I'm a wage slave, but years ago I helped a struggling consulting agency blow up.
It's usually marketing. That's probably why revenues are low too. Once we had marketing sorted out we had more work coming in than we knew what do do with. So we promptly raised our rates and became small but profitable.
Don't quit your day job until you have too much work to do it.
I don't want to dump a rant (but I did anyways) but start online and start local. Do geofenced ads on Google and Facebook. Put in your ads that you're close by. Even in online age companies they can drive by and see have a huge edge, so this is best place to start with ads, you will have a solid handicap against powerful national ad campaigns. Know your market, for instance, we discovered a lot of older guys running small businesses listen to certain AM radio stations and ads there are super cheap. Some of them still read newspapers too. Lots of little insights like that eventually give you an edge. Marketing is all a big competition for eyeballs at the lowest price.
Another plus was partnering with an IT company. We gave them IT work, and they gave us software dev work when there wasn't an off the shelf fix. After years of this the owners merged the two companies for good profit.
Organic reach is just as important as ads, if not more. Figure out what problems you could solve for clients and start writing articles about them. Don't outsource this to ad agencies. They write fluffball articles with no substance and Google will deepsix you. Find the most knowledgeable person on the subject that doesn't want a fortune or even who wants to promote their own shit that doesn't compete with you. Humble-brag but I have some articles related to my specialty that still rank #1 on Google for our targeted keywords a decade after leaving that place. At one point 20 articles that I wrote brought in 70% of traffic. No idea what their metrics look like now, but I'm sure they still bring in tons of traffic to this day. TLDR: organic reach is super important because unlike ads, it's free.
Your best bet early on is copying successful competitors. There's a lot of services out there to monitor competitors ad campaigns and website organic reach/links. Mimic your competitors at first, leaning on closer physical distance to make up for worse targeting until you got your beat then rise up against them or find your own niche.
Again small advantages build up. One of our biggest local competitors used a help widget on every site they wrote. I eventually found all of their clients from this using DNS and we systematically called them all and took a good fraction that had issues with their hosting.
I am convinced it's all marketing. Software consulting is a generic business like a restaurant unless you specialize in military guidance systems or Fortran or something. Just like a restaurant, the food matters but marketing is what makes or breaks you
It's usually marketing. That's probably why revenues are low too. Once we had marketing sorted out we had more work coming in than we knew what do do with. So we promptly raised our rates and became small but profitable.
Don't quit your day job until you have too much work to do it.
I don't want to dump a rant (but I did anyways) but start online and start local. Do geofenced ads on Google and Facebook. Put in your ads that you're close by. Even in online age companies they can drive by and see have a huge edge, so this is best place to start with ads, you will have a solid handicap against powerful national ad campaigns. Know your market, for instance, we discovered a lot of older guys running small businesses listen to certain AM radio stations and ads there are super cheap. Some of them still read newspapers too. Lots of little insights like that eventually give you an edge. Marketing is all a big competition for eyeballs at the lowest price.
Another plus was partnering with an IT company. We gave them IT work, and they gave us software dev work when there wasn't an off the shelf fix. After years of this the owners merged the two companies for good profit.
Organic reach is just as important as ads, if not more. Figure out what problems you could solve for clients and start writing articles about them. Don't outsource this to ad agencies. They write fluffball articles with no substance and Google will deepsix you. Find the most knowledgeable person on the subject that doesn't want a fortune or even who wants to promote their own shit that doesn't compete with you. Humble-brag but I have some articles related to my specialty that still rank #1 on Google for our targeted keywords a decade after leaving that place. At one point 20 articles that I wrote brought in 70% of traffic. No idea what their metrics look like now, but I'm sure they still bring in tons of traffic to this day. TLDR: organic reach is super important because unlike ads, it's free.
Your best bet early on is copying successful competitors. There's a lot of services out there to monitor competitors ad campaigns and website organic reach/links. Mimic your competitors at first, leaning on closer physical distance to make up for worse targeting until you got your beat then rise up against them or find your own niche.
Again small advantages build up. One of our biggest local competitors used a help widget on every site they wrote. I eventually found all of their clients from this using DNS and we systematically called them all and took a good fraction that had issues with their hosting.
I am convinced it's all marketing. Software consulting is a generic business like a restaurant unless you specialize in military guidance systems or Fortran or something. Just like a restaurant, the food matters but marketing is what makes or breaks you