you need to talk to people and be
at every event vaguely related to technology to network with people. Go to
mainframe user groups. Go to toastmasters. Network. Also if you are good at
what you do you might be surprised at when and how work will magically end up
in your lap once the world knows you are for hire (don't expect this to get
you started, but it is neat to see in effect).

Partnering with other firms never worked for us.

Mentors/coaches... heavens yes. Find /good/ business consultants. People that
can help you crystallize the outcomes you want and help you keep your eye on
the ball. If you want to do more than just a one man shop, this is really
helpful.

Hire a sales person? Technical sales of development and infosec consulting
services is /hard/. The good ones are really expensive. Part time sales and
referral type relationships rarely work (though they can some of the time, it
has rarely worked for us).

That is all I have time for, will chat more later if you track me down.

edit: welcome to the big show. I can't ever imagine going back to working for
anyone other than myself and my employees. It is a weird inversion to finally
truly get how special and important running a business is. I do it for me, but
I also do it for my employees and our freedom to live in a world with minimal
red tape.

------
finkin1
I manage a 2-person remote design and development team that seems similar to
yours. We all got started doing individual freelance work, and then we raised
some money as a team to pursue building our own software product. When we ran
out of money, we went back to individual freelancing. We decided to actually
start a consulting firm when we landed a big client that required combining
all of our skills. We still actually operate with individual S-Corps which
contract with our consulting firm LLC, which we own equally. Sometimes we
still do individual freelance work outside of our firm. You may want to talk
to a CPA about the best way to set things up for your particular goals.

\- Look for projects everywhere. Even if someone is looking for an individual
freelancer, there's no harm in presenting yourself as a team and trying to get
the gig anyway.

\- Local, remote, doesn't matter. The quality of the project is what matters
most in my experience. Burnout matters even more when your team is small and
everyone is relying on getting income from a project.

\- Definitely reach out to other agencies, particularly local ones. Tell them
you can help with overload and custom coding problems they might not have the
in-house talent to tackle.

\- I've never had a mentor/coach, so I can't really say if it's worth it.

\- You should probably start by doing the outreach yourselves. Try subscribing
to some paid curated lead generation services for freelancers/agencies. For a
couple hundred dollars a month you can get dozens of leads sent to your inbox
every day and a few of those might be promising. Follow up with everyone
relentlessly. I use a service called Cloze for this.

Other thoughts:

\- Keep expenses other than payroll in mind as they can add up. You can
probably start with less, but there are a lot of great tools that can
streamline things and save your team a lot of time. We pay for a co-working
space, DocuSign, Slack, GetHarvest, UberConference, Google Apps, and Cloze, to
name the ones I can remember right now.

\- It's a really good idea to have a written contract with all of your
clients. This is my favorite video on the subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8).
The lawyer in that video, Gabe, reviews all of our contracts and he really is
my favorite person to pay.

Best of luck!

------
jondubois
Me and a fellow open source contributor just started offering services around
a real-time open source project we created/worked on and we've seen an
increase of inquiries recently. See
[http://socketcluster.io/#!/services](http://socketcluster.io/#!/services) \-
Maybe get in touch (email form is linked from the bottom of the page) - We're
looking to build connections with people who have expertise with real-time
systems. We're literally at the very beginning so anything is possible.

------
htormey
I'm doing this right now in the Bay Area. Most of my early clients came
through me reaching out to a lot of people in my network.

I also had a lot of luck on angellist. My strategy there was to apply to jobs
and then ask to meet the head of engineering for coffee. I got one of my best
customers through that method.

If you don't have a strong network you need to be going to a lot of meetups or
other events where hiring managers are present.

------
ryanmarsh
All of my colleagues who transitioned to running their own consulting firms
did so by leveraging existing relationships with their employer's ex-clients.
This is in conflict with every one of their non-competes. Since then they've
built their businesses mostly on referrals. This is not what anyone would
advise you to do but it's what I've seen pay the bills. YMMV.

------
sixdimensional
Sorry it doesn't directly address your questions, but I have one comment based
on observations of people who have tried to go from starting a consulting firm
to their own products. That observation is, they get so busy running the
consulting firm it takes all their time and energy and they never got to
making their own products.

Thought to consider - if you really want to make your own products to sell,
just jump right to working on that and spend all your energy doing that.
Unless you genuinely want to do consulting work, of course.

Consider that starting and running a business is the same amount of work from
the paperwork perspective. And a consulting firm just sells services where
results are often owned by the client- whereas the product you make for your
own company can be owned by you.

That's not to dissuade you at all if it is your dream to take this path. Just
food for thought about what your dream really is and how much time/money you
have to pursuse it.

------
wjessup
I started a consulting business about 10 years ago. We're >80 people now and
only do full team projects that include design, product management and
engineering.

As others have said in this thread it's all about relationships and sales.
Technical ability will help you retain clients and build bigger things over
longer timescales, but won't help you get clients in the first place. Also,
technical ability rarely leads to happy clients - they don't review your code
- but a focus on helping the client achieve their mission is the key to
success.

You need to start by getting 1 client. Then 2, and so on. You don't need a
website, or even the name of a company to do this. I didn't know the name of
my consultancy until about 6 months into it after we were 5 full time people.

Subcontracting with other firms when you start is possible, but is mostly
based on relationships, not capability. When I started I had a relationship
with a design agency and they subcontracted us their heavy engineering work.
In reverse, I saw this as outsourcing sales and account management to them.

To grow the business I started a meetup.com group back when meetup was just
starting. There were no other groups at the time and I was able to make a good
name for myself in the community which lead to word of mouth business. Once a
month I would have a different big name company in town host an event where I
would bring 50-80 engineer types and do some tech talks for about an hour. It
took about 5 hours to organize per month and barely any out of pocket costs
since companies were happy to open their spaces to technical types and provide
food.

