How to Find Consulting Clients

For what its worth I can talk more about how I do it. I tried to start a SaaS company, realized my CAC was out of control and started taking on consulting clients as a way to fund the SaaS and pay my bills.<p>We&#x27;ve been doing the consulting portion for 3 months now and are on pace to hit 10k (mostly mrr) this month.<p>I don&#x27;t believe there is any super special process. I figured this out through months of failing and piecing things together.<p>You should make content to establish yourself as an expert. I did for recruiting. Over the course of 6 months I went from some random person who knew nothing to an authority in the space.<p>By doing that, I get invited to speak and train teams across the US. Our business is pretty simple. We make content, which helps our lead gen efforts be more effective because people know who we are. Through that, we shoot for 20 meetings booked a month.<p>We try to close 5% of the opportunities we generate since we aren&#x27;t really sales people.<p>And then once clients are closed we work like hell to fulfill what we told them we were going to do!<p>There really isn&#x27;t a magic sauce. Its just about the volume needed for sales (I struggled with this for awhile as an engineer).

I&#x27;ve written quite a bit about this topic (www.iheavy.com)<p>Yes getting &quot;out of the building&quot; is important, and going out &amp; meeting people is key. All the time. Also don&#x27;t hard sell people. Instead introduce one person to another person. At first you are simply giving your connections. But soon people see you as a go-to person, and will bring things to you. Also people don&#x27;t forget gifts of introductions &amp; business you bring.<p>Another thing. Don&#x27;t go to &quot;peer&quot; events with other engineers. These events are useful to build your knowledge, but not work building your business. Stronger leads come from business owners, managers &amp; CTOs. Start going to events outside your subject area of expertise. Go to pitch events, vc events, startup events, entrepreneur events.<p>You will be surprised how valuable you will be in a non-tech business event. This will also teach you to communicate better with non-tech folks. And share what you know. Also ask people, &quot;what events do you recommend?&quot; Then go to those events. And so on!

I&#x27;ve been doing software consulting for startups for ~10 years.<p>My best generic advice is to try to put yourself in the mind of your perfect client&#x2F;customer.<p>It can be easy to forget this, but they&#x27;re just as desperate to find help as you might be trying to find work. Think about where they might go—online or offline—to find help, and go there. Rinse and repeat. You may not even meet your actual client this way, but may meet someone who knows someone. That&#x27;s just about nearly as good.<p>Once you have a few stable clients, that&#x27;s where a good network comes into play. Do good work, be nice, and tell people what you do, and the work will keep coming in (and likely in amounts greater than you can handle).

Pretty much agreed with blogging part and niche as fellow HN&#x27;ers mentioned below.<p>I (re)started my tech blog after several years and made it more active and discussed things which were kind of like a &quot;niche&quot; that is web scraping and automation. I wrote posts how things are done and put code on Github. At one side I was building my Github and on other hand my SEO optimized posts attracted Google and eventually developers and..site&#x2F;business owners too that helped me to get contractual work.<p>The biggest issue with us, techies, is that we don&#x27;t know how to sell ourselves. Blogging could be pretty effective to get consulting work.

Another aspect I find useful is to think about how to position yourself. Do you advertise yourself as a technology expert or do you describe what you do in common language? e.g. &quot;We build website with angular&quot; vs &quot;We build website for jewellery brand&quot; is very likely to influence what kind of client you will get

This feels very derivative of an article (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gkogan.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-leads&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gkogan.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...</a>) that I’ve seen reposted a couple times.

Run a meetup group. There are&#x2F;were 2 guys who ran the Ruby on Rails meetup group in Houston, and were constantly being asked by companies who were trying to look for RoR devs to hire but would often just ask them to do short-term work. I think their abandoning the group now....but someone should snatch up the opportunity.

Yes, from jobs, from luck, from university, from parents people actually can have so many contacts that they don&#x27;t have to worry about finding clients. That&#x27;s a core prerequisit for consulting. If you don&#x27;t have that, your best approach is working for the biggest company that will take you 5+ years while trying to spend a lot of time with customers and partner companies.

I wrote a blog post about this once, from the perspective of a freelance writer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sonyaellenmann.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;find-clients-freelancer.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sonyaellenmann.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;find-clients-freelanc...</a><p>Your personal network is the most important thing, in my experience.

As someone who is just starting consulting, after 10+ years of development and a few product experiments, I thank you for sharing this article!

TL;DR: it’s one of those sites that pretends to give you useful information but is actually just an email address harvester.<p>Don’t bother.