Ask HN: How do you scale a consultancy?

by croquetonon 11/13/2024, 12:35 PMwith 1 comments

Hi HN.

I work for a small business (5-10 people). We like to think of ourselves as a software company, but for all intents and purposes we operate like a consultancy. We're mostly devs, no *real* sales, marketing or BD people on the team.

Each year we try to get more projects signed off with more clients, hoping one may stick and turn into a SaaS type offering. But so far that's only worked once.

FWIW, we primarily deal with computer vision (object detection, segmentation, etc) in a fairly niche sector, where all our potential clients are behemoth corps that move slowly and are not used to a change of process within the corp.

For the time being I've given up on the dream of becoming a SaaS with a single core product. So, how do I focus our efforts on scaling up this consultancy?

by verdvermon 11/13/2024, 6:01 PM

Consultancy is personal, typically scaled by adding more (capable?) people

(capable is the hard part)