You need to figure out what you're willing to sell. Staff augmentation? Time &
Materials? Contracts based on scope? They're all very different in sales
process and delivery.

You need to think about account management as a real thing. Developing the
empathy and focus around happy customers _over_ "best code" or "ideal
features" is critical.

Developing your sales beyond word of mouth is the hardest thing to do. Hiring
a sales person alone won't do it. There are way too many small consultancies
reaching out to potential customers everyday and you can't distinguish
yourself from the noise. If you have a clearly differentiated product offering
or services approach that a sales person can leverage to make a clear pitch
that's not just "we can do your projects!" then it can work.

------
wehriam
Check out Thoughtbot's "playbook" \-
[https://thoughtbot.com/playbook](https://thoughtbot.com/playbook) \- it's a
thorough and up-to-date guide to running a consulting firm.

------
awinter-py
Consulting will murder you. You'll never build a product while consulting.

Read your employment contract and talk to a lawyer. Don't put anything on
paper before you leave. I'm not a lawyer but you have 3 problems:

\-- if you design products while employed, your contract may assign ownership
of those 'thoughts, ideas and inventions whether reduced to practice or not'
to your boss

\-- you're planning to recruit your coworkers to come with you? may violate
your non-solicitation clause.

\-- if you're a senior employee and your new company is in the same area as
the old company, your old company may be able to stop you from working
(period) under your noncompete.

------
tedmiston
Hey cosmorocket — I've gone on a similar endeavor last year starting my own
full-time, one-man company focusing on contract software development. Most of
my work is independent contracting vs freelance though I'm starting to
experiment more. I'm also doing related work such as (paid) technical writing.
Having this flexibility is perhaps the biggest advantage to me. So far all
work is purely contracting, not consulting, though the terms seem to be thrown
around interchangeably these days. My business website is sparse but is at [1]
for reference.

I've found that finding clients is not as big of a challenge as envisioned.
Marketing / sales / and all that turned out to be pretty irrelevant in my use
case. I also didn't bother making a portfolio — my best work is private low-
level backend dev that can't easily be shared and often not even discussed
(this is a challenge). So far I've received most work based on personal
reputation as opposed to any type of proposal or competitive process.

Partnerships are very helpful — being able to recommend a front end dev or
graphic designer on a whim is a big service to your clients. This one I
underestimated initially and am still working on developing a nice organized
rolodex (and currently seeking software to simplify the approach).

Feel free to reach out if I can provide any other relevant thoughts from my
experience (email in profile).

[1]: [http://www.edmistonsoftware.com/](http://www.edmistonsoftware.com/)

------
bmmayer1
Full time freelance consultant here, specializing in product strategy and
early customer acquisition. This should apply to your situation as well. What
other people have said in this thread is mostly accurate: consulting is 100%
about client development, and 70% of client development is doing good work for
the clients you do have, because almost all your clients will be word of
mouth.

But, that doesn't answer the question of _how_ you get your first clients.
Here's what I suggest:

\- Start networking. Set up meetings. Lots of meetings. With everyone you've
ever met, at all levels. Depending on who you are talking to, float the
possibility of leaving your current job to 'see what opportunities are out
there'. In some cases you can be more specific ("I want to go freelance"). In
other cases you can be more declarative ("I am freelance now.") The purpose of
these meetings is connecting with people, most of whom you probably haven't
talked to in a while. The purpose of networking is making friends. You want to
catch up with people and slip into the conversation that you're going
freelance now or already are. You don't have to ask them for work; work will
find you. It's important to realize that networking is ultimately about
increasing the number of nodes in your network so when one of your nodes has a
friend who is looking for work, your name is top-of-mind for a referral. The
best sales come from INCOMING connections, not outgoing ones. Engage in your
networking activities to maximize your incoming referrals.

\- How do you start networking? I'm sure you have friends at work who won't go
blabbing to management about your desire to leave your job. Ask them to
connect you with people because you're looking for new opportunities. You
don't even have to mention consulting--saying something like "I've been
working here for a while, and I'd like to see what else is out there. Do you
know any people I can talk to who are doing something interesting?" will work.
This will be your initial word-of-mouth funnel that will lead to clients.

\- Use meetings as a way to get to more meetings. It will come up naturally in
the conversation. "Oh, the work that Acme Inc is doing with data warehousing
is really interesting. I would love to find out more about that!" Make the
goal of every meeting to get a new meeting.

\- Go to networking events. Not coding meetups, where you'll only meet other
engineers, but boring industry-related networking events where you'll meet
real companies who can hire you. If you work in a real estate tech company, go
to a real estate industry event. Go to tech industry events like Techweek.
When you're there, meet people. Make friends. Make sure they know what you do,
and you know what they do. Get their business cards. Follow up with people you
like. Set up more meetings. Etc, etc.

\- One thing that could work for you: there's nothing wrong with taking job
interviews, especially at small companies that can't necessarily afford to pay
for a full time person. If you establish yourself as a freelancer and do a
good job, it's easier to get freelance work at higher levels. Many companies
who bring you in for an interview will be responsive to something like "I
can't really take on something full time right now but all you need to do is
deploy a new framework for your site, so I can do that in two months for
$X,000. How does that sound?" Boom, your first fixed bid contract.

\- In summary: you should spend 100% of your time outside your job networking.
I promise you will get clients quickly.

Those are some DOs. Here are some DO NOTs:

\- Do NOT try to sell to anyone in your network. This seems counterintuitive,
but you will almost NEVER hard sell consulting services to someone you already
know. Networking is not about sales; networking is about making friends, and
you will LOSE friends if you try to sell freelance services to your friends.
Instead, like I wrote above, maximize incoming connections. I guarantee you
will meet with someone and halfway through the conversation they'll say, "hey,
I have this friend who's building an X, can you help with that?" Boom, instant
sale, and the best part is, _their_ friend is referring you so your reputation
will start warm rather than cold.

