Ask HN: How do I start being a consultant?

(1) Start a freelance practice.<p>(2) Raise your rates.<p>(3) As you work for clients, keep a sharp eye for opportunities to build "specialty practices". If you get to work on a project involving Mongodb, spend some extra time and effort to get Mongodb under your belt. If you get a project for a law firm, spend some extra time thinking about how to develop applications that deal with contracts or boilerplates or PDF generation or document management.<p>(4) Raise your rates.<p>(5) Start refusing hourly-rate projects. Your new minimum billable increment is a day.<p>(6) Take end-to-end responsibility for the <i>business objectives</i> of whatever you build. This sounds fuzzy, like, "be able to talk in a board room", but it isn't! It's mechanically simple and you can do it immediately: Stop counting hours and days. Stop pushing back when your client changes scope. Your remedy for clients who abuse your flexibility with regards to scope is "stop working with that client". Some of your best clients will be abusive and you won't have that remedy. Oh well! Note: you are now a consultant.<p>(7) Hire one person at a reasonable salary. You are now responsible for their payroll and benefits. If you don't book enough work to pay both your take-home and their salary, you don't eat. In return: they don't get an automatic percentage of all the revenue of the company, nor does their salary automatically scale with your bill rate.<p>(8) You are now "senior" or "principal". Raise your rates.<p>(9) Generalize out from your specialties: Mongodb -&#62; NoSQL -&#62; highly scalable backends. Document management -&#62; secure contract management.<p>(10) Raise your rates.<p>(11) You are now a top-tier consulting group compared to most of the market. Market yourself as such. Also: your rates are too low by probably about 40-60%.<p>Try to get it through your head: people who can simultaneously (a) crank out code (or arrange to have code cranked out) <i>and</i> (b) take responsibility for the business outcome of the problems that code is supposed to solve --- people who can speak both tech and biz --- are exceptionally rare. They shouldn't be; the language of business is mostly just elementary customer service, of the kind taught to entry level clerks at Nordstrom's. But they are, so if you can do that, raise your rates.

There's a guy named Alan Weiss[1], who is widely regarded as an expert (maybe <i>the</i> expert) on consulting. He has written several very popular books, including <i>Million Dollar Consulting</i>[2] and <i>The Consulting Bible</i>[3]. You may find his work useful. However, note that he would probably not classify what you're talking about (if I understand correctly) as "consulting" at all.<p>His take is that consultant is someone who shares their knowledge of process and works strategically with the client's decision makers... not someone who is knee deep in doing the work of implementing a project. If you're talking about writing PHP code, you may be more setting yourself up as a one man staffing agency, not as a consultant. I'd suggest reading Weiss, think hard about what you really want to do, and go from there.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.summitconsulting.com/about-alan/" rel="nofollow">http://www.summitconsulting.com/about-alan/</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Consulting-Alan-Weiss/dp/0071622101" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Consulting-Alan-Weiss/d...</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Bible-Everything-Seven-Figure-Practice/dp/0470928085" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Bible-Everything-Seven-Figu...</a>

To be a consultant, rather than an hourly-rate freelancer, you need two things:<p>- insight<p>- reputation<p>The reputation (from prior work) gets you in the door, and the insight (from your wealth of experience in the field, which you have, right?) is what gives you the right to call it a "practice", and the right to get you the 5- and 6-figure paychecks for each engagement.<p>Insight is more than just experience; you'll have to offer something unique and valuable for each customer that they can't just get from their local recruitment agency for commodity rates.<p>You have to be able to communicate at senior management level, in big picture terms, but also operate at the ground floor and all the way up. You must be able to advise at each level of the organisation, while understanding the nuts and bolts of the guy doing the programming (and quite probably doing it yourself).

How I started: - Called up past employers and let them know what I was up to. Asked if they "needed any help" - Reached out to local startups and asked if they "needed any help" - Trolled craigslist for projects, built POCs quickly, then responded to the ad with a link to the proof of concept.<p>My first three clients were an ex employer, 2 local startups (reaching out to startups), and a real estate company (craigslist)

I think the advice folks are posting here is very good. I'm about a week into the process of incorporating a company and trying to figure out how in the hell I'm going to do this.<p>While not particularly novel advice, the one thing I can advise (and I have to remind myself of this constantly) is to be cognizant of whether your spending too much time focusing on the inconsequential things (which seem psychically easier to deal with) than the important things.<p>In my case, I'm still trying to figure out a plan for getting initial work (which you might imagine is a pretty important thing), but I found myself debating for days about my new logo (which is pretty much guaranteed to never be looked at by anyone for longer than a few seconds at the top of my web page).<p>I've also spent hours figuring out systems for how I'm going to handle invoicing, client management, output delivery, branding and marketing, etc.<p>All of those things are certainly important to do, but I find it's way too easy for me to focus my energy on them, instead of the elephant in the room.<p>Good luck though.

Start building your consulting business or freelance presence on the side while you still have a steady stream of income. For example, by the time I left my full time job, I had:<p>- full time contract work for at least 6 months<p>- my LLC formed (US only, I think)<p>- my site built, setup w/analytics, a blog, Google webmaster tools, etc.<p>- my first set of business cards in hand (may not be that important to some people, but they came in handy for me)<p>- other misc. stuff (spoke to my CPA about taxes, researched sample contracts, looked into software I'd need, etc.)<p>Doing all that while still having income meant that I didn't have to trade billable time for those once I became a consultant. When you're running your own business, you'll always have to invest non-billable time, but those first 3/6/12 months are always the hardest, so do what you can to maximize billable hours and finding more clients or work, w/out overwhelming yourself.

I highly recommend working for free for 1-2 months.<p>I've been in SEO for the last 4 years. I do in-house enterprise stuff now, but I had started a consulting gig for a little while a few years ago. I spent 1 month telling everyone and anyone that I was doing free SEO consulting in exchange for a great testimonial (read: Yelp review). Got 8 or 9 free clients. Two insisted on paying me after the work was done, and the rest wrote me fantastic testimonials and sent me referrals for months. Afterwards, your testimonials and Yelp reviews will be the catalyst for more business in the future. My 2 c's.

Wow, amazing responses! Thank you guys, I've learned a lot from you :-)<p>I have another quesiton that's been bothering me:<p>Let's say I contacted my old company. I know that there are developers there that knows better than me (with regards to programming). Should I still pursue consulting there? What should I do?<p>P.S. Let's say I see the project that's going to be done would fit perfectly well with PHP, it's adequate and saves the company money. Then there are the developers that are .NET programmers and they are pushing that although let's say for the sake of argument, PHP would suffice.

Most services and products out there have free trials.. If the service is good, customers will keep coming back.. You just need to get them through the door first so I agree with the idea of giving couple of hours for free if that can win the deal