On 5/18/07, Christian Seberino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, May 18, 2007 11:09 am, Bob La Quey wrote: > For me consulting has been chicken and feathers. Sometimes > fat and sometimes lean. The main problem I have had is that > I needed to spend a lot of time and energy looking for gigs. How many down weeks can one afford? Let's face it, not every type of software specialty needs a ton of people. That was my reason for this post....the need to be in a *hot* field makes all other issues shrink to insignificance.
Doing it the way I did it I figured I needed at least one year of down. That is a sizable nut. Some might manage to get it down to three months. My approach was to study a company. Look at their products and services, then to develop a short proposal (unsolicited) for some new development (I had to be interested in it myself.) Then I would hit them with it cold. Often it would turn out they had other problems so a dialog was started. That dialog might result in a job that I wanted. Or it might be something I was not interested in. I would pass those on to friends. I can do these microproposals pretty easily since I have lots of ridiculous ideas. Maybe on out of ten led to something. You can also follow up the proposal by asking, "What do you need help with?" Companies always need intelligent people to help them with existing problems. A lot of work also came from people I knew. Just the old boy network I suppose. There are a lot of ways to do this. I knew a fellow, Fred Wolf, who was a physics prof back in the 70's. He wanted to travel the world. So Fred sent letters to physics departments at universities in each of the countries he wanted to visit. He wrote something like, "I will be near your university next June. I am doing research in 'esoteric physics topic.' I would like to give a seminar. Would you invite me?" Mostly the universities responded with invitations. Fred the took the invitations to some DOD research group (I think it was the Naval Research Laboratories) and said, "I have invitations to talk about 'esoteric physics topic' at all of these places. Please give me a research and travel grant so I can talk with my colleagues." Fred got money for his world tour. So a lot of consulting is about promotion. What do you really want to do? Who would it help? You need to think about it entrepreneurially. Another issue is whether or not you are willing or able to travel. If you are a single parent that introduces anther set of nontrivial constraints.
> So I decided to start another business, > based on delivering services with technology as a basis. > That is going well and at least so far is far more satisfying > on every dimension than the consulting had become. How do you find business?
I have about 50 ideas before breakfast. Most of them are bad ideas. I have developed a list of questions that I use to filter the ideas before I invest any time or energy in them. One out of every 1000 ideas goes through the filters. I invest time, money and energy in that idea. I ignore the others.
How do you advertise and market your services?
An idea must be relatively easy to advertise and market or it does not make it through my filters. Just one approach, BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