\- Do NOT hire a salesperson. You are not a company, even if you have a logo.
Your company is YOU. Clients will hire you because they trust and like YOU.
Until you have 10+ clients full time, you will be indistinguishable from your
firm. There's a reason why even major consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, LEK)
are named after their founding people, decades later. Oh, and by the way,
those firms don't have salespeople either.

\- Do NOT waste time on marketing, research, positioning in a market, etc.
Your market will be determined by your unique skillset and your referrals.
Treat this like a MVP startup: let the customer guide you to a product-market
fit. You can spend 2 months building a website that no one will visit, or you
can spend 2 months building a network of thousands of people. Choose the
latter.

\- Depending on your cash situation, I wouldn't quit your job yet. Until you
have a client or clients willing to pay you at least half of what you're
making now, pretend your current job is your current client. Use it as an
opportunity to get new clients.

=====

TL;DR: Spend all your time networking until you have clients. When you have
clients, do amazing work and they will introduce you to more clients. Never
try to make a sale. Sales will find you. Good luck!

~~~
d33kay
bmmayer - that's a very insightful post. I'm in a similar boat. I recently
left a VP, Product level position in a software company to start my own
consulting practice. I'm trying to focus on early customer
discovery/development/strategy for small/mid stage B2B startups. I'm wondering
how your experience freelancing has been so far? How long have you been doing
and what were you main motivations to switch to consulting from FT? Do you
have any plans of (or are already) scaling your practice beyond yourself and
getting partners/employees to work with you?

~~~
bmmayer1
d33kay--Happy to talk offline about it. Connect w/ me on LinkedIn?
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmmayer/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmmayer/)

------
instaheat
I'm a Loan Officer (Mortgage Banker) with IT experience (5 years) Ran my own
IT consulting firm for a year before giving it up. It was hard to do it on my
own. I had 4 clients under contract doing both the Technical side and sales
side.

Let me know if you would be interested in working together. I would be
interested in being a salesperson.

Certainly qualified to do so, originating mortgage loans in 11 states.

~~~
nodesocket
Would you be interested in helping me out as well? See profile for info and
business (DevOps-as-a-service and infrastructure) consulting company.

------
caherrerapa
#2 You are in the right direction. Take your time to find the right first
clients to define your niche.

#3 You must be profitable in the first couple months if you are doing
services. It doesn't make sense to make a service business and not being
profitable.

#4 At least a year before that.

#5 it's not as easy as it seems. But it's good u look to get out of non-
recurring revenue.

As soon as you have your first decent client, you should commit full time
otherwise your priorities are wrong (burn the bridges).

Quality and word of mouth sale more than a sales person if you are doing
service. For a product it's a different story (mkt., sales, etc.). It's way
harder with a product.

Partnerships never work, they are a big distraction and a way for your
competitors to gain insights about your business. Focus on getting off the
ground.

You need to define which niche you wanna target. You should have a network
that knows what's your next move in order to make it work.

Started 3 years ago, going great, we are based in Bangkok with decent revenue.
Successful internal products are elusive tho. Good luck with your next step.

------
redbeard0x0a
There are a lot of things that you need to do to start your own consulting
firm.

One of those things to do needs to be:

* Watch this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8)

~~~
nodesocket
This talk is actually pretty good. Contracts in consulting are critically
important to have in place as they establish expectations. Without a contract,
you'll be surprised how many companies will no-pay or try to wiggle out of
financial obligations.

------
mathattack
IMHO - 2 thoughts...

1) The way to find out if this is a pipe dream is to see if you can get a
first client. Get a first client for yourself. If you can't, nothing else
matters.

2) There is a huge fight in consulting companies between investing in
"products" versus serving existing clients. This is why it's so rare for
consulting companies to create products of their own. The best people wind up
serving clients, and the internal products get sidelined. It only works if
you're 100% explicit from Day 1 that the consulting exists purely to bootstrap
the product. That's admirable, but if you're really into products, why not
just get VC money?

------
phkahler
Almost all of your questions come down to relationships, so the answer from
WhitneyLand is important, but I'll be specific:

>> How do I identify that a company might be in need...?

By having connections and a solid reputation, they may actually start coming
to you. For now talk to people you know to see if they have a need you can
fill.

>> Should I partner up with firms like ours? ....

Yes. But they will need to know your reputation before they are willing to do
so. So it's connections again.

>>Should I hire a salesperson?

Probably not. You will be your own best salesperson and will start with your
own network.

------
crystalPalace
I recently started a remote development team with a
friend([http://whiteboarddynamics.co/](http://whiteboarddynamics.co/)). We use
2 lead generation services as well as the monthly HN threads for freelancing
and hiring. I find that spending time every day working on the business and
searching for clients is key. I think that it is important to be able to
market yourself, in relation to hiring salespeople. You know your business
best so you won't over or under sell it.

------
geniium
Your plan is nice, but you'll never get to 5. You will most probably get stuck
in doing client work with that strategy.

I would rather continue in your current position and prepare everything to not
"Switch from contract work to our products gradually" but switch from a known
and secure context to your new product. Either gradually or abruptly if you
have enough cash.

Haven't replied to the other questions due to blocking point 5. But mentor and
coaches are great to have an external point of view : try to use them wisely.

Good luck!

------
issa
If your ultimate goal is to build your own product, then starting a consulting
business is a distraction. Maybe it helps to just focus on the goal? How you
make money while you pursue the goal is not important. So keep your day job
and work on the product as your side project. I'm almost certain your day job
is MUCH easier than starting a consulting firm, so you'd have more time to
devote to the goal. It's also much more stable and predictable in terms of
income.

Good luck!

------
yed
> Willing to find projects for a small team (2-4 members) of
> developers/designers should I look for larger projects in a different way?

