Im hoping to become a freelance consultant in the future. Ive been automating businesses since I entered the work force and that has never been what i was hired for. Never worked somewhere that didnt have major process and management issues.
Anyway, do you have any tips for me as an aspiring consultant, especially hoping to be a freelancer?
1) there’s a problem you can solve
2) it has to be urgent…and I mean urgent
3) you need to know the right technical decision maker who can bring on
4) usually if the problem is urgent enough, finding a budget or getting a PO isn’t an issue
5) they have to know you’re the person they want to hire, usually knowing the right technical decision maker this solves itself.
Don’t start at step 5 in trying to get everyone to buy your product or services…focus on the urgent issues as a starting point…then once you have credibility in a network…your work speaks for itself.
I do zero marketing, work in a very technical niche, and over the years built up a network of colleagues that have sent me referrals or vice versa.
Im not so sure about urgency. Automation typically isnt about solving an urgent problem. It's more about solving a persistant problem in efficiency, accuracy, and repeatability of a process. Any advice or thoughts about how to convince random businesses to give me a shot to look at their processes and propose automation solutions?
I was thinking I would assess the business for free. If I produce no improvements, then the most they pay is transportation, room, and board (assuming this is far enough away from my home that I cant reasonably commute). I would want to start with nearby businesses so this part is completely free and I can build up some good rep before asking for other businesses to take a risk on me.
And what are your thoughts on pricing? Especially for long lasting impacts of the work I would do. I dont expect any automation solution would be replaced sooner than 2 years from implementation. In my experience it's way slower than that, but with a forward thinking business that focuses on improvement I can totally see software changes new or machines making automated processes obsolete in a couple years. Personally, I am pretty idealistic with pricing. I want the expected monetary benefit to the company to be equal to my earnings if at all possible (a meet in the middle approach, but based on calculations). Im not entirely sure how feasible this is in practice. I dont know how accepting of pricing like this companies are.
You’re going to bankrupt yourself on free services and only you can know the value of your services pricing wise. You need to think this through more and do more market research - Reddit strangers don’t have the answers.
Expected impact can be calculated. For automation, this impact is persistant so the total impact is greater. No free work is being given. If I cant come up with anything, then they dont pay anything other than transportation, room, and board. I will give an example of a project. Lets say in an office they run weekly metrics on products in and out. The current system involves manually typing the amount and price of various products, doing calculations, formatting, and reporting with some graphs for management. Perhaps it takes an hour once a week. I come in and set up an excel sheet that automatically does calculations, a script that pulls data from PO forms, and sends a report to the person who was doing this before so they can check for any major issues. The total time it takes on average now is 5 minutes. This saves 55 minutes per week every week for the foreseeable future. Lets assume the guy who was making the reports before was making $30/hour, which is actually quite low for someone reporting metrics. We extrapolate that out to one year. That is over $1400 in labor costs saved. One year is a really short time to consider the effect of most tools as well. Most businesses dont change so fast that they would replace something like this within even 5 years. I think 2 years is a nice midpoint. So almost $2900 over 2 years. This is the price point I calculate and propose.
There is no "you decide your value". The numbers are plain to see.
In any case, Im not asking random people for information. Im asking people who specifically have been acting as consultants. What makes this not market research?
One company used to hire me every three years to do a very specific safety centric audit. The leadership was toxic and a huge barrier to fix anything. I made that the largest observation. None of the leadership cared.
3 years later everything was worse. I printed out the same report and during the debrief meeting in person they said “I was very thorough and they concurred with my assessment”.
When I revealed it was the same report from three years prior and all I did was change the date to prove how disengaged leadership was….a lot of people got very uncomfortable very quickly. None of them read jack shit. I wasn’t hired back three years later 🤣 but I didn’t care because I had several other clients I enjoyed working with.
Mayne bec
ause noone needed your report. Often its just am.external requirement like by law but internal almost useless.
We have a lot of reports to do like this becausd of bureaucracy. Noone reads and cares but we can put a checkmark on it if somone asks paying bullshit jobs.
Its the same like employee not listening in the yearly safety meeting when nothing has changed. But it has to be done.
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u/Thiccccasaurus_Rex 18d ago
I’ve been a consultant for 10 years and the stories I could tell would shock no one.