My path to consultancy

I had big doubts about becoming a consultant or contractor. Could I do it? Would I find work? Could I run my own business? Would I need to change who I am, wear a suit, or buy a briefcase? Seven years have flown by since I took the plunge, so I'm going to share my story in case it's helpful for you!

TL;DR¶

Becoming a contractor and consultant back in 2018 was one of the best moves I've made.

I didn't need to wear a suit, or buy a briefcase.
I had no problems finding work - contractors are just humans too, and my experience was up to the task.
The income was a big step up at a time when I needed it.
Setting up and running a business was easy enough, and felt pretty good.
I wasted time on a custom website before going with a static site generator and trustworthy theme.
Accounting and tax were more complicated than I realised, causing some hassle and unexpected, painful tax bills. If I were doing it again, I'd look for a well-recommended human accountant to show me the ropes and help me through the first year or two.
I've been able to pursue opportunities with teams and organisations that probably wouldn't have been open to me otherwise.
The work has been challenging in good ways, and I feel my professional development has been accelerated.
My fears about becoming mercenary and distant from the people I worked with were unfounded.
I've gained access to a great network of people who challenge and push me, and I've been able to stay in touch with the teams I've worked with over the years and see how my decisions played out.

I took a permanent job with Equal Experts when I was offered it at a time of great personal and professional uncertainty in 2020 - new baby, COVID, and IR35. I've never been fired or let go from a role throughout my career - so far - and I don't feel like I'm at significantly lower risk of being unemployed as an employee than I was as an independent associate.

I feel like I've got the best of both worlds now, getting to be more consultant than contractor whilst being part of a great organisation. Tempered Works Ltd. is still alive but dormant in case I want to go back to being my own boss one day.

I recognise that I don't belong to an underrepresented group in the tech industry and I can't speak to the challenges others may face. I hope sharing my experiences can still provide some value or insight for those considering a similar path. I'm also happy to answer any questions you might have that I can help with, so please feel free to give me a shout on LinkedIn. I will not share anything from any conversation without permission.

Prologue¶

They waited until the end of the first year at uni to tell us that there weren't many jobs in physics, so that was my dream of writing maths on whiteboards for a living up the spout. My mum had gone to university after the divorce, getting a degree in computing and working as a contractor before getting a job in IT with a bank. I was too young to understand much about it at the time.

A few years later, she told twenty-one-year-old me to apply for the bank's graduate scheme. I got in, and that set up my next thirteen years with HSBC, starting out in IT Security (first job: stuffing Lotus Notes passwords into envelopes) and ending up programming in Global Banking and Markets. I was aware of some contractors here and there, but I don't recall ever meeting one, let alone talking to them about contracting or anything much else.

The other contact with contractors or consultants I can remember from these early days was my avid reading of Martin Fowler, Sam Newman, and the other luminaries at Thoughtworks.

First contact - Thoughtworks¶

I went from a huge multinational to a little company in Manchester that was trying to grow back in 2014. We were having trouble trying to sort out an unwieldy, monolithic codebase running on bare metal servers that resisted any extension and struggled under any sort of load. Our efforts to get the team aligned and flow moving just weren't working. What was I doing wrong?

I suggested we engage Thoughtworks and a couple of their people came to talk to us about our needs. I needed someone experienced to talk to, someone who could help me figure out what I was doing wrong and how to put it right. I asked for advice and guidance, but it turned out that wasn't an option. We'd need to pay for a team of at least two full-time contractors as a minimum engagement. I can't remember what the $$$ number was, but it was comically out of any budget I could justify, so that didn't go anywhere. Disappointing, but my first real contact with the contracting world.

I worked with some great people there. It was a real struggle, but I learned a lot, and we did manage to rewrite the beast and move everything to AWS. I've really enjoyed seeing them succeed since I moved on. One of the other backend devs contacted me recently to let me know that the thing we hastily built together had been the foundations for seven years of growth without major problems.

First contact - Equal Experts¶

Next stop - Sky Betting and Gaming, building a new service for the Italian market from Sheffield's Electric Works. This was the first time I really worked with contractors. No suits, no briefcases. A friendly bunch, always happy to share their experience, knowledge, and opinions. I went along to my first Equal Experts "Expert Talks" event there.

I think this is where I first really considered that I could "do" contracting. I was still a bit hung up on whether it would be right for me though. Running my own company seemed like an interesting but daunting prospect, and I recall dismissing the idea in a conversation because I wanted to be invested in what I was doing. If I'm honest, I also didn't feel like I was good enough.

