Bridging the Gap
From Zanecorpwiki
Growing a software consulting business from a one-person operation is hard because the price of increasing capacity is the cost of a high-salary employee. Hiring part time is next to impossible, and sub-contracting on a project basis is almost as difficult. It's impossible to "scale up production" in-so-far as all you can really do is double capacity, which doubles costs.
In other words, the only stable, dependable option is to transition directly from 100% capacity and costs to 200%. That wouldn't be too bad, except that the sales cycles for projects runs 3-6 months and payment can run 1-6 months behind that. Plus, many projects only last a handful of months. All of which makes it extremely difficult to time that first hire to projects. The cost and difficulty in timing makes traditional financing that much harder, and it really comes down to luck and patience.
It's very tempting to "take the leap" and hope that things come together before one runs out of run-way. I've done this a couple of times--had short to medium term prospects that could use additional resources and bet that "the next thing" could be put together before those ran out--and it's worked with varying degrees of success, though never turned into something really stable.
The better option is work on forging the relationships which can allow one to make arrangements to bridge the gap. First, build up enough cash and credit so that you can weather hiccups and bridge small gaps without putting on the breaks. Next, find lots of work with clients with whom you have a strong personal relationship.
The personal relationship is key because at some point, you're almost certainly going to have to go to your clients and say, "I need you to bear with me." Without a personal relationship of some sort, the client is never going to have any reason to trust in the business as you see it and will only deal with the business as it is.
Edit Point
Get yourself in a position where you have an embarrassing number of options. Then work like hell to manage expectations so that you don't end up burning any bridges while you frantically juggle 3-4 different schedules until you can align things into something that might work. Now continue to scramble for months as dates slip, existing projects drop out and new projects come in, and try not to despair because all you can do is nudge things this way or that.
You're not trying to "execute a plan", because you're not in the position where that's possible. You should, and must create plans as you go and execute as you can, but the externalities dominate the situation. This mean most of the plans will fail and there's nothing you can or should do about it because there's nothing worse than committing to a doomed plan.
The point is to stay alive until the perfect moment presents itself, something that could easily take years and will almost certainly take many months.
