How I Left Facebook to Forge My Path in Data Consulting

📓 30-Day Checklist Included!

Feb 22, 2024

Hi, fellow data practitioners, directors, scientists, and all-around amazing readers 👋 ! The Seattle Data Guy here!

Today’s article will focus on talking about what it takes to start your own independent consulting company. If you are considering starting your own consulting company soon and you’d like even more guidance, then you can check out the Technical Freelancer Academy which I put together to help accelerate other people’s consulting journeys.

Now let’s dive into today’s article!

In 2021, I quit my job at Facebook to start consulting and to help companies setup their data infrastructure.

However, I didn’t start my consulting company in 2021; in fact, I have been consulting prior to starting at Facebook. But it was far from easy to get to a point where I could quit my job as a data engineer and go into full-time consulting.

It took time for me to get the skills and network required to quit my job and rely on the income from consulting.

I imagine some of you out there might also be considering starting a consulting company. You might be on the fence and wondering if you should even try or maybe you’re just interested in learning about what it takes to start your own independent consulting company.

Well, let’s dig into how you can go from an analyst or engineer to a full-time consultant.

How To Start

Before trying to get clients or building a website, you should first decide what you plan to consult on.

There needs to be a reason for people to reach out to you and seek your services.

You need to clearly solve a problem.

And that’s where you start–by defining the problem or set of problems you plan to solve for your clients.

Now I put together a 30-day guide for those of you looking to break into consulting which I shared in my other newsletter, but here are a few points from said newsletter on where you should get started:

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 the why, as well as possibly why a business might hire you, start thinking about finding your niche. What do you offer that is distinct? You don’t have to solve every problem. Instead, 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 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.

Once you’ve clearly defined that, the question becomes, “Where will these clients come from?”

Where Clients Come From

The first challenge you’ll likely face, and I did face, is finding clients.

My first few clients were friends or brought to me by other consultants so I never developed my own prospect pipelines or funnels early on.

Honestly, because during my first year of consulting, I had all my clients come to me I didn’t work on any form of client acquisition, and guess what? It showed.

The second year I billed 1/4 of what I billed the prior year and even that was just because the beginning half of the year still had some lingering projects. Really I netted exactly 0 new clients.

So this left me with a very important question.

Where would clients come from?

There are truly dozens of ways different consultants find clients, but here are the methods I have found most reliable.

Content Marketing - One of the very first places I found success was in content creation. I just started writing. I wrote about topics I found interesting, problems that I was dealing with, and what I thought my target personas would Google. Slowly, I started to find traction, and with traction came interest from possible clients
Networking - This is likely what you’ll use to start, and honestly, continue a steady rate of clients. Almost every consultant I have ever talked to said that they started getting clients through their network. Whether it was Matt Chung or David McCandless, they all referenced that their network was where they started.
Referrals - Once you’ve run a few projects, you now have the opportunity to ask for referrals (which are worth their weight in gold so to speak). You’ve got someone selling for you and making warm leads.
Sales Outreach - Many of the examples above tend to be somewhat passive. Sales activities and motions tend to involve using solutions like Sales Navigator and getting email target lists to try to reach out to the right buying persona at the right time. This is a more active strategy and really requires a combination of research(so you know which industries/companies to target) and timing. Just like marketing you will need multiple instances where your content or perhaps just helpful advising reaches the same person multiple times until it finally converts.
Vendor Partnerships - Another tactic consulting companies may take on is partnering with vendors to help provide services that implement their solutions. In particular, this comes into play when a customer is blocked from buying a solution because they don’t have the talent and/or time to implement the solution themselves. In turn, an account executive or perhaps partnership manager may work with consulting companies to close deals(or provide some level of solutions engineering).

Now above we have covered a few methods you can use to attract the right clients to you. But let’s drill down into this more.

Creating A Marketing Funnel

One method I like using when I think about content marketing in particular is creating a funnel. For example, I started using the AIDA(Awareness(although I have seen attention here instead), Interest, Desire, and Action) funnel as a framework to better organize my content and how I target my buying personas. If you’re new to the topic, there here is a quick breakdown of what each of these terms means along with a quick image of how I view some of my articles.

Awareness: These pieces of content are meant to target prospects who are just starting research on a topic. Maybe they aren’t searching concrete terms or are focused on a broad search. Thus I don’t focus on specific problems but on general ideas.
Interest: At this stage, I focus on creating content that’s a little more nuanced. Specifically, I think about problems a customer might face when they implement a data solution or the fact that they might be seeking alternatives.
Desire: Once the prospect has clearly started to show an interest and more importantly is likely switching from "I like it" to "I want it” I focus on content that talks about the results I have driven in the past. That way they might connect with the end goals. Do you want the benefits of reducing data infrastructure costs or perhaps delivering an ML model, etc?
Action: This final stage tends to be less content and is more just the services I offer. Do you want me to provide a data infrastructure audit or improve your Airflow set-up?

Now using the AIDA framework I take it one step further and create a table like the one below to help generate topics and actually create a flow in my funnel in terms of content.

The goal of all of this is to create a message in terms of what my services offer and create a funnel that leads my prospects to figure out if I offer the right solution or not!

Now that was a lot of tactical advice. I’d like to take a step back and provide a few more free thoughts for those who are looking to start an independent consulting company.

Contracting vs. Consulting

One of the concepts you’ll learn early on, especially in tech consulting, is there is a difference between consulting and contracting. Although oftentimes when businesses look for either, they might use the term interchangeably; there is a difference in how these two operate and what they focus on.

One example of this is the quote used by Alan Weiss which you can see below.

“Consultants are not another pair of hands. They are a new brain.”

-Alan Weiss

The point is that a consultant is meant to come in and consult and provide insights from their past experiences. I do find it hard not to do some hands-on work, especially in tech. How else are you supposed to provide insights on where technology is going if you aren’t at least occasionally working with it and understanding what is changing?

Resources You Can Look Into

If you still would like more information or resources, below are several articles and lists of resources that can help you get started!

Final Thoughts

The benefit of consulting is that, to a degree, you can just start. Just let your network know what you’d like to start consulting in and see if there is a need. In the technical world, there is a constant need for this, whether it's more contracting work or the general middle-ground type consulting work (where you both provide guidance and deliver).

Once you’ve got a few projects under your belt, you can put together some case studies, start looking for referrals, and build your own little flywheel.

Good luck!

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