How do I make the move to consultant?

I have some meta advice, having done a bunch of really fun consulting gigs over the past few years:

* Flexibility is super important to a lot of people. I like to tell clients “one of the best things about hiring a consultant is that you have no long-term obligations to me. You can cancel our contract on a day’s notice if you want, and I won’t be the slightest bit annoyed.” I’ve never had anyone actually do that, but folks always always react positively to that offer and appreciate it.

* Bill by the week, do a one-week minimum, and pair that with the above. You’ll be surprised how often that week turns into six months (or more).

* A lot of full-time folks get very threatened when a consultant arrives on the scene (particularly if you’re a generalist, but even if you’re a specialist). This is just a natural protective instinct. Don’t be put off by this - go out of your way to reassure them you’re there to help, work with them, and help them do their jobs better. The defensiveness will often turn into supportiveness and they can become your biggest champions.

* Think of yourself like a business, not an employee. Make sure you can be independent, go over-and-above on documentation, and communicate like a professional. Don’t get mixed up with company drama or gossip. You’re above the fray (and that’s why you should be paid accordingly.)

"I'm a reliable remote worker but I know that's going to put people off, how to alleviate concerns here?"

Show, Dont' Tell.

Write. Start a Blog. I recently hired someone remote and one of the reasons was their blog (among other reasons). I could go through their posts and see how they think, their perspectives on stuff and skills in writing about it. The best way to market yourself is to distinguish yourself from others as much as possible. I am always amazed to find people who are freelancers/consultants but don't have a good online presence. Yes it is hard and yes it takes time. But that is the point.

So don't print business cards. Well ok print them but that should not be your priority. I run a business and I failed to print business cards so far (too lazy). But I still meet plenty of people online and in person. Start writing about whatever you know. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to a scientific paper. Just write.

You mentioned sysadmin, cloud stuff, migration etc. Do you know how critical this stuff is for any business ? If you kick ass on this stuff, you already are ahead. But Show, don't tell. And no, there is no easy way. No one cares how good you are because no one knows.

EDIT: I forgot to add that I also recently hired another short term consultant for a gig. This will make them a few thousand bucks and I found them online through their website/blog AND they wrote an e-book on the subject. Easy win for that consultant since I emailed him saying "take my money".

Here is something nobody mentions that seems to work. Do assessments. You charge $2k for a 2-3 days assessment. If you have relevant experience this is a very cheap and appealing offer to a company looking to improve xyz practice. During the assessment talk to the people making decisions, try to go from one assessment to a monthly freelancing gig. Personally I don’t like charging hourly or daily. Please note this is my personal experience and my personal experience in consulting is still very new. I also want to do more stuff on cloud, thousands of companies are moving to the cloud so it could be a good opportunity.

Tptacek

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

(1) Start a freelance practice.

(2) Raise your rates.

(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.

(4) Raise your rates.

(5) Start refusing hourly-rate projects. Your new minimum billable increment is a day.

(6) Take end-to-end responsibility for the business objectives 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.

(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.

(8) You are now "senior" or "principal". Raise your rates.

(9) Generalize out from your specialties: Mongodb -> NoSQL -> highly scalable backends. Document management -> secure contract management.

(10) Raise your rates.

(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%. Try to get it through your head: people who can simultaneously (a) crank out code (or arrange to have code cranked out) and (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.

I have a few friends that moved to that role and basically it is like creating a personal brand.

Start sharing knowledge on your personal website, blog, linkedin, twitter and other social media and also make sure to make it clear that you are open for conversation and could help other people/businesses. Attend local events and conferences, even become a speaker. Talk to a lot of people, see what problems they have and discuss how you could help. Get engaged with them, give an advice or do some small work for free. This would give you better impression of the project and the people that you would be working with and then tell them that you would be happy to consult them and offer them your rates.

When you have completed a project, ask if you could use them for future reference. On your blog/twitter write about your experience with this project and how you helped that company (without sharing any sensitive or business critical information) - this will show future clients that you are trustworthy. Rinse and repeat.

I'll give you a much simpler answer than I've seen so far, and it was given to me when I posed the same question. The advice proved to be some of the best I've ever received.

---- Learn how to sell ----

Consulting is an interesting ballgame because you might be the customer support and technical resource - but first you're the salesman.

I made the switch about 9 years ago and the first year was brutal. Alot of the advice here is spot on but it reaches past the point that you landed a customer at a project price that you can endure for some period of time.

A book that helped me with this a great deal was "You can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar" by Sandler

Okay, assuming you are smart, skilled, work hard, lucky, organized etc this is the one piece of strategic advice that will deliver the most value if you start a consulting practice:

Define your niche as narrowly as possible.

I know it sounds counterintuitive but it works wonders. You can read crossing the chasm or just try it. You’re not a tech consultant, you’re not a crypto consultant, you’re not even a bitcoin consultant, you might be something like the best person to document the ICO process for the investment community in Europe.

Because there is a lot of competition for the former but you should basically own your market.

One way to make the most of your country of residence is to exploit the timezone difference as a positive. Look for companies that have 24/7 operations and need to have someone available for troubleshooting when their main team are asleep.

