| 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. |