Juan’s Consulting Playbook

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Hi, I’m Juan Perez

Before I returned to Microsoft to be a Principal Lead Product Manager in Azure Core, I spent 10 years (from 2004 to 2014) building two bootstrapped consulting businesses and learned many things that I wish I could have learned less painfully. This playbook includes recommendations and principles for starting and growing a consulting business, and the approach applies product management techniques to building a consulting business.

Why I made this

When I moved back to focus exclusively on product in 2014, I started a brain-dump of what I learned with hopes of someday publishing it. Since then I’ve had many conversations with friends as they consider the next chapter in their careers which include stories and principles I learned during those times.

Reflecting on the recent layoffs in tech, I realized that I might be able to help those impacted by making the push to publish what I learned. My hope is this article is the spark to light the fuel that builds the next exceptional consulting company to help solve today’s most pressing challenges.

Building a consulting company is a thrilling ride! It means you get to build an amazing team that works closely with customers on interesting technical and business challenges. I’m confident it’ll be an amazing team and include interesting challenges from your perspective because you get to decide on who gets on the train and what problems you work on.

This might be a great option for you, if a majority of the following are true (check all that apply):

You enjoy listening to people to discover meaningful problems.

You enjoy collaborating with people to solve problems.

You enjoy building long-term relationships with potential customers and collaborators.

You want to build a brand, team, and potentially a movement around a meaningful problem domain.

You are willing to build your own infrastructure instead of living within the walls of an employer.

Special thanks to

SiNing Chan⁠

for building the initial version of this Coda doc from my

article on LInkedIn⁠

. SiNing inspired me to transform the article into an interactive Coda doc.

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Cover photo credit:

Chris Ainsworth⁠

Unsplash⁠

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Gallery

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