| 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. |
If you bill hourly, people will attempt to attain an intimate knowledge of the comings and goings of what you do in order to get more out of you for less money, and this will be irritating, and they will also demand that you produce itemised invoices, which will, in itself, be time-consuming and even more irritating. Tell them that your minimum billable unit of time to complete a task (any task) is a day - tell them that it's a resourcing requirement, or just tell them nothing (if you're not brave, then half a day just about works too - but nothing more granular than that, ever).
If you're working with any decently sized kind of enterprise, almost any reasonable rate you can imagine will be absolutely fine - worrying about $800 vs $1000 vs $1200 per day is utterly pointless; pick the highest number you dare and if they want to work with you it will be fine, and if they didn't want to work with you, the rate wasn't the problem anyway. I once charged a client ~$15,000 for a week's work, because they needed it in a hurry; I thought I was being outrageous (because the work was very easy and very repetitive), but they went for it. Later they accidentally sent me the pitch deck they had sent to their client, which included their costs, and I found they were charging ~$25,000 for the technical side of a $90,000 project - they made $10,000 on the bit my consultancy did, and a hell of a lot more on the rest. So yeah, raise your rates.