[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.

[bigmanwalter]

Make friends with CTOs that have budgets, and convince them that anyone else would just mess it up.

[mzzter]

Do you do consulting or work in a similar manner? Genuinely curious. I believe the steps you describe are relevant to other consulting domains, not just software.

[PeterisP]

I do some consulting; not a majority of my time but I work with some people who are fully in that business and I have a "company" i.e. separate legal entity made for these tasks, which is useful especially if I need to hire someone else for a bit of help on some task. Yes, the steps are absolutely generic but I believe that there shouldn't be anything specific to software consulting; the basis of how "renting expertise" business works is the same, no matter if that expertise is in software, hardware, consumer psychology or geology.

[sixdimensional]

If you go this route, you might even find an opportunity you realize would be better suited to making and selling a product rather than consulting, allowing you to delay that decision to consult or make/sell a product to find the right fit for a problem!

[KristofferJGalt]

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

Any particular techniques how to start doing offline sales?

Being a foreigner struggle a bit to find local projects in Bay Area. Meetups and events doesn't help a lot, cold contacts on Linkedin or by email are mostly ignored.