The 2 Secrets of a Successful Software Consulting Company

Seems a lot of software consulting companies don't get it, so we'll give away our "secret". There's two keys to a successful consulting company:

1. Recruitment
2. Training

Some companies try to replace #1 with more of #2. They settle for second-string or third-string recruits and hope that spending enough money on training will be enough. This is the approach I see with a lot of the bigger companies. Let me tell you right now that by our own experience (and we're damn good trainers), all the training in the world won't arm an under-talented person with the decision-making and problem-solving ability that he/she needs in the project. Furthermore, given the pace of change in software development, you need people who can train themselves, otherwise it's a monumental effort to keep their skills relevant.

Some companies, particularly the smaller ones, try to replace #2 with more of #1. This is better than the first alternative, since good recruits, while expensive, can usually figure things out by themselves. The problem is, as you scale out, it's hard to find people who have both the talent and experience not to screw up on the job. I'm not just talking about more expensive salaries, I mean that even if you had all the money in the world there's just not enough of them out there! So you start recruiting talented people who haven't had much experience yet, and you hope they'll learn on the job. "After all", many developers-turned-entrepreneurs think, "I learned on the job as well, and look how I turned out." But these entrepreneurs forget all the screw-ups they made while learning on the job, and they don't know how much these screw-ups cost the company they used to work for, in terms of lost confidence from clients, re-done work, etc. So now, these talented but raw kids in your company will be learning from their own screw-ups, which you have to pay for.

So that's it really. Recruit and train. And retain. Okay, that's 3 secrets.

By the way, O&B is looking for partner consulting companies both to subcontract work to, and to expand to new markets. We're more than willing to share our recruitment, training and retention tactics to any company that we partner with.