ian
A goal of mine for 2020 is to work on growing the consulting work that I do. In the past, consulting has been an accessory to my full time job. This year I want to flip that around and make it one of my primary focuses. I have multiple side businesses (leadaide, indibot, huntify) that I have been working on for the last 1-2 years. They are all growing and require more attention. Moving away from a full time job towards a part time role will afford me that flexibility.
Step In The Right Direction
I took the first step towards this in July of this year when I moved to a 4 day part time job as the Head of Engineering for Bl3ndlabs. This was a big move for me. While this came with a decrease in salary (due to only working 4 days) it allowed me 8 hours a week to focus on myself. Prior to this, I consistently had a 40+ hour a week job. I would have to find nights and weekend hours to work on my side projects / consulting. Moonlighting is very do-able (I’ve been doing it for years), but it’s hard. This one day was significant because it was a chance to bet on and invest in myself. While I was only taking home 80% of what I normally did, I knew that if I could invest in myself for those 8 hours a week, I could easily make up that 20% and much much more.
Tip: If you are planning to leave your full time job to start your own business, I highly recommend that you attempt to work part time first.
For me, this was exactly what I needed. This allowed me to have the security of a paycheck / benefits, while building up the income and clientele to support my family.
Ideal Client
When it comes to my ideal consulting client, I like to focus on product strategy from a technical perspective. This is purposefully vague as I try to sit in the middle of hands on and hands off work.
Some examples of projects that I have worked on include:
- Custom operational Rails app to help with marketing attribution
- Custom Shopify App
- Researched and proposed technical strategy
- API integrations ( Vonigo, Mail Parsing, Twilio, Plivo, Sendgrid, many more)
- Refactoring technical debt
- Guidance for management team
- Internal prototyping
What I’m Looking For
I already have a couple fantastic clients, but as the year progresses I am looking to add a few more clients. If you know of anyone that might be a good fit, please reach out to me at ian at submarinerock.com
