[towelpluswater]

Takes years, many years, of networking, and investing back into your network. Know someone who was let go and needs help finding a job? Help them find a job. This might turn into something in 3 months, maybe a year, maybe never, but it's a game of numbers.

Like any good long-term investment, you have to keep nurturing it. Continuously stay in touch with people you meet.

If you do it right, the leads come to you through natural conversations, and you don't even feel like you're selling. Without the relationships already in place, everything feels like selling, and it's exhausting and significantly harder to land strategic project work. There's no magic here, and no book or course that will tell you the secret (it's mostly snakeoil) - it just takes time and effort. It gets easier when some of these relationships lead to real opportunities, you show well, and can use that for referrals into other places as the people you meet move around.

Another route for early starters is to subcontract through established consulting firms. Our company is more of an FTE model, but when we need specific / niche skills that we don't always have in house, we consider subcontracting options. If that's something you're interested in (we're US based), I'd be happy to chat (email in profile) and see if there's anything coming up.