Selling yourself as a team is to ultimate goal, but initially you may need to
focus on leveraging your experience as a freelancer. Sell the same way you
sold as a freelancer, but twice as much and contracted through your company,
and expect your partner to do the same. As you gain relationships with
customers, look for opportunities to pivot into larger projects or staffing
two freelance positions with the same client. This base of work will keep you
afloat while you figure out how to sell larger projects or build up a software
portfolio. Ideally you'd find an anchor customer willing to commit to an
extended contract to take some of the pressure off.

> How do I identify that a company might be in need of a team like ours? I
> don’t want to spam everybody trying to catch a project.

Same as above, this is something you'll need to learn from experience. Start
with the skills you know from freelancing and the connections you've gained.
Don't worry too much about "spamming" people, your hardest job now is
marketing and selling yourselves. You may be surprised how willing some people
are to help out a fledgling company.

> Should I prioritize our online sales channels over local ones?

Sell any way you can and keep what works, ditch what doesn't.

> Should I partner up with firms like ours? Contact them and show our offer so
> that they could be interested in subcontracting with us?

If you have opportunities to partner with a larger established consultancy,
then yes this is a good way to grow while letting the bigger guys do the
selling for you. This works especially when you have relationships in the
industry you can leverage and/or specialized skill sets that other
consultancies need to backfill. Otherwise, consultancies generally try to
avoid subcontracting so it may be a difficult nut to crack.

> Should we have mentors/coaches?

Absolutely.

> Should I hire a salesperson to look for projects?

If you and your partner can't sell yourselves then your company won't survive.
You shouldn't worry about dedicated sales people until your quite a bit
bigger. That will be you and your partners job for the time being.

------
matchagaucho
If front-end UI components for enterprise apps are your "niche", then I'd
suggest a 2-pronged approach:

1) Publish a library of pre-built, generic UI components suited to a
particular domain. Use a license like Creative Commons to charge for
commercial use, but make the library available for free trials.

2) Offer hourly consulting services to enhance/adapt the components to
specific needs.

------
djangowithme
Lets say that you're a small start up past the MVP stage. What would be the
types of tasks that you would outsource to a consulting firm? Isn't it much
more likely that you would try to hire full time and build a team / culture?
Does consulting even work for this market segment?

~~~
bigmanwalter
There are situation it makes sense. Mostly around needing a specific feature
by a certain date. Maybe for a particular sale, or maybe to lure a certain
investor in. Either way, if your team is saturated already, and the new
feature is something they aren't fond of building (eg: something heavy on
frontend when your team is mostly backend), then a contractor or consultant is
often the only way to have it built on time.

Finding the right employee can take time, and hiring the wrong person can
destroy a team's productivity. Better to pay a premium than to get burned.

~~~
djangowithme
Do you think that there's room for consistent work from a company like this,
or would it be more project specific work like you explained?

~~~
bigmanwalter
My experience is that it's usually project specific. If it is recurring they
will, at some point, bite the bullet and hire someone.

------
fnbr
I work for a reasonably high end software consulting firm. We find most of the
work through word of mouth or in-bound responses due to projects we've put on
the web.

Two suggestions:

1\. Patrick McKenzie ([http://www.kalzumeus.com/;](http://www.kalzumeus.com/;)
patio11 on HN) has a lot of brilliant work up talking about his consulting
work, consulting work in general. Give him a read.

2\. Focus on solving business problems, not technical problems, and start
approaching people that you think would make a lot of money if you solved one
of their problems. Customers rarely push back if you make them more money than
you cost them (to an absurd degree- it's shocking how much you can charge for
a recent grad's time).

Regarding your plan:

\- I don't know if you need to prepare a portfolio site. If you have a strong
portfolio & can offer references/testimonials, that's probably sufficient.

\- I don't even know if you need to make the workflow stable as long as it's
profitable. If you have the product people working as contractors, then you
can get by with instability. Also, charging large amounts helps substantially
as you can spread out the cash over time rather than having to constantly
search for work.

Regarding your questions:

\- As mentioned above, you want to find people who have business problems that
you can solve. The best way to do that is to meet lots of people and ask them
about their business problems. Lecture 19 of "How to Start a Startup" has a
good discussion of this [1, 2]. I would start looking at large organizations
in your area who aren't tech companies. Governments will often have public bid
processes that you can start applying for.

I would not prioritize online sales channels over local ones. I think
consulting really only works when it's enterprise focused, as that's when you
can charge the large rates to justify your time & overhead. That's going to
necessarily be in person due to the way that enterprise sales works
(unfortunately). However, internet marketing can work well. We've had a lot of
success attracting in-bound interest from viral posts on social media
(visualizations, projects, etc.).

\- I wouldn't partner up with firms like yours. I would partner up with firms
that lack the expertise. e.g. large management consultancies like Deloitte
(easier said than done).

I'm happy to provide more specific advice over email. My email's in my
profile.

[1]: [http://startupclass.samaltman.com/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/)
[2]: Transcript: [https://genius.com/Tyler-bosmeny-lecture-19-sales-and-
market...](https://genius.com/Tyler-bosmeny-lecture-19-sales-and-marketing-
how-to-pitch-and-investor-meeting-roleplaying-annotated)

------
peter303
Write a business plan to focus your energy. It doesnt have to be long or
fancy. Include your resources, your market, your one-year and five-year goals.
There are guides and samples on the web. You may revise on an annual basis.

------
clueless123
Sales, sales, sales.

* Your are a developer, so everything else, you can figure out on your own.

~~~
tryrall
So what you're saying is that to engineer a system where clients pay me to do
work for them, all I need to do is engineer a system where clients pay me to
do work for them?

------
tootie
The thing you're missing is project and product management and sales. Those
parts can be really hard. You're coding skills are worthless if you can't
deliver the right thing on budget.

------
mee_too
You're not in a good position to start consulting - you have no understanding
how that business works.

If you really want to build a product, start building a product right away.

------
igolden
A great resource for burning through your idea and getting your business
setup/organized -> startuprocket.com. Free, too.

