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by thaumaturgy 5787 days ago
I've been doing exactly this transition for the last couple of months -- transitioning from consulting to running a business and working on services (basically, a startup, just under my company's brand).

For me, trying to schedule "startup time" didn't work. There was always too much immediate consulting-type work to take care of.

So about a year ago I ran a Craigslist ad, spent a day wading through applications and making phone calls, and found someone that was willing to work on a part-time, on-call basis, for good wages but less than my consulting fees.

A year later, I've got a couple of people that I work with now -- sort-of employees-on-call -- and I was just able to take my first real vacation in 2.5 years. Everything was handled fine while I was unreachable. So now I've got plenty of time to work on software.

So, one solution is to run your consulting like a business for a while, grow it, get some contract help, stabilize it, and then manage it part-time.

1 comments

I don't understand... sounds like you still have to schedule startup time around a job. Is it that you're working fewer hours than you were before? Wouldn't it have been easier just to take on fewer consulting hours?
Maybe he has a lot of pre-existing repeat-clients who always come to him for their tech stuff that he doesn't want to send away permanently.
Yes, exactly. And, both the consulting and the startup stuff are part of the same business, just different aspects of it.

I know it depends on the individual, but I find it a lot easier to concentrate on startup work when I'm not developing an ulcer over finances. (And I can't wait to stop developing ulcers over finances. ;-)