Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business
So I&#x27;ve had basically the opposite experience this person has with consulting. The problem with all these retrospective analyses (positive and negative, I concede!) is that they&#x27;re situational. Scaling up a consultancy is both its own skill and also idiosyncratic to the field you&#x27;re trying to work in. Maybe IP telephony is especially hard to consult in! Maybe security is especially easy!<p>So, just some general shotgun-blast responses:<p>* Whether you&#x27;re trying to scale out or just keep a steady income for yourself, if you&#x27;re not specializing, you&#x27;re going to have a bad time. If you&#x27;re trying to sell basic IT services on a piecemeal basis, consulting is going to be a drag (but: if you can reliably deliver IT services for 20-60 person organizations, you&#x27;re I think actually in a pretty good place right now, since a lot of our clients are auditioning firms for just that, and there aren&#x27;t many good ones!).<p>* There&#x27;s a whole spectrum of aptitude and experience to hire in between &quot;entry level&quot; and &quot;fully billable&quot; and part of the basic challenge of running a consultancy is figuring out how to ramp up talent and where on that spectrum to hire people. The basic job of a specialized consultancy is finding sharp people and rapidly conferring on them the tools to get billable work done, and then structuring projects so that everyone cal be billable. The analysis of &quot;you can hire entry level people but then it takes months for them to be billable&quot; is pretty superficial; every serious consultancy has strategies for dealing with that problem (some better than others, but all better than &quot;hire and then wait a year and hope&quot;).<p>* The bit about how scaling consultancies is a matter of creating a big binder of methodology so that an English major can execute your projects is lifted straight from Joel Spolsky, and Spolsky is just as wrong as this person is, at least at the scale consultancies started by HN&#x27;ers (for all I know it&#x27;s actually true at Accenture scale, but it&#x27;s definitely not true at for-hire DBA or security or IT or distributed systems or iOS development scale).<p>* The idea that consulting work will sap your ability to build product is a bit of a head-scratcher, or, at least, the explanation this article gives is. The &quot;reliable&quot; way to do a product&#x2F;consultancy is to use consulting headcount to fund development headcount. Developers aren&#x27;t billable, full stop. When you&#x27;ve reached the point where you can fund 3-4 full time developers, you&#x27;ve run out of &quot;consulting made this hard&quot; excuses. The simpler reality is: building and launching products is hard, and, by a wide margin, most startups (consulting or otherwise) that attempt it fail.