------
dbg31415
I see a lot of good answers here already... but understand the reason you want
your own firm... and the reason why it sucks to be a developer at most
agencies... is the same as why it's really hard to be a developer out on your
own. It's not talent that matters, it's the ability to sell. The sales guys
have all the power because, without them, there is no viable firm.

Now... you can say, "Oh without delivery talent there isn't a firm either..."
and you're not wrong. But, a firm can always fake it until they make it --
many do. Then scramble to hire devs once they get a sale. It's not a
discussion around what comes first -- the chicken or the egg... it's sales
that comes first.

If you're just looking to freelance, find a "cash cow" client or two. Bend
over backwards to keep them happy. You'll make an OK living billing out at
your hourly for them. If you have time, try and grow... but at some point
you'll have to make the call if you want to do sales or delivery work -- and
if it's the later you'll never have time to do the former correctly.

So to keep a client happy... you have to talk to the project manager on their
side, the VP on their side, the C-level folks on their side... all the lunches
and emails and gifts and crap that you never see because the sales / accounts
team handled it for you. And if you don't do it... rest assured someone else
is, and you'll end up losing your contract to someone who is willing to waste
a day playing golf and building multi-layer relationships.

Having done my own business for a number of years... it's empowering to be
your own boss, but even getting all my clients through reputation / word of
mouth... it's a never-ending struggle to keep up with sales / accounts and it
takes a lot more of my time than I ever thought it would.

It takes a lot more than just doing the job right for them. Let's face it...
most of the higher up folks making the decisions about budgets... they aren't
perfectly in tune with delivery anyway, so when someone comes along who tells
them they can do it cheaper, faster, better, whatever... and turns on the
charm... your relationship with the client's project manager isn't going to
mean all that much.

It's exhausting having to be so aggressively inquisitive about my clients'
businesses so I can get out ahead of them before they send out an RFP or
invite another contractor in that could be trying to vie for my job. At the
end of the day... is it worth it? Sure -- for me -- for the freedom. But I'd
probably have more money, and a lot more free time, if I just worked for
someone else.

------
4sellff
I have interest in speaking with you about a consulting opportunity. Please
e-mail me: ron.michel at vmconfig.com

------
nunez
Be a consultant first. I didn't think it was as tricky of an industry as it
is, but it is.

------
xkenneth
I have run a consulting firm for the last 8 years. Feel free to email me.

Ken@erdosmiller.com

------
lwhalen
Let me save you 18+ months of agony by recommending: expensiveproblem.com/hbin

worth every penny, IMHO. Been freelancing 3+ years, getting off of hourly and
onto value-based billing has been life-changing.

------
wushupork
Started on my consulting firm around 5 years ago - quite organically. (I was a
freelancer taking on more work than I could handle so I hired help). Now we
have around 40 people, a pretty remote team, some big Fortune 500 clients as
well as lots of startups. We're also incubating our own SaaS products.

I'll address your questions as well as offer my own experience as lessons /
pitfalls.

As many have said, sales and BD (business development) doesn't seem like a
priority for you, but it probably takes a good 70% percent of my time
nowadays. The other 30% are a mosh of running the company, maintaining
relationships, and figuring out more sustainable avenues for the future (ie
SaaS products).

Should you look for larger projects? Yes. Look for projects that will feed a
big team. The 80/20 rule applies here. I would say 30% of my clients are
responsible for 70% of the revenue. The double edged sword here is, make sure
that 30% is not just 1 huge customer which happened to my friend. He learned
the hard way that when 80% of your revenue comes from one customer and that
customer goes away, you're toast. I lost a big whale which took out a HUGE
chunk of revenue, but we were pretty diversified. Otherwise we would have been
in real trouble. It sucked, and it was painful, but we recovered.

How do I identify that a company might be in need of a team like ours? Should
I prioritize our online sales channels over local ones? - I'm 5 years into the
business, and I have to say, most of the business I get is still from
referrals and relationships. Almost nothing is from online channels, although
that is SLOWLY starting to happen because of some marketing channels. Also I
didn't really have much of a marketing team until recently. And even then, it
will take some time to figure out the right marketing activities to focus on.
If you are still small, you might be out of business by the time you figure it
out. Most of your business will come through relationships. Hit up all your
friends who work at big companies.

Should I partner up with firms like ours? - if you look on our site we have
several impressive partnerships, but I can tell you exactly how much business
they've brought - a big 0. Partnerships are hard. The partner is having enough
trouble dealing with bringing money for themselves, much less worrying about
bringing you money. I've never seen it work out in consulting. If you sell a
product, there's no end to people who want to resell your product via VARs
(value added reseller) or affiliates.

Should we have mentors/coaches? YES. I constantly talk to others who have had
much bigger consultancies who are not my direct competitors (not in the same
geographic space etc). I try to talk to them when I have specific issues -
that they've probably run into before, or regularly so that I have a sounding
board. I constantly ask for feedback on things I'm trying to implement etc.
Learn from people who've done it before. Nowadays I also spend a lot of time
with SaaS mentors because that's where I want to be.

Should I hire a salesperson to look for projects? I've not seen any small
agency early on have success with a salesperson. This is because you'll
probably only be able to attract mediocre or subpar salespeople with your
small projects and small commissions. The best salespeople tend to work for
companies like Salesforce so they can earn HUGE commissions and drive
expensive cars and afford expensive watches. Also, everyone I've known in
consultancies go through multiple sales people before they find the right one.
You'll burn a lot of money before you do. Even after 5 years, I still do most
of the sales myself. When you are this small, people want to deal with the
owner. Also you are still figuring things out - your unique value prop, what
you sell and truth be told, a salesperson who's not technical, won't be able
to explain what you sell or even know how to sell it until you figure it out
and systematize it for them.

