A Step-by-Step Guide to Starting Your Own Consulting Firm

📓 30-Day Checklist Included!

Starting your independent consulting company can be terrifying. You may already have a job that pays well and thus you don’t want to leave it.

Or maybe it’s just the fear of not knowing where to start that holds you back.

Well, that’s why I put together this 30-day checklist for those who need a clear set of steps for how they can go from nothing to a consulting business that is ready to start finding clients.

In this article, I will walk through that 30-day checklist and the various areas it focuses on.

Starting Your Business

At some point, you need to make the call and commit to the idea of starting your business. Maybe you’ve helped out a few friends or done some side projects. But eventually, you’ll want to commit to the idea of consulting.

Once you do that, you now need to go from being open to any project to defining what type of projects you want to take on.

"Find a niche, not a nation."

- Seth Godin

For this first part of the checklist, you’ll be taking on tasks required to start your business. Both in terms of the technical tasks you need to do to the ones you’ll need to take on to create the vision of what your consulting business will be.

Here are a few points from the checklist.

• Find Your Why - Before even starting your business, I’d recommend you try to answer two things why do you want to start a consulting business and why would clients hire you?

  Do you offer a unique take or have a special skill or framework you can offer your clients? Are you trying to get away from the 9-5(although you’re starting a business, that won’t happen for a while), etc? Figure out why you’re starting and why clients would want to hire you.

• Finding Your Niche - Once you’ve answered you’re why as well as possibly why a business might hire you. You can now start thinking about finding your niche. What do you offer that is distinct? You don’t have to solve every problem. You can focus specifically on problems and industries and become the “data person for mid-sized healthcare providers” or focus on a specific piece of technology. Now you don’t need to figure out the perfect niche initially, I do recommend you take some time and figure out what clients seem to be asking in the general space you’d like to break into.

• Business Stuff(LLCs, Insurance, etc) - Of course, you’re not going to get around the general business tasks. You’ll at some point need to commit to setting up some form of business corporation and hire an accountant to give some guidance there as well as get business insurance. Some clients may even require you to have a certain amount of coverage.

Building Your Online Presence

30 Day Checklist

You don’t need to be a social media guru to get clients. But I do think that having a website, a well-organized Linkedin, and some social media presence is helpful.

First, your website is kind of your billboard or business card. It tells people what you do. In addition, you can start taking advantage of the blog that generally comes with all website builders whether it's Wix or WordPress.

So here are a few things you should do while building your online presence.

• Pick your website provider and host(Wix, Wordpress, etc)

• Clean up your LinkedIn profile

• Create a LinkedIn and Twitter page for your consulting company

• Also towards the end of the checklist, you’ll write a blog and a few posts to share on your website and socials.

But for now, let’s take a step back and look at your network.

Networking - Share What You’re Doing

When I talked to other consultants, the way they first started getting clients was by reaching out to past co-workers, people they knew, people they met during their extracurricular activities, etc.

So to start this:

1. List out as many people as you can that you know. They don’t have to be people you’ve worked with, but they should be professionals(not college students)

2. List out possible people those individuals know that you might want to get in touch with

3. Email or DM your contacts letting them know about your consulting business, and also it would be worth referencing some of the warm leads they could set up for you

I hope you're doing great! I'm excited to share that I've started my own consulting business, [Your Business Name], specializing in [your area of expertise, e.g., IT solutions, HR strategies].

I'm reaching out because I value our past work together and your insights. If you know of any projects or contacts in your network who might benefit from my services, I’d be grateful for an introduction.

Please feel free to check out my website [insert website link] for more about what I offer. And of course, I’d love to catch up soon – let me know your availability for a quick chat!

Thank you for your support!

[Your Name]

Marketing - Become The Expert

Finally, you only have 30 days. That’s not a lot of time so at this point hopefully you’ve got your website set up, you’ve reached out to your network and you’ve started to understand what projects you might want to take on.

Well, now it’s time to tell people. People that you don’t know and people that might be searching for your skills. You just need to show them you have them.

You can start by creating content answering questions that possible clients might ask and talking about how you’ve solved it. That’s what I have done to get a lot of my clients.

“Million Dollar Consulting Orchestration: if you don’t blow your own horn, there is no music.”

― Alan Weiss

Here is how you can start creating content that your clients want to read.

1. Write out your target persona

2. Write out problems your target persona likely faces and pick three that you'd want to solve

3. Write a list of blog topics that answer your target persona's

4. Start to create a marketing strategy, this should be focused on the pain points you're focusing on.

5. Write the first paragraph for 2-3 of the blogs for practice

6. Pick one of the topics and write an outline for the blog

7. Write the blog and perhaps some LinkedIn posts to go with it.

8. Now share it!

30 Days And Beyond

Now once you complete your first 30 days, you’re not done. Now you’re going to continue to need to figure out where clients will come from. You’ll want to set up vendor partnerships and learn how to deliver value to clients.

But let’s just focus on the next 30 days!

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading, if you want to read some of the prior articles, then read these articles.

• How To Sell Your Data Consulting Services: 7 Tips to Make Sales Easier

• How To Get Clients As A Consultant - Marketing Tips

• How To Kill Your Profits As A Data Analytics Consultant

---

Starting Your Own Consulting Company Today

Looking to start your own data analytics consulting company? Not sure how to attract clients, partner with the best vendors, or choose projects you're passionate about?

I've been there. In my Technical Freelancer Academy, I share how I built a successful data analytics consulting business from the ground up. A business that made it possible for me to quit my data engineering job at Facebook. You can use the code sdgd3 to get 50% off today!

See you there!

---