Building Your Service Offering and Resume

One of the first steps once we decide to do consulting as a side-hustle is to define our service offering. We have the option to be a general consultant and do at large coding or technical support. However, that is not an easy one to sell or even define. By its nature, a broad offering will limit your ability to speak directly to a customer’s needs.

Pick A Path Or A Few

Start your offering thoughts with a favorite or ideal project to work on. This may be something you can do with your eyes closed or what you love to do. You may find it hard to narrow your focus to a tightly defined project. That is ok. Find the most specific point (or points) about an ideal project and start there. For example, you may be happy doing any web application on Apache Tomcat and Java. That is general enough, but also has a good enough specificity to it.

Your offering, in this case, will focus on building Java web applications. When you put together your offering you will do best if you include a few examples of websites that have varied goals. In this case, I would have an example of an e-commerce site, a simple business site, and a membership site. Those three examples cover a lot of common needs and show a broad range of skill application.

Your Resume

Your normal resume is an excellent start for this project. However, you have narrowed your focus in the prior step. Therefore, a tighter, shorter, more focused resume will be needed here. There is a bit of an art to crafting a good resume in the IT world. Most projects have multiple technologies involved and give you experience in multiple specialties.

Your service-based resume needs to highlight in each project the work you did related to the service. If you focus on Java programming then do not include work done in C# on a project. You will want to list somewhere that you have that C# experience, but leave that out of the project details.

Launch Your Website

Once you have a service flyer or document and a related resume, you are ready for the website. You might want to create the site with the technologies you focus on. This provides yet another reference project for your customers. That may be an approach that is too time-consuming at this point. In that case, fire up a WordPress site with a couple of pages to describe your offerings. This can be done in a few hours, will be low cost, and looks professional. Check out our video course to go all out over the period of a few weeks.

Register on Work Site

Your website is the home of your service offering. Once you have that looking good, it is time to search for business. This is easier than it ever has been. You can create a profile on multiple sites or try your hand at a single one. Each site is a little different in how it works, the projects offered, and the type of competition you will typically face. Try before you buy where possible to find the best fit for you and your offering.

Your Homework

Now stop reading (and listening) and get started. I have included a sample document to help you out with these steps. However, here is what you should aim to complete this week.