Hi Sebastian,
I am a regular reader of your blog for a few months now, and I have a couple of questions for you.
1. How do you manage all your books that you read while traveling, or do you read e-books instead of physical books?
I'm around 95% Kindle. Here's the big 3 I use --
Kindle for Mac, Kindle for iPhone, Kindle Cloudreader.
The iPhone Kindle app is pretty good and gets most of my attention. I'll only carry around a physical book if that's the only way I can find a book, and then for a limited time.
2. I am a software developer with broad experience using various technologies. What advice/books do you recommend for starting a freelance practice (which will eventually grow into a multi-million dollar consultancy)? I don't know anything about sales and the idea of cold calling scares the shit out of me.Thanks,
N
1. Find a market that you love, where you'll gladly spend your leisure time learning everything about that market, where you'll happily got to the conferences and events, and so on.
2. Start getting to know everyone in that space before you need anything to do with them. It'll vary from space to space, but there's probably some groups or activities that make you a ton of contacts in that space without requiring a lot.
3. For where you're at, pick up a copy of Get Clients Now. The author's description of the universal marketing cycle, what activities generate marketing and sales results, what resources are worth building for marketing/sales, how much time to spend on those various activities is very well done. Sounds like the most useful thing to read for where you're at, and it'll answer most of the finer points.
Cold calling isn't required. Cold calling doesn't present great results anyways in terms of efficiency, and even semi-warm calling isn't necessary for business. Personal relationships, referrals, and doing great work is more than enough to get you there. Especially if you love the space you're in and are well known in it.
I know there's a lot of people here who do engineering and software consultancy/contracting -- what advice do you have for N who is thinking of starting out soon?