Two things that worked for me are firstly having a technical blog, which shows off not only the skill set you have, but also that you can communicate well. It also shows that you have the enthusiasm and curiosity to go beyond the day-to-day work of cranking out code.

Then secondly, go through agencies to find your initial contracts. Many companies in big cities will accept remote employees if they can find good ones, but it's hard to find those companies if you are not local. The agency essentially does that for you in exchange for a cut of your day rate. Also, they usually (in London at least) pay weekly so you don't have the big financial dry spell before your first invoice is paid. Once you have a bit of cash built up, you can go direct to companies as an independent.

I have no advice, just a anecdata: Me and people I know got into consulting, because we were interested in certain technologies; really interested, researched all stuff, tried to answer all questions on those matters, engage with people online, organizing events.

And all of the sudden, people come to you with business cases, questions and consulting gigs. I see consulting for money an extension of something, that you are already passionate about (I mean professionally passionate, you don't have to pour your identity into it).

The idea is not that hard, it's just that you have to have enough energy and sitzfleisch to see these things through.

Here’s what my first year of consulting was like, with tips I learned along the way: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...

Don’t bother with social media and business cards. Figure out where your potential clients get their information, and go there. “Fish where the fish are.”

Printing business cards and going on social media are the last activities, not the first. The first should be finding someone who respects your work to hire you. If you can’t do that, all the business cards and social media in the world won’t help. After you have a first client, then build your brand.

Don't try to build a brand name if you're aiming to remain a one-person shop. Your name should be the brand. Having to push ACME Corp. pretty much doubles the required branding efforts, and potential clients / partners might be put off by the unnecessary front.

Try subcontracting for an existing consultancy. Local meetups often have consultancies with excess demand to fill.

It's all about leads. Gigs sometimes end abruptly and you need a backlog. Find some clients on up work and try to get them off the site (be cool about it, it's a violation of up works tos). Also a lot of companies like local. Reach out to local big companies and send them a one pager on your skills. There is a huge demand for your work, it's just really hard to find.

Lack of programming skills is certainly an issue for you. I recommend remediating that, little by little. You don't need to join a bootcamp and land a developer job in 3 months (though why not?) but a little coding here and there can't hurt!

A lot of companies would like to employ open source technologies, but lack the manpower to setup and maintain that software. There is a lot of "enterprise ready"-ish projects out there like Nextcloud, Mediawiki, Keycloak etc, which can replace much more expensive and vendor-locked solutions. Maybe that is right up your alley?

You say you are living in a non-english native country. If that country generally has lower living-expenses and salaries, maybe you can use that to your advantage. With connections both to your local community and a higher-paying market you could start an outsourcing business and in the process help local developers. Or maybe there are alreay outsourcing firms in your area which might pay reasonably well?

I did that move a decade ago, but I think my advice is still valid. If you're looking for contracts lasting at least few months rather than short jobs of few weeks I recommend to talk to some recruiters. Before you do talk to them make up your mind what daily rate you would like to get depending on the length of the contract. Personally, my rates on anything shorter than 3 months are double the daily rate I ask for in a 6-12 month contract.

Also, don't let yourself be convinced by the recruiter to take a permanent job if they don't find you any good contract for a while. The moment you show any willingness to even consider a permanent job they stop looking for contract gigs for you and focus on finding you a permanent role. I have no idea why recruiters prefer placing FTE's, but I observed that many times with my colleagues.

I'm going to give another perspective simply because it's not not listed here, though it may be unpopular.

Big consulting firms have global presence. @pards mentions a few good ones but would like to add Booz Allen to the list as well. It's a boon to the firm to hire local, but western talent. Usually they have to pay someone 15-20k to move out there plus a raise and lots of incentives.

Although many are suggesting 1099/subcontract work, I think that in some cases you can absolutely get a better deal as a full time employee. Depending on your level, you won't need to sign a non-compete this way or anything like that. When you think it's time to jump out you can transition as a subk working for your same clients and team potentially if you maintain the relationship.

Out of curiosity how would your day to day work look like? There's an interesting article that explains why "freelance developers" (or devops or whatever) are not actual consultants because they are paid to do something, not to know something (https://daedtech.com/software-consulting/). I would also like to reach a level where I get paid to share my expertise, given a specific context, without actually building the solution but, like somebody already said, seems way harder than building and marketing your own products until something sticks.

I've been consulting since 1995, and have been co-hosting the Freelancers Show podcast (https://devchat.tv/freelancers/) for about 5 years now. If I could distill all of the advice I've given (and received) over those years, it would come down to a few things:

(1) Consulting means running a business. This requires a different set of skills, and often different thinking, than you have as a developer. You'll have to learn budgeting and marketing, among other things. Learn these skills, and realize that for as long as you consult, you'll need to improve at them.

(2) There are many different types of consulting. I personally do Python training, and love it. But many consultants do what's sometimes called "staff augmentation," working as a contractor on gigs that can last one day to one year. Staff augmentation is the way that most people start off, and it's not inherently bad -- but you can make far more money, and have more influence and satisfaction, by providing insights and value from your experience and knowledge. And yes, this often means that you can make more money diagnosing problems and architecting solutions than actually developing the software that solves the problem. Also, the higher the level at which you're working at a company, the more you can make; helping a team leader is better than helping a programmer, but helping a VP is better than a team leader, and helping the CEO is better yet, still.

