[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.

[BrentOzar]

Further, think about:

* The length of your expected average contract (days, weeks, months) * The revenue in that contract * How many of those contracts you'll need to sustain the team per year * What percentage of your prospects will sign a contract

So for example, if you need 10 contracts per year to survive, and only 20% of your prospects sign, that means you need at least 50 sales conversations per year.

Marketing is the single biggest problem I see at small consulting shops. They don't get enough leads. Sure, you might believe you can convert a lead into a sale - it's harder than you think - but how are you going to get those leads?

Without leads, you end up groveling for low rate work that you don't really want to do, just to make ends meet. Then, after a year, you've built up a low rate reputation and low rate skills. It's a downhill slide from there to giving up and taking a full time job again. Nothing wrong with full time jobs at all - they're much easier since you don't have to do marketing to find work.

[tootie]

It's compounded by needing so much outbound sales when you have no reputation and such small capacity. I work at a mid-size consulting shop where we are maybe 50/50 outbound and inbound. Inbound sales are like gift-wrapped christmas presents but they require so much effort to get to. Outbound sales is extremely costly.

[ultimatejs]

That's why my suggestion to these guys is to save every penny at their current job so they can skip to a product business.

Forget the sales, soft skills, and making products for other people that will never truly appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it. Just stick to your guns and create the situation where you can just work on your own product.

If you guys are kicking ass at your current firm, you should be being paid for it, i.e. making enough to save some some money. There's your ticket. Be patient and wait it out while saving money. Plan out your upcoming product, and do all the preparation that doesn't require deep immersion, so from day one after quitting you can deeply immerse yourself.

ps. how's 7 years as a remote freelancer so different from a consulting firm? It's not. Just more developers, bigger projects. You already know what that life is all about. Do you really want to go back to that, now with the burden of supporting more engineers? Keep it simple. If you have the skills and confidence, your product idea will work out. Just create the space and time to do it.

[te_chris]

This is bad advice, imo.

If they start a consulting business there's a much more stable path to revenue from day 0, if they follow your advice they'll spend all their savings and possibly be in the reeds for ages. All the while they'll still need the sales/bd talent.

[ultimatejs]

Ultimately it depends on the individual's scenario. Both sides are extremely challenging. Without more info, it's up to them to decide which best suits their situation. They're already thinking of going the consulting route, so I'm providing an argument for a different way so they can fully weigh as many possibilities as possible

So, the downside of consulting for one is that he's just going back to freelancing, just now with his buddy. But more importantly, the downside is simply that projects are always under-estimated, you'll grow your business ponzi-scheme style (new projects paying for old), eventually have more engineers, and be responsible for them, etc. Typical scene. They will have severely complicated their lives, whereas what a startup/product needs is simplicity and space to focus (i.e. not a plethora of projects distracting you and occupying more time than hoped). So it may very well be a long while before they truly create the space to do their own product whole-heartedly. I'm not saying it can't be done. They need to weigh whether they want to go through all that.

VERSUS:

a year from now (presumably after demanding a raise) taking 6-12 months off to work on their own product, and if it fails, simply going and getting another job (they'll be better engineers, and it will therefore be easier to get jobs).

At the end of the day, the biggest--and perhaps hidden--factor is whether you have kids. If you don't have kids (or people other than yourself to take care of), and you can't create this environment for yourself, you have other problems. But more than likely while at this stage of your life, you have options. So the trick is not to get yourself into trouble with large under-estimated projects for other people, and to do whatever it takes to create time for yourself and your own projects. That's the name of the game. That's what it's all about. I.e. keeping it simple. Don't get yourself into trouble with too many projects, projects that are too big, working for too much potential that doesn't pan out. Get short low responsibility projects, and make your #1 focus creating time for your own projects.

[tedmiston]

It's hard to call advice blanket good / bad when the decision is heavily dependent on an individual's end goal combined with their tolerance for risk and uncertainty. Different people need different advice.

