I'm struggling with how to market myself. I'd like to take what I do as a full time employee and pivot into doing it as an independent consultant. Yet have been struggling to find enough side income to support making that jump full time, because I can't find an "elevator pitch" that articulates what I do and what value I provide. The vast majority of side gigs I've gotten have come from previous bosses who have firsthand experience working with me, but the work is too sporadic to rely on.
In case anyone here has any advice in how I can position myself: I'm a generalist that specializes in getting shit done. Whether that's strategy/advisory support, execution of exploratory initiatives until they show enough ROI for a full time hire, or filling skill gaps that are too sporadic to justify an FTE. I've worked directly under CMOs, CEOs, COOs, CTOs, business owners, as well as client-facing agency work. And in essentially all cases, have been the guy you go to when you don't know who to go to. I generally "seed" efforts, working end to end until it scales to the point of supporting specialists. I've been a one-person data/analytics team (fully owned from maintaining the databases to coding the ETL to writing SQL queries that support the analytics/dashboards for the business) that I've scaled to an entire operations and decision support department. I've managed advertising campaigns and created an entire conversion rate optimization infrastructure to support getting the most out of my campaigns. I've also worked with technical teams to adjust development processes so that they incorporate best practices that drastically improve the ease of marketing/analytics efforts. And most of all, I end up getting pulled into meetings to resolve confusion between business teams and technical teams.
Ideally, I'd like to provide those same type of "catch all" services as a consultant. For a monthly retainer, I can fill whatever strategy or tactical level gap you have. If you're a technical person/team struggling with sales or marketing, I can provide that guidance along with initial implementation/execution to prove it out. For business people/teams, I can either provide technical points of view to ease communication with your tech team, or provide actual execution services if needed.