[glimcat]

Steps to being a consultant:

1. Decide to call yourself a consultant.

2. Make it stick by doing the job.

The "something" can be quite a lot of things, while "good enough" is more or less driven by "it would take one of our senior staff at least few weeks to get up to speed with it."

(For a more in-depth walkthrough, go read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615)

[chc]

Ten thousand guides have been written to becoming a freelancer or consultant, and all contain the same variety of Underwear Gnomes planning.

1. Decide to call yourself a consultant.

2. ????

3. Keep on doing step 2 and raise your rates.

It's the part where you find decent paying clients that is most people's stumbling block, and yet that part is always elided. Really, how many times have you heard someone say, "I have so many great consulting prospects, but I don't know how to call myself a consultant and I can't figure out how to write quotes based on a figure of $1000 per day"?

[glimcat]

Okay, here's how you find clients.

1. Know some narrow segment of businesses well enough to have an idea what problems they're facing and how it translates to dollars, or do enough research to learn same.

2. Track down people matching that segment and pitch them. Use your existing connections if you have them, make connections or go cold if you don't. You will spend enormous effort making new connections either way, so having connections to start with isn't the long-term advantage it might seem.

Note: this requires sales skills. If that's a problem, consulting may not be for you - at least, not as an independent. One of the key selling points of an agency is having the principals deal with much of the lead generation, sales, reputation building, and so forth.

But seriously, if you want to start, start. Stop worrying that you'll be bad at it at first - because you will be, no longer how long you worry about it. And at the same time, they're hiring you because they expect to get value from it.

Go out, make a fool of yourself in front of a few prospective clients, learn stuff in so doing, then do a better job pitching the next few.

If you're half decent at public speaking, see posts by patio11 & bdunn re: throwing events related to the topic you consult on. Being the person in the front of the room at a professional event automatically positions you as an authority figure. If you're terrible at public speaking, this still mostly works if you run the event but invite other people to give the actual talks.