How to get your first client as a data science/data engineering consultant

Getting your first client as a data science consultant is just like trying to get your first job with no experience. It feels borderline impossible. Barely anyone will talk to you or consider your services. Everyone wants experienced consultants with references, project examples and case studies. But how are you supposed to get references and project examples without first working on another project?

Now, this makes sense. Compared to you, most experienced consultants will be a much better option. They have more experience being a consultant and working as an auxiliary entity vs. working as an employee. These really are two different things. Consulting requires more than just technical skills.

You need to know how to manage a client relationship. This includes creating a solid on-boarding process, creating relationships quickly and scoping the problem as well as assessing road blocks. This might all seem like things you do at your job but you are probably taking for granted all the support you get from all the various other employees and cross functional partners.

When you are a consultant, there are limitations on your support team. You won’t have a project manager, or system admin to make sure all of your technology is working correctly. So if things break, or your locked out of your clients system, you need to go through the process of figuring out who to contact and how you will fix the problem. This makes even a small problem that much more difficult to deal with and if you are new to consulting you might not know how to handle these problems efficiently.

So, the question becomes. How do you get your first consulting client? In particular, for this post we are going to focus on the first step. That is, how do you get noticed by a possible client.
We are going to lay out some tips to help you get your first client. Now we would like to point out you shouldn’t just do one of these tips. It really is just doing all of the tips listed below. Similar to job searching, getting your first client to notice you means you need to be everywhere.


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