>I'm looking at the independent idea a lot lately. This is for independent consultants who have been on their own for two or more years. Just a couple of questions:
>
>1) What's the population of your metro area?
Hmm..Good question. Maybe 200K in the immediate area, 1M within normal driving distances.
>2) What's your primary method of developing new business: word of mouth, ads, luck?
>
When I had started I took over some business of my previous employer when they went out of business. But a good majority of the business came from word of mouth. I tried the cold-calling method, mailers, etc. but nothing came close to word of mouth. Cold-calling is not fun - I'm not particularly good at it, and I can't imagine it would work well for software development (I did system integration, sales, etc. when I tried it).
In fact, it came to a point where I started turning away some referrals. I didn't have the time to handle all the work. I did the math on hiring more employees and I would have had to increase business significantly to make the extra overhead worthwhile (ie. so I'd make the same/more money). That's something you might want to decide on beforehand. Do you want to be the one and only employee or own a full-blown business. There are tradeoffs and benefits to both.
Subcontracting for other developers might be a good alternative to get started with.
>3) Do you find yourself working for a lot of the companies you used to work for as an employee?
See above. I didn't have to deal with the dilemma of "stealing" customers.
>4) How do you deal with things like insurance, etc?
I had a hard time finding liability insurance since I went on-site a lot. I found a place that would insure me, but it cost me > $900/year. Compared to a lot of other industries I guess that was high.
As far as medical insurance, I never really dealt with that. I was independant for about 5-6 years before I started with my current employer. Since I was fairly young (20's) I just didn't worry about medical insurance. I know a friend of mine that is also independant pays a few hundred a month for medical insurance.
