From Contracting to Beyond!

[ChimpMaster]

For those who have stepped up above 'daily rate' contracting, how do you go about finding clients?

My situation is that I have a specialist skill in data transformation/manipulation/transformation using a vendor product that is licensed by end clients - usually quite big corporations. I have thought about licensing the product myself, hosting it on my own server and then selling the data integration capability as a managed service. This would appeal more to the smaller organisations that don't want to pay for expensive software or teams of developers etc, but still need to trade on a B2B basis, possibly to meet data format requirements of their own, larger clients/suppliers.

So my idea would be to approach (small) businesses to ask if they have any data integration requirements, then build the interfaces and host them. The fees would be charged for development and ongoing hosting/maintenance.

However, I haven't really got any idea where to start in terms of contacting potential clients.

[colinrobinson]

For those who have stepped up above 'daily rate' contracting, how do you go about finding clients?

My situation is that I have a specialist skill in data transformation/manipulation/transformation using a vendor product that is licensed by end clients - usually quite big corporations. I have thought about licensing the product myself, hosting it on my own server and then selling the data integration capability as a managed service. This would appeal more to the smaller organisations that don't want to pay for expensive software or teams of developers etc, but still need to trade on a B2B basis, possibly to meet data format requirements of their own, larger clients/suppliers.

So my idea would be to approach (small) businesses to ask if they have any data integration requirements, then build the interfaces and host them. The fees would be charged for development and ongoing hosting/maintenance.

However, I haven't really got any idea where to start in terms of contacting potential clients.

Ive done a similar thing in the past with a product called data junction that later became pervasive Data integrator. The market soon dried up after MS put more resources into SSIS and scheduled transforms and as its still bundled with sql you have a job on your hands selling a competing service.

Aslo you've prob got the additional hurdle now of the Data Protection act and other data compliance issues.