How to get started as an IT consultant

For the ambitious IT professional, there are a number of ways to take advantage of today’s hot job market. You could patiently climb the ladder at your organization or jump to an attractive opportunity at another company … or you can go into business for yourself as a consultant.

To be a successful consultant, you’ll need excellent technical skills. But knowing networking, security and databases like the back of your hand will only get you so far. You’ll also need a bit of business savvy.

How do you get started? Here, three consultants share how they landed their first clients.

Who do you know?

How did you find your attorney, accountant or real estate professional? It was likely through your network of contacts. People who already know and trust you represent the single most important way to find potential clients. But even if you have hundreds of contacts on Facebook or LinkedIn, you might be unclear where to start. Our advice? Keep it simple. Make a list of past employers, customers and project stakeholders you already know.

Several IT consultants started their careers by working out arrangements with past employers. “My first three clients were former executives or coworkers,” says Ray McKenzie, founder of Red Beach Advisors, which opened for business in 2014. That prior history of trust not only helps you get the job but likely makes a difference in closing the deal quickly as well. “For each of my first three clients the process was between two to four weeks prior to starting the engagement,” he adds.

In other cases, new consultants may negotiate with past employers to start their business. Jonathan Stark, a consultant who helps credit unions with their mobile strategy, says that after leaving a position as vice president in a boutique software firm in 2006, he made a deal with his former employer that allowed him to take one of his big clients with him. “That client engagement was ongoing and gave me enough cash flow to bootstrap my new business,” he says. John Chapin, founder of Capital Technology Services, had a similar experience: “A former employer transitioned 3-4 clients into my care since they were getting out of the software business,” he says.

In addition to past employers, also consider industry and community organizations as networking opportunities. Chapin served as a volunteer at Nashville Software School, a non-profit organization in his community. This volunteer assignment led to volunteer work for Code for Nashville … and also to several clients.  “When someone knows that you’re concerned about the same causes, you’re likely to get a recommendation from them when they hear about work you can perform,” Chapin says.

Beyond your network

To attract new clients outside of your immediate network, you might need to find ways to market your services. You could, for example, turn to advertising using services like Google AdWords, or you could reach out to prospects via e-mail. Marketing consultant Ed Gandia advocates a method called warm email prospecting — sending a customized email to prospective clients based on their situation (e.g., making the most of a new product launch or expansion into a new market). The key to making direct sales techniques work is to target your message to likely prospects, research their needs and be prepared to work the phones (or e-mail) on a daily basis.

If direct sales isn’t for you, there’s another tactic you could try that would take advantage of your expertise and also build up your reputation: content marketing. Many consultants, including Jonathan Stark, attract clients by publishing articles and books, presenting at conferences and creating other materials, such as videos and podcasts. “In my early days, writing books and speaking at conferences were the only things I did to attract clients,” he says. Stark has written several books, including two published with O’Reilly: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Pricing your services

Finding a client who’s interested in doing business with you is an important first step, but to close the deal, you need to price your services right. In fact, that’s an important challenge to navigate as you build your business.

There are several popular pricing options for consulting services, including hourly rates, project fees and value-based fees. Experienced consultants often use the value-based pricing system popularized by management consultant Alan Weiss in his book, Value-Based Fees. As the name implies, this pricing model is all about determining how much your clients value your services. In other cases, consultants may be more comfortable with pricing their services using an hourly rate or project-based rate. While easy to understand, the hourly rate pricing model poses two problems for new consultants: First, while you may assume that the entire 40 or 50 hours you work each week will be billable, that’s unlikely to be the case. Second, your hourly rate may be too low for you to live on once you figure in the cost of taxes, insurance and the like.

As with landing new clients, figuring out how to price your services so that you can earn a living and will take some experimentation and will likely change over time as you become more adept at running your growing consulting business.