Expanding company - need advice on first/next steps.

[Lance]

You need a really good salesperson. Without that, the chances of your business surviving are minimal.

Some contractor friends of mine set up a consultancy and once they'd exhausted their own contacts, they hired a top knotch saleman. Since then they've seen 20% year on year growth.

Another couple of contractor friends built some incredibly useful software. They have no salesperson. They get ~50K per year, which is nice. But with a decent salesperson, they could be doing so much better.

and if agency fees are what is driving this 'business idea' then wait till they see what a decent salesman costs....

[Paralytic]

Paralytic to answer your question "Do your clients see you as a supplier or merely as staff augmentation?" I would say the former in that I control what is being built and how it is built and do not participate in staff events (to ensure don't fall foul of any IR regs)

From your answer, I'm not 100% convinced that you are 100% convinced that is how the client would see it if asked.

A follow-up question: if you were to stop working for your current client, and you replaced yourself with someone else for all future work, would the client care (so long as you confirmed you'd on-board the new person in your own time/at your own cost and with no impact to delivery expectations)?

[Paralytic]

You need a really good salesperson. Without that, the chances of your business surviving are minimal.

Some contractor friends of mine set up a consultancy and once they'd exhausted their own contacts, they hired a top knotch saleman. Since then they've seen 20% year on year growth.

This. When we moved to a consultancy model, we hired a salesman (initially part-time on a commission-only basis and then added in a retainer + commission once he'd started delivering a pipeline) who had connections into the clients we were targetting. OP, do you have a list of target clients?

[northernladuk]

OP, the points about the sales is totally valid but you need to go right to the top of the tree here. What does the customer want and what do you have to offer? What is it you will be selling? Sounds very much like it's just extra bodies to a client and you want to replace agencies. Every contractor has had this idea and it doesn't work. You need to be selling a solution the client needs. Be that a packaged bit of managed software, a team that can own a whole piece of work and deliver it back, whatever.

Find out what a customer wants and develop a solution. Then and only then can you start selling it and expanding. At present you don't seem to have a clue what the client wants and what you can do for them which is absolutely fundamental in a client/supplier relationship. Without that you've zero chance.