How to Find Consulting Clients

The reasons its pays so well are several:

1) Most CRMs are initally setup by non-technical users and suffer from a litany of performance issues stemming from bad architectural decisions (i.e. lets do all our analytics in Salesforce Apex (java-like) code instead of a mainstream ETL solution).

2) The process of customizing a CRM is the epitomy of enterprise development, there is a severe lack of standardization and many examples of close but not quite: Salesforces SOQL is kind of like normal SQL but with lots of weird quirks, Salesforce lignteningforce components are like some front-end frameworks but not quite and with lots of weird quirks.

3) Most development knowledge is tribal, meaning you learn Salesforce by going through the trenches and then that knowledge lives or dies by you and your team. It's difficult to learn and train for legacy development (training docs are often for the ideal cases which rarely exist in the wild) thus you get to charge whatever you want. Often the really tough questions can only be solved by wading through the customer support muck (if your licensing allows it) until you get to denvercoder9.

4) Every few years the Sales reps of the CRM company shove new development techniques and methodologies at their clients which can mean a large refactoring or migration is needed.

I try to be as honest and forthcoming with each client and I've basically hit a cap now in being able to add any new ones and deliver the experience I want to each client. Scaling is the most difficult part for me right now since all my clients are quite varied. Some of them are web apps, other mobile apps and others just pure cybersecurity. They're so vastly different from each other that it's a bit difficult to hire someone who can handle the diverse amount of work. Also, I think for the amount of work I do, I should probably have much bigger retainers, so some clients are $1,250 / month, but jesus is that hard. It should probably be at least $5,000 /month.

For me tho, I've learned so much about business and my technical skills have skyrocketed. I honestly feel like I can tackle any problem in the world and it's a powerful feeling. I make decisions based on the problem its self and have no loyalty really to a specific technology. I understand why a client may want to use WordPress and why a client may want to use Kubernetes. Some clients want to just do servers using Linux and that's okay. I've learned that more basic technology (like bash) can be hugely beneficial to trying to write your own solution. When you're under time constraints, you start to have some pretty creative solutions, and not the creative where it breaks later, the creative where it does exactly what it needs to do, but it's done in 1 hour instead of 1 month.

The best advice I could give is to basically be brutally honest with each client, do the best work that you can and always reply in a timely manner, regardless of what's happening in your life. So many consulting companies are slow to reply, or don't really care about their clients on a personal level that clients will really love you if you spend time thinking about their business on a personal level, being responsive and just being honest when you're overloaded in work.

It is a stressful business tho and I'm in the alpha stages of a product I'm working on based on the problems I've seen over the years. It'll be interesting to move from consulting to a SaaS product. The transition being the consulting provides the funding to be able to work on the SaaS and then hopefully the recurring revenue outpaces consulting eventually and I live a less stressful life!

Uh, that's literally what my clients hire me to do. I don't do any of the work for them - I analyze the current situation, and give them a checklist of what to do in order to solve their problems. I don't do the work.

Yes, there are advice-only consultants and clients looking for that, but "consulting" is a bucket of work that encompasses a lot of different things. Trying to force a distinction is kind of elitist and not really in line with reality.

Source: been consulting for the last 12 years with firms of several sizes and focuses.