As for products, I've always budgeted time and money for products since the
very beginning and I've had MANY failed products. The nice thing about
consulting is that it does give you runway to experiment. However the
experiments will take more time and run slower. However, I would say you have
more runway that "traditionally" raising some angel or seed. In helping lots
of startups, I see a lot of this happen. People have an idea, they want to do
a product. They find a team, raise a small amount of capital, and try it out.
It doesn't work for whatever reason - maybe the hypothesis was wrong, they
couldn't execute, they couldn't market, whatever. They run out of runway and
investors don't throw in more money. They disband and usually end up getting
jobs in more stable startups or big companies. That's it - game over. Or if
they disband and try again, it's usually with a different team etc. To me
that's a hugely disruptive way to do it. If you have a team you work well
with, ideally I'd like to keep that team regardless of whether 1 idea works
out or not. Remember, these are experiments. So the consultancy let's me keep
my team intact while I iterate through different ideas.

Business process, (and technical processes). When you are small, and all
sitting in the same room, you'll have a lot of tribal knowledge you pass on
when you look over the shoulder. That doesn't scale, so the sooner you capture
that into a document or process, the better. If you have to do something more
than once, don't expect other people to know how to do it like you do it or
like you want them to, so best to document it. We probably started that way
too late but we have some processes now and we're still implementing new
processes.

I want to end by stressing RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS (read
with Steve Ballmer's enthusiasm). This applies both in clients and talent.
Most of my clients have come through relationships. We did a good job for
someone and that someone knew someone who needed help in a similar area. A lot
of our talent also come through relationships. Good people know other good
people and want to work with those good people. If you have a good work
environment, your team will recommend their old coworkers who they want to
work with.

