Welcome to Edition #29 of Ask Gorick Anything. This AMA is part of Gorick's Newsletter, where Harvard career advisor and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Gorick Ng shares what they don't teach you in school about how to succeed in your career.
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ASK GORICK ANYTHING
“How do I start my own business?”
Have a career question? Ask me here.
Subscriber’s question:
“Gorick, what support or best practices do you offer for someone seeking to transition out of their corporate job and looking to start their own online consulting business?
After being employed for so many years, the logistics of being a solopreneur are a little new to me - legal, operations, preferred tech stack etc. Any guidance that you can share would be greatly appreciated.”
—Kevin M. from Philadelphia, PA
Gorick’s response:
Hi Kevin,
Thanks so much for reaching out. I’d love to help!
In terms of how to start your own (consulting) business, see below for my (non-exhaustive) list of 10 steps + my thoughts on the logistics.
For those of you reading this and are thinking, I don’t want to be a consultant… why should I read this?, hang tight!
“Consulting” is really just a fancy way of saying “helping someone get something done.” If you think this way (as I do), then everyone can technically be classified as a consultant:
- A primary care doctor is a health consultant
- A personal trainer is a fitness consultant
- A freelance web developer is a website consultant
So, if you’re at all interested in starting your own thing, I hope you’ll find at least a few items useful below.
If you prefer reading listicles outside of your email provider, tap here instead [blog post link].
Step 1: Find your niche
Start by asking yourself: “What's a process I've navigated myself that a lot of people would pay (and ideally already) pay to help them navigate?”
Example: How to apply to certain MBA programs or how to build an ecommerce business
Step 2: Decide on your delivery method
There are 3 flavors of consulting firms (and service businesses more broadly):
A. “Done by you”—where you give people advice but otherwise let them do the work themselves
Example: “I'll give you an assessment and plan on what plants and landscape design you could have for your backyard, but actually doing the work is all on you”
B. "Done with you"—where you work side by side with someone through an entire process
Example: “I'll give you weekly homework assignments that, over six months, will lead to a strong graduate school application”
C. "Done for you"—where you get the job done end to end for the other person
Example: “Give me all the photos and copy for your website and I'll design and implement it for you”
Step 3: Decide if you’re “B2B” or “B2C”
If you can help an organization take a process or job and do it better, faster, or cheaper than if an employee were to do it in-house, you're B2B (or “business to business”).
If you're helping people solve problems in their own lives, you're B2C (or “business to consumer”).
Whether you’re B2B or B2C depends on 3 things: (A) the types of clients you’d most like to work with, (B) who’s most impressed by you, and (C) where you have the most (and deepest) relationships.
Step 4: Find your clients
Make a list of people you already know who could use your help, including...
- Your current colleagues
- Your former colleagues
- Your former clients (assuming there you aren't barred from soliciting business)
- Your friends and acquaintances
- Your former classmates
- People that any of the above can introduce you to
Step 5: Offer free services
Do the work in exchange for feedback, testimonials, or a case study.
Step 6: Ask for referrals
Ask that (hopefully) happy client if they know anyone else who could be interested in your services.
Step 7: Align with the market
Go online, look for the rates of other people offering similar consulting services in your area (if your services are geographically focused), and then offer the same services at a discount.
Or, if what you're offering is already available on existing consulting / freelancing / gig platforms (e.g., Fiverr, Upwork, Toptal, Freelancer, Behance, Dribbble, 99Designs, Yelp), create a profile on those platforms and offer your services for cheaper to get more experience and testimonials.
Step 8: Raise your rates
Keep raising your rates as you build more experience, confidence, and credibility!
Step 9: Build your online presence
Eventually, update your LinkedIn profile and build a website to showcase your work and to provide the public with a way to discover and contact you.
Step 10: Optimize your systems
I know I spent a lot of time talking about the process of getting started and this is intentional.
Legal and tech stack are important—but this stuff helps you operate more officially and efficiently. They don't actually make you successful. So, I would first focus on building demand—and then figure out the back-end operations later.
Here’s a brief brain dump on legal items and tech stack related items (including what I use).
Legal
Legal depends on which country you're in, but in the US, your general options for legal entity are LLC, C-corp, or S-Corp (or LLC taxed as an S-Corp). I can't offer legal or financial advice here, but most solopreneurs I know who are looking to build a small business and aren’t interested in raising venture capital funding just have LLCs or LLCs taxed as an S-Corp. Ask your accountant on this front!
Tech Stack
Once you've proven that you have demand and are actually interested in sticking with a certain niche of consulting, you'll likely want to build a website, get a professional domain, and get a branded email account.
Websites
As tempting as it may be to go all in with a fancy, feature-filled website built on Webflow or Wordpress, my recommendation is to start with an easy to use drag and drop website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or Duda.
Pick a template that you are 100% happy with (since any modifications will immediately be a headache), fill in the image and text fields, and launch the site. It's only worth building a fancier website once you have business and your basic website is actually a bottleneck to growing.
Domain
Whether it's through GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Google Domains, just find a domain you like and register it. Then, get a Google Workspace account so you can start sending emails from a @yourdomain.com email rather than from your personal Gmail.
My (current) tech stack
Aside from the basics, here's what else I use:
- Email newsletters: Beehiiv (use this link to get a 30-day trial + 20% off for 3 months)
- Meeting booking management: Calendly or Hubspot Meeting Scheduler (I use both)
- Form builders: Fillout (a selfish affiliate link here)
- Cloud file storage: Google Drive, Dropbox
- Design: Canva
- Other software: Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, Zoom, Teams, WebEx (I use them all since different clients have different preferences)
I hope this helped you as you consider the next stage of your journey! As you can imagine, this topic is super vast and impossible to cover in a single reply. So, if you have any follow-up questions, let me know: https://forms.gorick.com/askgorick
Looking forward to hearing more and wishing you all the best!
See you Tuesday for our next story and unspoken rule,
Gorick
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