Setting up a local consultancy plan

This is going to be an odd post where I’m essentially brainstorming out loud in public, which is about as #BuildInPublic as you can get.

I’ve come around to the idea of starting to build out some consulting offerings, and I think I’m going to take many other people’s advice (from @jasonleow to Simon Hoiberg) and start local. The “macro” plan for this is for it to accelerate the time in which I can get out of the 9-to-5 grind and work on SaaS/consulting full time. It would be nice if I could do it with SaaS right off the bat, but I think the more I can increase my leverage over time the better.

Okay, service offerings! I’m going to start with what I’m good at and what I enjoy, and make my way toward things I don’t enjoy as much but can do and the things I know less about.

• Web scraping, data collection and analytics
• Teaching software development
• Teaching privacy/security best practices
• Website design and development
• SEO

Those top two are my bread and butter. The third is fun and I enjoy it but I don’t know how large my customer base will be for that. Website design/dev and SEO are just there because honestly I know people around here will ask, but I really don’t enjoy it too much honestly.

Alright. Now on to the mile long to-do list.

• Web presence. I’m going to start fairly small here, just a landing page with a contact form. Eventually, I’d like a blog, but I’m going to have to really flesh out what that’s going to look like and how much time I can put into it.
• Marketing strategy. I need to figure out how I’m going to get my name out there, focusing on relative locality. This is going to be pretty key to getting my first couple of clients before word-of-mouth starts kicking in.
• Facebook. Ugh… I really never wanted to get back on that site again, but I suppose I’ll have to to get local contacts easier.
• LinkedIn. @jasonleow and others have made it very clear that LI is slept on, so I really need to up my game there in many regards.
• Marketing print. I need to take the service offerings and transform them into more marketing-friendly print. The complication here is I’ll be pitching to small businesses and very non-technical audiences, so I need to make sure that I write it well enough for it to land in all audiences.
• Contracts. I made the mistake one time in not getting a customer to sign a contract before I started work and got stiffed for a couple hundred dollars… I’m not doing that again. Creating some general contract templates to make drawing up offerings easier will be a necessity.
• Logo/branding. I’ve got the LLC name already registered, I just need to convert it to a logo and do some branding work.
• Business cards. I’ll definitely need some business cards to hand out, and honestly I just love the aesthetics of having one anyways.

There is probably… a lot more. But that’s what I have thus far. Now I just need to start chipping away at that to-do list in my free time this week.