31–40 of 97 posts
I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles. I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at lea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs) I think some of the same magic involved in finding consulting clients draws parallels to getting large corporations to consider you for contract work?
How are consultants and contractors different?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs) I think some of the same magic involved in finding consulting clients draws parallels to getting large corporations to consider you for contract work?
How are consultants and contractors different?
Consulting is the practice of engaging a business/org/lob to address a larger, less clear-cut problem. M&A is for M&A Consultants who specializes in acquiring and merging. Out of the merger may arise a unit of work to be "contracted out" in cases where timeline and capability are out of sync.
Can you consult under contract? Sure, but being a contractor doesn't automatically make you a Consultant.
How timely. Currently am frustrated by indy consulting. I have watched several colleagues successfully launch into independent consulting. Honestly, it's a mixed bag. They speak very positively about it, but when I ask more direct questions, I hear about trouble getting paid, Net60 and longer durations between checks, long periods between gigs (7 weeks was what one friend just reported). Every time I attempt to go in…
Depends on the country and the market in that country for contractors / consultants. The UK is pretty much boiling with demand, mainly around London, for software consultants. Hopefully the gov won't kill it with the upcoming IR35. Usually in the UK it would be recruiters that would find indie gigs for you, but you do need to have a skill for it (good mix of more than just a stack) and the agility to learn a client's…
Isn't it already like decided? Almost everyone going into IR35 from April (I think?) 2020?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming this semantic distinction holds, what are the practical consequences? How do you find "consulting" clients? In fact, what is even the shape of a "consulting" engagement in software development, where I am telling the client what to do, instead of doing what I'm told? Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least something about what software needs to be built? Not trying to put up a…
> Do clients hire consultants to build software without knowing at least something about what software needs to be built? Yes? All the time. "I've heard about this thing called machine learning. Come assess how I can use it in my business." "We have a problem where orders are missing their commit dates and we need something built to find those earlier in our procurement process. Maybe our new cloud ERP can help...?"…
Imagine you're selling ERP systems and you have a client who says "we need an ERP system that has features X,Y, and Z" versus "we think we need sometype of system to manage our business"
Which client do you prioritize? Every good sales person in the world will tell you the first one.
The title is way off: he's talking about contractors, not consultants. Short version: Consultants tell the client what to do. Contractors are brought on to do what they're told. The advice in the article is a lot about "do you need someone do to ___ task" or "are you hiring an FTE, and could you do with a contractor instead" and that's contracting, not consulting. It's still valuable advice, but you don't find consul…
My company does both of these (we're in tech), and I can authoritatively tell you that in the overwhelming majority of engagements this is a distinction without a difference. Over the past five years I haven't had a single client who just had me "tell them what to do". Typically, if we're being brought in, the expectation is that we will not only identify what needs to be done to solve the problem, but that we will also do it ourselves.
I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles. I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at lea…
Those things can definitely be part of a strategy and a lot of (but by no means all) successful consultants are known from speaking/blogs/books/etc. But it's also easy to slip into patterns where you're spending a lot of time and at least some amount of money for random generic exposure without any real sales/marketing strategy connected to it.
I went the boutique consultancy route just last week and brought on a couple of people into the mix. I pretty much agree that everybody kind of faces the same question and feelings. To be honest, I might have taken a small leap of faith as I pulled the trigger before securing a client. Though the only reason I felt comfortable with it is that I've been in the space enough to be pretty sure I can land a client in the…
I'm curious how well this scales though. Are the kind of clients you're reaching out to small- to mid-size? I've spent a lot of time working at fairly large consulting agencies and the amount of time and resources that go into just pitching seem daunting to a newcomer.
Depending how you look at it ie. Building networks or just chatting people up can lead to very different outcomes. The above was mostly focused on the 'getting started' part. Though the 200+ setup is successfully run by a team of 7 or 8.
Things change as you scale and the approach that works on smaller mumbers does not work on largers and vice versa.
Feel free to ping me on email or otherwise if you'd like to chat.
He's spot-on with that last part: you only need a few. The same few contacts (4-5) have brought me more work than I can actually do, and I often have to say no. It's pretty hard maintaining a relationship with all of them, though: when you say no, they have to look elsewhere, and that's when the relationship can falter.
Do be careful. Becoming overly dependent on upstream "feeders" is what killed my company. It is a balance. Turning down work is dangerous, and the generally opposite of why you're in business. But giving other firms too much leverage will kill you just as dead as insufficient work. I started getting nervous when one company was over 50% of our income, but there was disagreement about urgency and what exactly to do ab…