Hope that helps.

~~~
dave_bcs
I started my own consulting firm one year ago. In all honesty, it is still a
struggle, but I managed to grow it to the point where it is self sustainable.

My current challenge is to scale it up!

I used a very simple approach. I talked with a bunch of startups and SMEs and
asked what their main challenges were. With all this information, I was able
to find some trends and develop an offering that they really needed.

Best part of it was that I already had my first set of customers. By talking
with these guys, they were fully aware that they needed and better solution
and actually asked me to do it. In fact, I had to bring 2 people into the team
in order to manage all the work.

By the way, I just wrote a new post and am promoting it around. I would love
to hear your thoughts and know if there are any other topics you would like to
see discussed in my blog.

[http://untamedpotential.com/business-development-finally-
cle...](http://untamedpotential.com/business-development-finally-clear-
definition/)

------
dfcarney
First and foremost, if you have an idea for a good product then just work on
that. Don't complicate your life with consulting unless there's a dire need to
save up a bunch of cash. It'll be easier to work on that while maintaining a
9-to-5 job, as opposed to trying to build a product while running a consulting
business.

That said, consulting is a great way to learn a lot, gain experience, make
good money, and figure out what you _don 't_ want to be doing. If you want to
go this route, read on...

Speaking from experience (having incorporated two software consulting firms
and worked at that for a few years), I completely agree with the comments
about sales/selling be such an important part of things. If you don't enjoy
this (or have someone on your team who does), then you're going to get worn
out pretty quickly. However, if you can land 1-2 big clients and setup some
kind of continuous (ex. retainer-based) relationship then you're golden.

One option is to try and contract from your current employer. You obviously
have the experience and the relationships already in place. Your employer
won't be happy about you leaving, but might be amenable to hiring you on a
short-term gig.

An alternative is to subcontract. Expect your rates to be lower, but you'll
have more opportunity to gain valuable experience and won't bear the
risk/burden of landing clients yourself. It's a lot easier to find your own
contracts once you have a few projects (and a network of contacts) under your
belt.

Regardless of your approach, advice I _always_ give to people when they ask me
about starting a business are: get a good lawyer ; and get a good accountant.
Don't take the cheapest options because you'll regret it later. Find people in
the space who come recommended, whom you like, and who have a track-record in
dealing in your line of work.

Whether or not you decide to incorporate is up to you (talk to the
aforementioned lawyer), but in my experience it's a no-brainer.

In terms of legal, you'll also want your lawyer to provide you with a standard
NDA and contract that you can use in all of your engagements. Any lawyer with
experience should be able to provide this pretty cheaply (at a fixed rate,
hopefully).

In terms of an accountant (or a small accounting firm), you won't need much to
get started, but a 1-2 hour consultation to get your bookkeeping and invoicing
setup will save you a lot of time (and grief) later. Make sure that you can
hand easily hand your invoices, bank statements, receipts, etc. to your
accountant when it comes time to file your taxes. Again, if you cheap-out on
this it's going to cause you a lot of pain down the road.

Other notes from experience:

\- Switching from consulting to product is difficult and almost always fails
unless you're willing to make a clean break. As a consultant you eat what you
kill; as soon as you stop working then your revenue stream drops to zero. I've
seen people try to work around this by expanding their consulting firm to
handle larger and larger projects, but then the people at the top just spend
more time managing everything and have even less time to work on products.

\- You'll eventually come up with a good product idea, at which point you
should be willing (and able) to completely stop consulting to work on it. This
transition will hurt, but you should have enough cash saved up to make a go of
it.

\- It's okay (in Canada, at least) to start working as a sole proprietor on
some (smaller) contracts, but don't expect any client to be amenable to you
changing the nature of your relationship with them half way through a contract
(for instance, if you decide to incorporate).

\- The larger the client/contract, the more likely you'll need insurance
(errors & omissions, liability, etc). This doesn't come cheap. I recommend
starting with smaller clients and projects to mitigate this.

\- Figure out what taxes (if any) you need to charge ahead of time and be very
upfront about this (and your rates).

\- If someone wants you to be on-call (ex. 2-hour response time to a phone
call), then great. Charge them more for it.

\- If someone wants you on retainer (ex. 20 hours/month for dev ops),
wonderful. Consider giving them a discount for multi-month agreements because
it's a low-risk and guaranteed revenue stream.

\- Make it _very_ easy for clients to pay you. Include all of your payment
information on each invoice. Have multiple payment options, if possible.

\- Expect to terminate agreements with some clients. This sucks, but it's
sometimes necessary.

\- In your contract, be sure to state that the client doesn't own the work
product (copyright, etc) until they pay you. This doesn't mean you don't
deliver things according to schedule if payment is a little behind schedule,
but you have some recourse if things ever get nasty.

\- Finally, be sure to check your current employment agreement to make sure
there's nothing that would get you (or your colleague) in trouble if you both
decide to leave and start a company. Two things come to mind: there might be
some onerous (and probably unenforceable) non-solicitation clause that a
lawyer could twist to state that you solicited your colleague (or vice versa)
to leave (this probably won't be an issue); and there might be some non-
compete that you have to be careful about if you're consulting on similar
products/features to your current employer. In both cases, I think this would
be low-risk, but talk to your lawyer.

------
wyc
If you've been successfully freelancing for 7 years, then it's likely that you
already know much of what I'm about to write. I'd say scrap partnerships and
salespeople, and focus on what sales channels are best for you, online or
local, whatever works. The two most important lessons I've learned in
consulting so far are:

(1) _It 's really all about trust._ The client wants someone who can reliably
solve their problem, and tooting your own horn has a very limited
effectiveness in building that credibility. Trust heavily impacts what
projects people will give you, and how much you can charge. It's common that a
company will somehow find 2-3x budget to hire a partner who they know will get
the job done.

(2) _Referrals and good deeds are the fastest way to build trust._ When you
come well-recommended by a prospect's trusted friend or partner, then a good
amount of that trust gets instantly transferred to you. This transitivity of
trust is key to building a good referral network that will consistently send
work your way. If you don't have this, then you have somewhat of a cold start
problem. In this case, providing value to people on a regular basis could
really help with establishing your credibility. I don't mean doing projects
for free, but more like offering people free 30-minute consultations about how
to build their things, or sending them resources (articles or books) on a
consistent basis that would really benefit them. This demonstrates that you
can already deliver value, and makes it more convincing that you would do much
more of that if you actually got paid for it.

Here are some more resources that could help someone get a start:

[1] Getting Started in Consulting by Alan Weiss is a little antiquated, but
talks about what's important in getting your firm going and how to think about
your work's impact on your client. ([https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-
Consulting-Alan-Weiss...](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Consulting-
Alan-Weiss/dp/0470419806))

[2] Book Yourself Solid by Micheal Port talks about the best ways to build
these client relationships that will result in trust.
([https://www.amazon.com/Book-Yourself-Solid-Reliable-
Marketin...](https://www.amazon.com/Book-Yourself-Solid-Reliable-
Marketing/dp/0470643471))

[3] Double Your Freelancing by Brennan Dunn actually has very good information
about the tactics of pricing and the business side of project management. It's
pricey. The accompanying podcast has good information for free.
([https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/](https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/))

There are thousands of different info products online about this stuff, but
this bundle should give you the most core knowledge for your money.

------
lsjdfkljdfwkwdf
What about working for the same employer, but as a consultant (usually
involves leaving and coming back) while working for other clients on the side?
Having seen quite a few people going this route, they seem to be doing pretty
good.

------
amygdyl
I hope this isn't read as a off color comment,

but from reading cosmorocket's statement of inquiry,

I would say that he has to loose referring to anything as "stuff" right out
the gate, from this morning's coffee on, and forever.

I mean to illustrate a more valid, less snarky, point, however:

When people hire consultants,

very often, if not prototypically, it is because they want to understand
something that is outside their domain or their immediate efficient use of
time, or to learn about something they are unsure whether it may meet their
needs.

Hand waving and calling anything, "back end stuff"...

well, it rather blows as a pitch.

Certainly it fails at making a impression of confidence in our own knowledge,
whether that is unfair doesn't much matter, if you don;t get the chance to
expatiate further.

Knowledge != knowing what something is, and how it works. at least not in any
consulting gig I think worth the name.

Knowledge is, very definitely, the breadth and depth of understanding a domain
specialty sufficiently to relate and connect that to as yet undefined but
potentially complimentary scenarios.

I want to be very very harsh, here, towards cosmorocket,

and this is intended well,

but all cosmorocket's questions are about the mechanics,

and it is utterly transparent to the reader that the absent component is
appreciation for what it is that cosmorocket can bring to the table.

At least in the above question for HN, the reality of the quantity for sale is
sorely absent.

I think this is why we've got a busy discussion full of anecdotes about
corporate life, but nothing much at first glance that answers, "sure, you can
do this, so you put it like that, and take home that". Hmm, in a roundabout
way, some answers are a bit like that. But to really work, a proposition has
to be simple enough at its core to be a one liner. The most sophisticated
product in existence, can still be sold as "solves all your storage deployment
problems whilst making IOPs a commodity you control, and compliance facility
and data discovery and data loss guarantees a fixed affordable price".

Many people admire the sophistication of big sales outfits.

Corporate sales is not something many actually encounter, in life. Being
pitched by EMC on a roll, eager to sell you dozens if not hundreds of TB or
mainframe class storage in the nineties is a spectacular memory, like going to
a grand opera. But it does all boil down to people who can cut through the
chaff in a instant, so that what is too easily dismissed as frippery and
trappings, are really aides and props for detailed discussions, not valueless
glossy blurb. Great salespeople use their tools in ways not immediately
obvious, and with skills akin almost to artistry. I may gush a bit much for
your taste, but having been pitched by full on gung-ho teams, and felt at
times overwhelmed by the sheer onslaught of energy and attrition of new
supporting roles that a major enterprise sales effort fields to win your PO, i
developed a real respect for the orchestration. I'm saying this by way of a
analogy, that the casual onlooker might see glossy brochures that are terrible
at defining anything, but their purpose is more discussion prompts, than hard
data points.

I'd like to take cosmorocket aside, grab a empty conference room, and brain
dump a whole 30 years of stories.

But the one thing I hope cosmorocket might get from my putative one on one, is
the one i can give right now, just it won't seem like a hill of beans: If you
want to be a consultant, and the adjective successful is a condition, because
a unsuccessful consultant doesn't exist any more, or never did, you need one
fundamental skill: to be able to relate to people by understandng hw they
understand the technology you are discussing, so that you can get into their
minds how they see their use, and whilst adding a core skillset and experience
base, and maybe some tech sauce you might have rolled yourself, such as tools
for cloud deployments you scripted, read back to your customer a
interpretation of both what you can add, and what they might be missing,
evaluated against as hard data as you can find, so that they understand the
value to them of the next step they take with the technology you discuss.

Consulting is about making people understand the values of technlogy that
matter to them, and educating them about tools that leverage technology to
aide their needs, which needs you have to understand both from their
appreciation of their needs, as well as what that adds up to in reality in
practical as well as technical terms (i.e. sanity check, and eval whether they
are risking expensive or dangerous poor assessments or make bad
assumptions...) and explaining this in a way they can accept with the least
impact for the biggest result your bill plus any extra dollars spent, can get
your customer.

Selling to the next customer (i do prefer that word, even if people would say
I got clients, not customers, because saying "customer" makes you focus on a
product delivery, not wishy washy relationships, that frankly are strong only
when you deliver as if you were shipping product) you get the next sale by
opening up how you got the last, not by detail, but by example, and that is
your pitch, then: "I did x for Z Corp, by this method, and they got a, b, and
c, and i can give you this ROI for my work, and this customer reference."

Bu the first customer youwill get, probably you will best emphasize that you
have a command directly of tech, that you have extensive domain experience in,
where you see a edge that youlearned through your work, that is not widely
enough deployed or accepted to be able to offer exceptional returns, and with
a very low (relative, but do not ever sell yourself low, that is fatal, you
must charge a market rate, even if you think big consultant rates are
ridiculous for the customer you pitch, you need to be relatively in the same
order as that, or else offer a discount plus earn out / bonus on other results
that can add a big multiplier, if not a zero, to your contract payout) initial
cost. As one man, you almost guaranteed got the low initial cost (another
reason to watch tonor pitch yourself low) so you must move fast top the steak
of your offer: which is "I do this with that, and it rocks your ___blank___ to
the next level, and we can measure that, and we can do thisby performance in
next to no time." To get a start, you must optimize time as a component. Your
hours get multiplied by everyone you touch with the work you do hours. Your
$400 hourly rate (not ridiculous a number) can touch and cause cost at $4,000
/hr moment you interact with any significant team in any operation.

I started very down / skeptical, but you have to.

Biggest and only advice I would ever personally offer:

there is nothing like the wrath (and bad PR effect) of a upset client for your
consulting. Everybody will dump on your head.

cosmorocket, i've been harsh, sorry, but i mean well, i got not stacks but
enough time to kick about, if you wanted to email me, i'll shoot at explaining
better why I am right down on how you pitched this question, but also why
that, and maybe the answers that arose from that, are not end of world is
negative, or foreboding. But i would not encourage you to be optimistic for
enthusiasm's sake. Consulting has fewer pom pom girls than startups. And far
less of that, directly or indirectly, is allowed around any scenario i reckon
you might find yourself in. Anyhow, I' be happy to traduce any optimistic
cynicism I can, if you shout me. Good luck!

