Can anyone give advice for getting off the ground as a NetSuite consulting company? We've been in business for about a year with a few stable clients but I'd like to grow our business. I'm a developer not a sales person so I've never needed to do this before.

Content, referrals, blogs, ads, good website, user groups, webinars, social media, reviews, partners, podcasts, and friends

Know any good web developers? Our current site is just something I threw together on my own, but I'm not much of a designer.

What’s your budget?

Depends. I've got a few quotes from developers online but they all want to do Wordpress sites, which I'd really rather not do.

Might be worth it to go Wordpress for the SEO

Oh? I had assumed SEO was handled separately

I highly recommend https://redeggmarketing.com

Nice! What's your website if you don't mind me asking?

I'm autistic, SuiteWorld gives me massive social anxiety haha

Maybe hire a sales person or contractor?

Maybe, but I won't be able to pay them a regular wage until we get more clients. 🙂

What’s your website? What’s your rates?

Maybe add some projects you’ve done to your site

I'll ask our clients about reviews

Definitely

two of our three clients don't even know we exist because of strict non-compete agreements

Makes sense. I’ve been there

but that third one, I bet I can get a testimonial 😉

Work on one of the items at a time from my first message and you’ll get clients

I'll try that, thanks!

@Kristopher Wood good luck! Don’t get discouraged NetSuite has 37,000+ customers and 360,000+ google searches a month. There’s plenty to go around. Please keep me posted and feel free to reach out

Thanks!

Good to know. Sometimes we do!

I'd like to grow our business. I'm a developer not a sales person so I've never needed to do this before.

What does "grow our business" mean to you? For most people, the default answer is "hire a bunch of people", but that is far from the only way to grow a business. The Agency model is just one of many types of businesses you can build in this space. What role do you want to play in this business? How do you want to spend your time? Do you have partners? How do they want to spend their time? For my personal journey, coming from software development to running my own business, I had to stop thinking of myself as a developer and start thinking of myself as a business owner. That requires mastering an entirely new space of concepts and skills. Learning the latest JavaScript framework doesn't fill the pipeline with leads or deepen a client relationship.

Great reply, and exactly the direction I was hoping to go with this conversation, thank you!

Do you want that role?

Good question! Want and need are two different things. I'm much more of a computer person. I like solving impossible problems. I do not have enough clients to support the payroll of a dedicated business person who isn't me.

Maybe. Or maybe one of your admins would love to fill that role instead. Or maybe someone in your network (or in this channel) has been itching to go out on their own and just needs the right business partner.

It's possible

I agree.

I didn't know to look out for restrictive agreements like this when I started

I have been there as well

Same

haha

If you want to be the business leader, that's fantastic and you should do it. If you don't, recognizing that and searching for help is also fantastic and you should do that. Trying to do both ... that way lies madness. Ask me how I know

yeah I've been trying to do both and here I am with no more clients than I had a year ago because I'm always busy head down coding

It's a nearly impossible problem to escape that cycle as long as you are trading time for money.

Nice!

Hiring people will just put you heads down managing people and projects rather than heads down writing code.

yeah, I'm not looking to grow beyond maybe one more employee

The marketing gets much easier when you know who you're talking to and what pain you're helping them solve. It's an impossible problem to find people who have "impossible problems" because most people don't think of their problems as impossible. With that positioning, I have absolutely no idea who I could refer you to for client work. If instead you told me "We help small manufacturing companies running on NetSuite ensure they never run dry on inventory", now I have a crystal clear picture of places I could refer you

when you e?

Alliance Partner means you can get demo accounts… There are other requirements and barriers to enjoying life though.. There is an annual fee, and more.

yeah there are different levels, I know

Selling licenses is a large operation; not what it used to be.

Right but there are different partner programs for developers and solution providers, rather than implementation partners

I think that alliance partnerships are not the worst option, but there are lots of companies doing it, so it’s still a grind… The difference is that you have a little bit of clout having the NetSuite logo in your email signature…

I meant the solution providers not the alliance partners. shruggie

when you e?

Fixed ^^^. Still adjusting to a new keyboard layout

It's an impossible problem to find people who have "impossible problems" because most people don't think of their problems as impossible. With that positioning, I have absolutely no idea who I could refer you to for client work.

@erictgrubaugh Ok, that makes more sense! For example: I had a client on one of my past jobs who was an apparel manufacturer. They needed to fulfill based on promise date instead of NetSuite's default "first in first out" commitment logic. To further complicate things, they needed to schedule work orders to meet these promise dates based on when materials were expected to arrive. This meant tying POs to SOs, and daily reshuffling them when the POs were actually recieved. The initial logic made by a previous developer was linear: uncommit each sales order, commit the ones that can be delivered. This did not take the POs into account. Essentially it needed to be able to commit the SOs in an unknowable order with unknown deliverable dates. My fix was to recursively process all POs and SOs together until none were left to process, setting up the next deliverable SOs as the ones with the next promise date which we could expect to be deliverable by that date. I'm not sure what you'd call that. 🙂 Other examples are writing REST and SOAP clients from scratch in SuiteScript for undocumented APIs, using custom records and/or scripting to connect disparate record types, custom UIs, etc

What is the business outcome your client got from your work?

They were having frequent missed delivery dates because they'd build work orders for the wrong sales orders, then run out of materials for sales orders that had sooner delivery dates. My change allowed them to build things in the correct order, saving them weeks in delays

Those are all great outcomes, and ones that you can definitely translate pretty directly to dollars by asking questions.