Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

Do you get excited by pitching, doing sales, hustling leads, negotiating deals, and reading contracts yourself? Because this is half the work of being an independent consultant. You're both the biz guy and the tech guy, and if you don't like being the biz guy you're going to HATE being a consultant.

But it's been a hard, disappointing slog at work.

For most people, it can be an even longer, harder slog to find clients.

I put out several applications to other salary positions to have some way to get out, but given my timeline I think the independant route has better potential.

In all likelihood, it will take you far more time to find your first few clients than it will to get a full-time position. Finding clients is a crapshoot, and it takes a lot of time. Even if you do find a client, it usually takes longer to close a consulting deal than to get hired for a job. What are you going to do if you don't find clients in time?

I have what I think is a very solid resume for 6 years of experience, having lead two dev teams in the past three years, but I don't have any sexy tech like RoR or Django, nor any certs for my .NET and MSSQL experience.

What kind of consulting will you do? Without this details, it's difficult to comment on how you might acquire clients.

Bravura really gets to the heart of the matter. A consulting business, or any business, can only survive as long as it has clients. Do you have any? If not, start finding them now, while you're still employed.

When I wanted to quit my job, I told the boss I could only work 30 hours a week for them. I was so valuable to them that they didn't protest at all. I set my schedule as 1pm to 7pm; and then spent the mornings getting my business going. About a year later, I knew I could do it and quit my job.

The other thing that's hard to explain about consulting to people who don't do it is that even when you do have work managing the pipeline of new work is very hard.

You don't always know when the current contract is going to end. (And will they be able to pay for this month?)

So you may have more work than you can handle - but you also have to keep fishing for more work to ensure that you won't have unexpected down time. And that puts you under pressure because you are creating demand you often can't fulfill.

It may be easier if you are Yet Another Generic Common Technology Contractor because you can always trade leads with a pool of friends/colleagues.

For most people, it can be an even longer, harder slog to find clients.

Yeah, I think there's something unique about this current place. I've been in a lot of different work environments, and this one has been the worst.

Sales hustling: I'm willing to learn. I know it's going to be unlike most of the work I've done, but that's actually part of why it excites me--a new challenge. In times past when I've had very close working relationships with my employers' clients, I've enjoyed hashing their needs out, and I think this will also be vital experience for my some-day-business-with-employees.

My primary experience is in building business intelligence apps on ASP.NET with SQL Server. I'm a little weak on UI design (an issue I'm actively working on), but otherwise I'm strong in every other "layer". I have no doubts I could pick up Java again, or any other language, or any other vendor's RDBMS; I'm a hacker by nature. I also have experience with business analysis and writing technical documentation. I am unfortunately very lite on administering things, i.e. the care and tending of a live database or application server.

Your comments on time issues are noted.

In addition to the uncertainty of landing clients, there's the issue of actually getting paid. It may take 3 weeks to a month to land a client, another few weeks to be able to actually start working, a few weeks to send your first invoince but if that client turns out to be a flake with money, you have a lot of time into a loosing deal and you have start over. It aint easy consulting.

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