Proc.new

Many consultants are excellent at what they do, and want to start a consulting firm, yet many have no idea how to find new clients. So I’ve written up ten cheap ways to find new clients. None of these are new ideas, they have been around for years and they are currently being employed by professionals all over the world. Note, I have either used these, or personally known people that have employed these techniques to land paying clients.

The first thing to keep in mind is who are your customers and how can you get your message in front of them? It’s important to focus your efforts on people who will actually need the service you are offering. My clientèle have typically been small business owners, so for this article I will focus on the ways I’ve used to target that group of people. Additionally this article is primarily targeted at technical consultants, although it should be applicable to almost any consultant.

One final note before getting started. Using these techniques I have been able to keep myself as busy as I’ve wanted for a lot of years. What you will find though is that you want to interview your clients every bit as much as they are interviewing you. Do not give away free work, and make sure your client has realistic expectations about the budget required for the project they want. Most business people will not have any idea how expensive custom development is. Your job is to make them aware of that very early in the process.

1. Get the word out to your friends and family that you are starting a consulting firm and are looking for business. Something I’ve found particularly effective here is to offer a referral bonus. Just asking someone if they know of anyone that needs some programming work won’t get them to think very hard. However if you offer them one or two hundred dollars as a referral bonus for a paying client, they will think much harder about the people they know, and what they may need. Who knows, they might even start asking around on your behalf. Make sure to set your referral bonus low enough that you will still make appropriate money on the client. For custom programming, most contracts are worth many thousands of dollars, making a referral bonus well worth the money.

2. Get some nice business cards made and leave them at restaurants and on bulletin boards whenever you can, hand them out to everyone you know. The key here is to have very nice multi color high gloss dual sided cards printed up. The cost difference isn’t nearly as great as people think, and it’s a cheap way to make your card stand out in a pile. When you are leaving your card, the first impression you make on your potential client will be through your card. Don’t print up a cheap white card, and definitely don’t get the perforated kind at staples. A nice high gloss card stands out nicely in the pile. Since most geeks aren’t very photogenic, I typically opt to leave my picture off the card. Don’t go crazy on the graphics either, you want the card to stand out, but at the same time project a professional appearance.

3. Join your local chamber of commerce and attend the functions. Chambers of commerce are created to allow local business people get together and discuss their businesses and to get to know each other better. You may not drum up any business on your first couple of outings, that’s ok. At this point you are developing relationships, but make sure to let people know that you are looking for new clients. Pass your business cards out like candy here. Everyone else will be passing them out too. Make sure when you attend these functions that you dress up some. Nothing projects unprofessionalism like showing up to a business gathering in ratty jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt. At a minimum put on a pair of slacks and a button up shirt, make sure your clothes are heavily starched. You want to get past the impression most business people have that technical people are from another planet.

4. When you go to someone else’s place of business or you encounter another business owner, take the time to talk to them about their business. Find out what kinds of problems and challenges they are facing in their business. Ask them probing questions to see if there is some aspect of their business you can help them with. Often times business owners deal with problems that can be solved by someone else, but they don’t know that so they continue to deal with them.

5. Use Pay Per click placement in search engines. Hey, this is the internet era, you don’t have to get all of your business from the local area. That being said, I’ve had much better luck drumming up local business than I have over the internet. Most business owners seem to be comforted by dealing with someone locally that they can speak with face to face. With the search engines you can limit your searchers to your geographic area. You can also try places like craigslist. However it’s especially important on craigslist to be careful with your clientèle. Many people on craigslist seem to think software should cost about $300, no matter how complicated it is. However I have seen some very nice consulting relationships come about through craigslist.

6. Develop relationships with other consultant groups in your area. Business comes in ebbs and flows, sometimes you don’t have the capacity to take on a project, but the other consultant groups in your area will. I’ve had numerous offers from other local consultants to take on work they can’t handle. Other times I’ve been too busy to handle the workload myself and passed it off to other firms. Joining a local user group can be a particularly good way to meet other consultants in your area. Typically under this relationship, the person who drums up the work takes some type of hourly fee off the top.

7. Develop a relationship with contract companies in your area. They spend a lot of money on business development and usually have a pretty good pulse on the community. Most of them will contract you out as a 1099 if you prefer. As with getting work from another firm, they will take their hourly cut. One major bonus with going this route is they will typically handle all of the collection and billing for you. They will also do an excellent job at pre-qualifying their clients and will bring you higher paying jobs.

8. Get involved with your local charity group like the United Way or especially the Rotary club. The Rotary club is a service organization comprised of primarily business people. Most businesses have frequent interaction with their local charities. This is an excellent way to meet other business people in a very relaxed setting. My local United Way has a golf tournament once a year, typically you can sponsor the tournament by either providing a number of give aways, or you can pay a modest fee to help provide prizes. This is a cheap way to get your message in front of a lot of local business people and get bonus karma points while you are at it.

9. Get to know the professors at your local university. Particularly the ones in the department that teach your specialty. Many business owners will contact the universities and find out if they know of anyone that can handle the projects they need done. The school may want you to take one or more of their students on as an intern to help grease the skids. This is typically a win-win situation, the student gets invaluable work experience, and you get someone to handle those parts of the application that are tedious but non-complicated to work on. Make sure they send you several candidates to choose from. I’ve written previously about how to interview and hire programmers.

10. Take out an ad in the classified section of your local newspaper. While the internet era is definitely eroding the power newspapers once had, they are still an effective way to let people know about your business. Most business people tend to lag behind the internet power user curve, and so a substantial portion of them still look through the classified section in the local paper.

These are not the only ways to drum up business for a consultant. These are just ten ways I’ve used or have seen used, that are very effective. Something to keep in mind is that there are typically dozens or hundreds of other professionals in your area that are marketing to the same target group that you are. Talk to them, ask them how they get new clients. Find out what are the most effective ways for them to find new clients in your particular market.

Good luck and happy consulting.