(3) Don't forget to budget, and to put money away for a rainy day and for retirement. You should probably have a runway of 6-8 months before starting to freelance, just because it takes time to find clients.

(4) Specialize. You want to be the big fish in a small pond, rather than the reverse. There are lots of Python consultants out there. But there are many fewer who teach courses, fewer yet who do it full time, and and even fewer who talk about themselves nonstop as trainers. So companies call me, because the problem that they have -- employees who don't know Python -- is one that they instantly understand I can solve. Specializing means that most people will ignore you, because you don't solve their problems. But for those whose problems you can solve, you'll fit perfectly. Philip Morgan has a great book and podcast on this topic.

(5) Get your name out: Write a newsletter, blog, speak at meetups and conferences, and let people know (nonstop!) who you are, and what you do. It'll take time -- in my case, it took years -- but having such a constant presence, online and off, will lead people to remember you and ask you for help.

(6) Think about how you want to bill. Many do hourly, but it's better to do daily, even better to do weekly, and better yet to do value-based pricing, in which you charge according to the value that the client is getting. Jonathan Stark writes a lot about this. You'll likely experiment a bit with billing tactics.

(7) You'll have bad clients. Companies will be mean to you. They'll stiff you. They'll say it's your fault. This is all rather unpleasant; overall, I've only had a handful of such clients, but they stick out in my mind. Learning to say "no" to clients, and to have the right gut feeling about them, takes... well, the length of a career.

(8) If you play your cards right, you'll make more money than your salaried counterparts, without too much less stability. Moreover, you'll be able to set your own schedule. When things work well, they work really well, and gives you a sense of independence and fulfillment that wouldn't be possible in a full-time "real" job. The thought that I've paid off my mortgage, paid for family vacations, and still have savings... well, I kinda marvel at it, even now. But if I can do it, then so can you.

(9) Finally: Consulting isn't for everyone. You might decide that it's too hard, or that it doesn't suit your personality, or that you haven't found the right niche. That's totally OK. If you want to go half-way, you can work as a consultant for an outsourcing agency, which doesn't pay as much but gives you the variety and flexibility of consulting. But if you end up hating freelancing, and going back to a "real" job.... that's totally normal and reasonable, and you shouldn't feel like a failure if that happens.

Be sure to read Brennan Dunn's "Double Your Freelancing" stuff (https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/) and Patrick McKenzie's extensive and inspirational writings (https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/).

Best of luck!

If you're a cryptocurrency expert you really should look into joining TopTal: https://www.toptal.com/#hire-just-bright-hackers-now - they're really looking for them a lot.

Once you're in as a crypto expert you can apply for any type of remote job, not just crypto. I've been applying to Elixir jobs for example, because I really like that stack and wanted to grow in it while I came in as an iOS developer. Just make sure you list all of your other skills as well in your resumé (and don't lie about it, please).

Disclaimer: the link has a kickback for me. Just go to toptal.com without all of the hashtag stuff if you don't like that idea. I have been working for years for them and the amount of work, the immediate trust you get from clients and the reduction of headaches (just every two weeks a payment without billing and begging) makes it worth it.

First, pick a very specific niche that you know has demand, ideally by asking potential customers and then positioning yourself in that niche.

You say "sysadmin stuff, troubleshooting and cloud," but clients want to know specific platforms you know well, software you've implemented and types of problems you can solve.

Make sure you are targeting a market where they are interested in "dating not marriage." Many places will not outsource their sysadmin and try to hire you full time instead of as a consultant.

Finally, this comes from my experience running Tail Risk (www.tailrisk.com) a cybersecurity services firm. We have excess project work, tools, templates and playbooks we would like to share with independent (security) consultants. Is that something that interests anybody on this thread? If so, please reach out.

*edited for typo

This conversation seems super interesting & super valuable to a lot of people aspiring to roles like this... or also just junior level folks like myself looking for some insight into how more experienced programmers operate.

Why didn't I see this thread (with over 300 pts) pass through the front page at some point? Maybe I just missed it?

As someone who spent nearly 20 years doing sysadmin consulting: The first rule to becoming a consultant is: Don't do it.

Largely I think it boils down to: Most places consider operations work a "cost center" and the nature of cost centers (as opposed to profit centers) is that they always want to reduce them.

I have never worked harder, for less money, than when I was doing sysadmin consulting.

Come to terms with why you want to do consulting in the first place. What do you want to get out of it?

That said: First thing is you want to get your ducks in a row: Figure out accounting and billing, get a Tax-ID, figure out your company structure (do you incorporate, sole proprietor, etc?), and figure out google adwords. Also figure out local meet-ups where people who need you might go.

Try this: https://jonathanstark.com

Gerald Weinberg's book The Secrets of Consulting might be worth your having a look.

Make the move to consultant?

I can't say how things are done nowadays, but the traditional way has been to get fired...