~~~
lmenus
Hi John,

From reading your comments, you seem to have quite a knowledge. I'd like to
email you but can't find your address, do you mind sending me the first
message at lmenus@lmen.us? I am also in London.

Thanks,

Lubos

------
amygdyl
cosmorocket,

i owe you something i can't explain:

the mass of answers here are all brilliant in their ways,

but they are touching my memory of a very long time ago, in my twenties, when
i first was throwing my all into business, my own startup, which i was
indescribably lucky to keep from trashing..

i had the benefit of insane experience around me. By accident of a very long
story, i had 200 years of multi national board level experience advising me,
and i started silly young.

And i sounded nothing as good as, but really like pretty much all of the
above.

Now, is many many years later.

Please nobody take this in any way meaning anything down on the true effusion
of positive comment, above,

but for me it is a nostalgia trip,

i just got reconnected with a barely twenty something me

the outpouring here is amazing

i so wish there was anything like such a community, anyplace, the poles i'd
relocate..

.. the energies i read above, are what i yearned for, when starting out

and yet despite i had the most amazing advice, counsel, business partners
even, i only now realize to the extent at which they nurtured me, were patient
with me, and how- long after each of those great guys retired or we parted
ways - only now do i actually sound a little like they did, and it is so
unlike the brilliance here, so much tempered, so much becalmed by blows and
booms i never could have imagined, so much moderated by - not really cynicism,
but by simply the experience of years distilling everything to the shortest
short hand I could... Now i know how hard it was for my mentors to expand
arguments they had reduced to great simplicity. I seem to have come full
circle.

Oh, this isn't coming across how I wanted. But i mean without the slightest
ill comment, to say how reading this discussion reminds me of me, what i
wanted for colleagues, when young, but now i find, decades later, i think
entirely differently, and feel so distant from the first energies I tried to
let run in the world, and i rather have become what i once thought was
cynicism in my elders. I hope i've not appeared cynical. But I really really
want to say to cosmorocket, whose life may be changed by this, that a great
deal of the replies here are exactly what my mentors railed against, were
aghast against, when i expressed myself similarly. That does not invalidate
any replies, but without addressing any individually, i really see the
critical elements as missing in the debate entirely, which i note in my above
comment. And my company survived because I was babysat by guys retired form
boards of multinationals (fluke, fluke times a million, very difficult to
believe, my story, really) who somehow tolerated me. But I was wrong, and i
sounded like - rather I wanted to sound like but also be as confident, as what
seems to majority here. And it took me all this time to learn why that ain't
the full ticket, by some long way.

