Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm?
I'd rather go entirely opposite.<p>1. Get clients and start working for them. If you don't have more than one clear customer who already wants you, you'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. "Prepare the basement in form of a site with portfolio, our focus, expertise and articles." - this is fluff that can wait, it's a bit useful for marketing but not strictly necessary. You won't get clients from cold sales or random advertising anyway, you'll get them by personal contacts and word of mouth where this won't matter much; and if you won't get clients from personal contacts and word of mouth, then you'll fail anyway and this won'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're necessary but not sufficient for success; there's a good reason why successful consulting businesses usually are started only after a decade or two in the industry as that'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've decided that you want to scale to a larger volume. Before that, you'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'll have to convince customers that you/your company has expert skills and that you can do things that they can't do in-house and a salesperson can't really do that until you have a solid reputation and lots of prior clients.