Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm?
I&#x27;d rather go entirely opposite.<p>1. Get clients and start working for them. If you don&#x27;t have more than one clear customer who already wants you, you&#x27;re not ready for anything further in this list.<p>2. Incorporate and handle the core legal and financial stuff (only when #1 is solidly working!)<p>3. Setup the business processes and workflow;<p>4. Start aggressively looking for more projects - not online, though. The projects available there are not the projects you want.<p>5. &quot;Prepare the basement in form of a site with portfolio, our focus, expertise and articles.&quot; - this is fluff that can wait, it&#x27;s a bit useful for marketing but not strictly necessary. You won&#x27;t get clients from cold sales or random advertising anyway, you&#x27;ll get them by personal contacts and word of mouth where this won&#x27;t matter much; and if you won&#x27;t get clients from personal contacts and word of mouth, then you&#x27;ll fail anyway and this won&#x27;t help you. The connections and reputation to get offline clients is your primary competency as a consulting team, so work hard on that. The technical skills of your team are important but clearly in the second place, they&#x27;re necessary but not sufficient for success; there&#x27;s a good reason why successful consulting businesses usually are started only after a decade or two in the industry as that&#x27;s one of the few ways how a new company can get the required reputation to get started on decent contracts.<p>6. Hire a salesperson to look for projects when your existing projects can cover multiple full-time developers, i.e. when your business is working and you&#x27;ve decided that you want to scale to a larger volume. Before that, you&#x27;ll have to do the sales yourself, as your own personal reputation and expertise will be the main reason why others hire your company; you&#x27;ll have to convince customers that you&#x2F;your company has expert skills and that you can do things that they can&#x27;t do in-house and a salesperson can&#x27;t really do that until you have a solid reputation and lots of prior clients.