[williamle8300]

Great advice. I'd only add that the OP seems like he's from a foreign country and doesn't have English fluency.

When you can't speak English fluently your shop's greatest strength will be technical prowess. Soft skills take a backseat until OP learns English fluently.

[ar0]

Of course this assumes that the OP wants to build a consulting business in an English speaking country. Maybe he/she wants to consult e.g. in France for French companies, but still posted on HM because advice from HN would still be helpful and relevant.

[josephjrobison]

There's really good advice on here. One of the ones that sticks out is soft skills & sales, which is just as important in consulting as the technical prowess. I would say it's somewhere between 50-80% technical chops, and 20-50% soft/selling skills depending on the client.

I think that's a big distinction that hasn't been made. If your client is another developer or CTO that deeply understands the subject matter, then the technical skills are definitely more important. If you're dealing with a CEO or CMO or business owner that's not technical, be prepared to really explain the whole story and present value from start to finish. There's benefits to both, as the CTO may be able to negotiate down your rate if they know where to cut out segments of the project or give that work to cheaper labor. The CEO/CMO side will take more work to help them understand the project, but will defer to you on scope. Again, this is generalizing, but less so than some other comments that treat ever client as the same persona.

One thing to definitely consider is to have one or more people on your team that is or has good experience being client facing. Whether as an account manager at an agency, a client-facing designer/developer, someone who has been there and helped guide and manage expectations for 5-10+ clients at once. That's a skill that's required, or else you're starting from square one and will have a lot of learning to do on the job.

My thoughts on your questions:

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

A: I think the answer here is that some companies want to find a solo consultant, some want a small nimble team like yours, and some want a full-featured agency. I've realized this myself that there are different clients that want different things, so you should just understand what you are and what your value prop is and know that you'll be the perfect size/fit for some clients, but too small or too big for others.

- 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.

A: You can go the data route and find companies that just raised a round of funding if you're going the startup route, or get a list of 50-100 dream companies you want to work with and monitor their job listings, not necessarily to apply yourself (you can sometimes) but to gauge how fast they're growing and what gaps in talent they're missing at their company.

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

A: Like others mentioned, referrals and networking is helpful but it's not all or nothing. If you're not that type, many others have received great leads by publishing really good content (blog posts, webinars, slide decks, guides, etc) and getting leads in the funnel that way. Paid ads (display, PPC, FB) can work for top of funnel leads but not often for bottom of funnel (closing the sale) so adjust appropriately.

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

A: That's definitely a good way to start. One universal note is that it's likely that a firm will pay you 50% of the rate they bill the end client for. So keep in mind that if you find the client yourself you get 100% of your rate, if you subcontract you most often get 50% of it. Not a hard and fast rule, but fairly common.

- Should we have mentors/coaches?

A: Can't comment on this as I haven't gone too deep into this, but many, many people highly recommend it.

- Should I hire a salesperson to look for projects?

A: Can't comment much on this but it depends on your own teams capabilities/stage/style, etc.

[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?

[WhitneyLand]

The short answer is it turns out to be a hard thing to do.

Right off the bat your choices are limited because many sales roles benefit from being close to customers. You may be limited to local and have no option to leverage hundreds of millions of people outside the country like tech can.

Secondly, they're expensive. The stars can make double what a top architect makes. You might think, no problem it's just x% on what they sell and we all benefit. Then the problem becomes why should they join your company now if you don't already have a lucrative pipeline to maintain and expand? To get around this some companies will pay fixed cash rate until commissions ramp up, but often that's hard to do for a startup.

Also salespeople tend to care less about how cool the technology is. It does matter somewhat, it's better to be selling software than cigarettes. However it would be common for a tech star to turn down a cobol job even for a 30% raise, whereas I estimate that's less true on the sales side.

[ryanSrich]

Consulting = Selling. If you outsource the selling and you work on the tech, then you're the one being outsourced. It sounds like OP just wants to work on interesting technology, but not for someone else. Turns out it's pretty hard to do that without being proficient in running a business.

[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.