Do you catch yourself from time to time day dreaming about being your own boss? While it's probably not quite as care-free and leisurely as you envision, we are living proof that it's within reach. We launched Go Between in the summer of 2021, and while we had a clear and compelling vision of where we wanted this venture to lead (check out the Hello World post for more on this), it was far from assured that we would succeed. In this three-part series, we'll share some of the lessons we've learned throughout this journey starting with a few tips that proved beneficial as we got our business up and running.

Test the Waters

It should come as no surprise that your success in consulting will be largely determined by your professional skills and your ability to find companies who are both willing and able to leverage those skills. This is true both if you are starting as a freelancer or if you have a couple of trusted partners embarking on this journey alongside you. While these two key drivers of success are easy to identify, they turn out to be quite hard to confidently assess prior to getting started. Are companies looking for consultants with your skills? Can you find these companies and convince them to pay for your services?

In most software related fields, you don't have to "take the plunge" in an all-or-nothing manner to answer these questions. Finding projects on public platforms, like Upwork and Freelancer.com, or reaching out to a couple of people in your direct network, can allow you land a few initial projects before you have to decide whether to take this on as a full-time role.

Mindset Matters

If your main focus is on "selling your time", this attitude will be apparent in all of your interactions and in the artifacts you produce. It's far more beneficial to approach each engagement with a partnership mindset, identifying problems that you are well suited to solve and working collaboratively with your client to produce the best solution for their specific problem. This not only improves the quality of your work but also builds much stronger relationships with your clients, not to mention that you will have a ton more fun in the process.

Long-Term Career Goals

If your vision of success is managing a large team at a Fortune 500 company one day, consulting as an individual or as a small team is likely not the most effective path to get you there. Instead of developing management and leadership skills as you gain responsibility for larger and larger teams, this role will provide opportunities to build deep expertise in your craft and gain experience working across a wide range of teams, organizations, and industries. So if you aspire to be the go-to person when your client has a really challenging problem, has a project that's crucial to complete on time, or needs trustworthy, external advice, then this role could be a great fit and offer you tons of satisfaction for years to come.

Part-Time vs Full-Time Engagements

While your early projects may naturally be part-time engagements, as you test the waters while maintaining a full-time role, eventually you’ll land an opportunity that could consume all of your and/or your team's available time. At this point you'll face a key decision about how you want to run your business. Do you want to maintain multiple, concurrent part-time engagements at all times? Or do you want to devote all of your attention to a single team/project at any given time? It is particularly challenging to transition between these two modes of operation, making it something worth considering up front.

A few of the key benefits in working part-time across multiple projects are:

• Being able to gradually build expertise in a new area
• Avoiding periods of complete downtime between projects
• Developing and maintaining active relationships with multiple clients

On the other hand, focusing on a single project allows you to:

• Avoid the need for rapid context switching between projects
• Devote your time and attention fully to a single client
• Integrate more cleanly with an existing team of full-time employees working on the project

There is no strict right or wrong answer to this question, but it is crucial to be mindful of the tradeoffs as you embark in either direction.

To Grow or Not To Grow

Is the strategy for your business to stay small, providing increasingly higher value services to your clients? Or are you aiming to grow by expanding your team over time as you attract new clients, while retaining your existing engagements? While both of these approaches can produce a great deal of success and satisfaction, they require starkly different skills from their founding members.

Strategically small consulting teams must be very thoughtful about where they choose to spend their time, turning away projects that are not the best fit for their skills or interests. Growth-oriented consulting teams on the other hand place a greater emphasis on sales and marketing activities in order to build and maintain a consistent funnel of new clients. These teams will also need an effective recruitment pipeline to attract talented new team members, either as subcontractors or as employees, who will deliver high quality results for the business' growing portfolio of projects.

Are there other key decisions or aspects of freelance or small team consulting that seem concerning or important to consider up front? Get in touch with us at hello@gobetweenlab.com and let us know. We'd be happy to share our insight and feedback. If this still sounds like an exciting adventure, keep an eye out in a couple of weeks for the next post in this series where we will share more thoughts on some of the challenges you'll face as you establish your consulting business.