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Thank you for sharing your experience and recommendations! Definitely going to check out The Great CEO Within.

How much time would you say you spend on consulting vs. product, per week, and how do you find your clients?

I tried consulting for a little, with the same goal of wanting to work with and learn from lots of different companies while working on my own product on the side, and found myself struggling to dedicate time to my product, with finding clients taking up a lot of my time (outside of working for my clients). Granted I was in very different circumstances than you--not nearly as much as 5-6 years of expenses saved up, I'm also pretty inexperienced, hey I'm young so yolo--but I'm still interested in hearing what's worked for you!

Thank you for sharing where you are at and your struggles. I am having a similar issue going from a one person shop to hiring people. Mainly because I too realize that people are buying me because of my skill set and communication. I don’t want to be hands to the keyboard for the rest of my life though so I’m trying to figure out how to move forward from here. Do you think reading The Great CEO Within would help?

I'm not sure how much reading that book would help in terms of creating a sustainable business model that does not require significant daily work from the founder and also allows you to scale in a reasonably way.

It does help with the operations side of running a business and does give you insight on how some other CEOs might run certain parts of the company (such as marketing, hiring and finding product market fit.)

I've been looking at similar business models outside of software development (such as law firms.) to get a better idea on how this business model could scale.

Long term tho, I do not plan to scale the consulting side of the business, but hope to phase it out since I believe products are probably a better way to scale a business.

I don't think consulting is entirely a bad thing for us tho, I still strongly believe it gives you insights into other companies and allows you to see other companies mistakes every day and that's super useful.

Good luck to you.

You raise an interesting point with your mention of law firms.

As I implied in the article, I've not wanted to scale out consulting far beyond myself; it's a means to an end. But if I did, I think the way I would do it is to try to build a partnership with other consultants like myself in my specific area.

Professional associations such as law firms have all kinds of partnership mechanisms, but a common one is something like: there are four partners, every one of them has a monthly quota of hours to deliver to the firm. For every one of those hours, (let's say) 50% goes to the company and 50% goes to the partner. For every hour beyond the quota, the partner gets to keep, say, 80% and the firm gets 20%. Then the firm's annual profit is distributed among the partners at the end of the year, month, whatever. And although partners are presumed to be able to generate their own business, common resources such as marketing, administration, etc. are pooled and paid from the firm's common funds.

The key issue with a partnership is that it really has to create (ugh, I cringe at a non-ironic use of the term) synergies. Every partner's earnings have to be greater enough in the partnership than they would be on their own to warrant the bother. Otherwise, you end up with the all-too-common best-case scenario of two partners who together double the revenue, but each take half the profits, which makes it a bit of a wash, notwithstanding some small gains in economies of scale through expense sharing.

Great article, it resonated a lot with my experience.

This book is quite good on the standard parts of managing professional firms e.g. accounting and law: https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Professional-Service-David-M...

Technical consulting has significant differences, however. There is a big separation between the sales and requirements side of the business and the solution/execution side.

One of the things that most resonated with me from the book is three kinds of consulting companies: expertise, experience and execution.

Expertise consultancies solve complex problems that require non-standard solutions, e.g. a big merger/acquisition or designing a complex software solution. The boss typically has decades of experience, and the "juniors" have a decade.

Experience consultancies solve semi-custom problems, things that are amenable to process and knowing the answer to common issues in a domain. An example might be setting up a new legal entity for a startup, or building a custom website to handle e-commerce.

Execution companies handle well understood problems at lower cost than it would take to do in house, e.g. monthly book keeping, building WordPress websites for small businesses.

In the book, he talks about a number of standard ways of splitting up profits in a partnership. A lot depends on the goals of the firm based on its stage. So the partners might value individual billable hours, managing staff that are billable, bringing in business, or being the "managing partner" who makes sure that the rent gets paid and the copy machine works.

It's possible that you have a mix of Expertise, Experience and Execution in one firm, but one basic rule is that in order to be a partner, you should not be relying on another partner to make your team work, e.g. bring in sales.

This is one reason that technical consulting firms are different, because being great at technical execution does not mean that you are good at sales and relationship management. In fact, it's negatively correlated, and essentially impossible to hire for. Anyone who can do the job well can run their own consulting company.

Thanks for the book recommendation! It looks interesting.

That said, there seems to be a bottomless opportunity in business writing in offering taxonomies of things. I'm not saying the taxonomy is a bad one in this case, just that there are perils in boxing things into the mental categories someone else has set up for you to sell a book, as a very general principle.

That said, it seems like a reasonable way to break down consulting firms...

The useful part is that each of these has a certain business model, and depends on ability to hire and/or retain people to do it.

My own company is a combination of me doing expertise consulting and the rest being experience consulting, and we don't do execution, as it's a commodity.

Running a McDonalds is different from running a fine French restaurant. The McDonalds likely makes more money, but requires a lot more scale. It's not very satisfying if you are a chef.

Send me an email if you want to share some ideas.

ari@stacksoft.io

I too have found the issue of scaling consulting to be insurmountable, but there are others who have succeeded. One key factor would be to take someone, no matter how junior and start charging for him at least the normal if not senior rate straight away - that way this is profitable from day 1. I was never brazen enough to do it and training people off project for free doesn't generally happen anywhere else so it's a huge disadvantage - start charging from day 1 (or don't hire if you can't).

> no matter how junior and start charging for him at least the normal if not senior rate straight away

Author here. This would simply not fly in my line of business. :-) I've tried. At the end of the day, either your conscience will balk, or the customer will.

Making any product revenue from a side project is a huge accomplishment, so congrats! I still remember that first dollar ;)

One question: why not kill or sell all your side projects except the one making money? Splitting focus between consulting and a product business is hard enough, let alone multiple product businesses.

Well, without knowing whether the products are somehow complementary or derivatives of the same thing, it's very hard for us to make that call.

But instinctively, I agree. Churning out one product as a side project is hard enough; to really execute well, one cannot split focus among multiple products.

This is a great discussion. The initial article is good too.

I have been consulting on my own for about 3 years - though the first was more during a transition out of full time employment. A couple thoughts on what HAS worked for me: -I have been very focused on a specific and limited scope, product/market strategy for smart building/real estate tech firms (mostly startups who do not have their on product mgmt resources). I know folks who have been much more broad in focus and it doesn't seem to work. If you find a good gap in the market, you may find a consistent stream of work with enough flexibility on timelines to balance the days/weeks out so it's not so lumpy. -much of the marketing I do (free newsletter, articles in trade journals) do generate leads but it takes ~6 months for a particular article or effort to generate leads. I'm not sure why this is, but most people who reach out to me for help cite something from months ago as "how they heard about me" -pricing is difficult and the best response I have is that once you get a couple projects that are similar, you can use that average price as your list price - and you will have some confidence that it's a fair price based on the market.

Also, I have thought the easiest move into a product, for me, would be syndicated research. Instead of charging clients for consulting engagements, could I write reports that are of interest and then sell them. A few firms in my space do this, and I think it would be the most organic product I could deploy. I've been brainstorming ways to test this, as I don't really want to spend a long time writing a long report only to find that it does not sell...