EMRo

A little more than 3 months ago, I asked HN what the best way was to go about securing RFP's and getting bigger clients.

In the three months between then and now, I wound up building a substantial (mid 5 figures/mo) dev consulting business business focused on single page applications for mobile and desktop. Some of the clients have been large companies (fortune 500) but there are a bunch of smaller nonprofits and smaller companies as well.

I would consider this my first successful business and while that makes me warm and fuzzy inside, I'm running into an issue where my time can only go so far. I have more projects than I can handle as a single person and I'm going to have to figure out how to either A) scale up or B) say no and accept the cap on my revenue.

I'm hoping some folks here can tell the story of how they took their freelance consulting business and turned it into a full fledged dev shop with employees/a process to getting and keeping clients.

Specifically, I'm interested in the following topics:

1) When did you know you had to hire your first employee? What triggered it/how did you go about doing it/making sure your quality remained the same?

2) Outsourcing vs. On shore consultants vs. Full time hires? What decision did you make and why?

3) What run rate were you at when you decided to staff up, how did you avoid cash flow issues?

4) When did you first build a formal system/division for sourcing/managing clients?

I have many more questions but I'd love to hear your stories and any advice you may have about the process of going from freelancer --> devshop.

I've noticed in working as a subcontractor for larger contractors that they tend to have access to very interesting and high value RFP's from big companies/organizations. I've done all of the work associated with building the systems (so I likely have the credibility to score some contracts) but I am apparently clueless on where/how to get direct access so I can bid on my own.

I know that at this level, you aren't pitching websites or applications, rather solutions that solve business problems. I'm fine developing strategies and pitches for that as well.

Has anyone gone from being a small contractor to getting access to bigger projects via the RFP process?

Is it just really word of mouth and who you know?

Are there sites for this? Do you have a winning strategy to build a list of contacts who often have high value RFP's?

Any help/insight would be much appreciated!

TL;DR; I'm looking for a dope designer & front end engineer (JS/jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, Mobile Responsive, jQuery Mobile a + and Angular a huge + but not required)to build out my consulting team. I have a few large projects coming down the pike that I need help with and would rather partner than outsource. I'm in NYC but you can be anywhere as long as you're responsive and responsible. ------

I'm a self taught back end developer (LAMP + JS) with 5 years of experience. I'm based out of NYC just getting a consulting business off of the ground. I've lined up and knocked down a few projects thus far in the ~5-10k range (yes, I know that's small potatoes) and am looking to expand my business aggressively and break into larger projects for businesses.

What I've found is that my major limiting factor is front end. I can design and code for front end (both responsive and static) but there are people out there who can do that 10x as fast and 20x as pretty (I pretty much use bootstrap and customize for the most part).

To be up front, I'm not interested in this being a company that launches 1000's of crappy base level WP installs to make a few bucks a pop. I'm primarily interested in developing mobile web applications, single page AJAX powered applications with Angular or Backbone and generally applications of substance.

At some point if all goes well, there might be an incubator component where we help build/advise companies like a Betaworks.

If you're interested, drop me a line at evanmrose [at] post.harvard.edu