I felt that contracting might be a bit mercenary for me, and I wanted to be invested in what the company I worked for was doing. Then again, I wasn't staying with companies for very long before moving on. I'd consciously started thinking in terms of "going in, making a difference, making myself redundant, and moving on" to broaden my experience more quickly.

Need some money, quick¶

My next role was with a six-person startup. I really like the broad scope, urgency of value and need for adaptation that comes with startup roles! Alongside rapidly building the system we needed, I was getting involved with product development and marketing. This was my first contact with things like AB testing, and I had to deal with GDPR that landed towards the end of my tenure there.

Then, as far as I know, the startup ran short of money. The other people there were young compared to me, and on much lower pay. I agreed to go without salary for a month to keep the company going. Then a second month. We'd been having conversations about how the company probably needed more product development guidance than I could provide, so when I didn't get paid for a third month, I resigned - I honestly don't think there was anything more I could do. That's startups for you.

Bills to pay.

Time to embrace my inner mercenary.

Tempered Works Ltd.¶

LinkedIn says I started Tempered Works Ltd. in May 2018. I knew a couple of contractor people (as well as my mum, although she'd long since gone permanent!) well enough to buy them a coffee and pick their brains about what to do next and got advice on things like how to find work, how to set up my company, and how the banking and accounting side of things works. It's a bit of a blur now, but here's what I remember.

I remember the coffee shop I was sitting in before an interview with Infinity Works where I was deciding on a company name. I was going to use the domain I got for my old blog, crossedstreams.com, but Urban Dictionary warned me about other meanings related to "crossing the streams" that have nothing to do with the Ghostbusters movies. Scratch that idea then. Sheffield has loads of places today built in old industrial buildings called things like "Cutlery Works" and "Electric Works". We've got a proud history of steelmaking, and tempering is a process to make steel tougher and less likely to break under stress. I liked that idea as an analogy for what I like to think I do, so Tempered Works Ltd. was born.

I'll be honest. Day-rate money was frankly ridiculous compared to the salaries I'd been working for before. I'd been worried about not making enough pension contributions in the latter part of my career to date, and I was able to pay the bills and start building a better retirement buffer very quickly. On the advice of one of the contractors I spoke to, I went with crunch.co.uk for accounting. I didn't have the confidence to do "my books" on my own, but I didn't want to pay for an actual human accountant. Despite my best efforts, I did get some things wrong here and there and ended up with occasional hassle and painful, unexpected tax bills.

I remember heading to the library to take photocopies of documents (maybe I even had to fax them like it was the late 1900s) to Metro Bank to get my bank account set up. Recording expenses and filing paperwork was a worry, but that part turned out to be pretty easy. It all takes a bit of time, but it's not a big deal.

If I were doing it again, I'd pay for a human accountant for the first year or two until I'd got a better handle on how accounting and tax works.

My first gig¶

It didn't take long to get my first engagement. I can't remember how I advertised my services, perhaps it was just on LinkedIn. I had a fair bit of AWS experience, I was a certified solution architect, but the gig needed Google Cloud. I remember standing outside a bus stop in the sunshine with the recruiter telling me not to worry about it, my skills would transfer and I'd be fine. I took the gig. There was a tech test and interview to get through, but they were no different to what I'd expect for a permanent role.

He was right, and I had a really enjoyable first engagement with Dunnhumby, a super-cool data science company. I'm normally not sure if I can directly link myself to a client but in this case, I'd had writing published on their public blog, so the link is already out there.

I decided I wanted to diversify my experience, so I politely refused an extension to go and do something else. I recall the person paying for me saying that I wasn't like other contractors he'd worked with, more like part of the team. It was great to get that feedback, reinforcing that I could succeed as a contractor without being aloof and distant!

Evolving this site¶

I wasted a lot of time building my own custom React-based site in the early days. I wanted to have my own look and feel and thought that exercising my React skills would be helpful in finding work. After a while, I realised that I was spending too much time on the site and not enough on why the site was there - to support my business and an accessible medium for me to share my experience and thoughts.

I eventually found a neat, blog-capable static site generator in mkdocs-material that provided me the kind of publishing workflow, flexibility and clean look and feel I wanted. It's also got a lot of sponsorship and funding and a maintainance team that seems responsible and responsive, so I think it's a trustworthy option.

Equal Experts - Associate¶

I'd met lots of inspiring Equal Experts people at events like that Expert Talks I mentioned earlier. Everyone seemed to speak highly of EE, and I applied. If I recall correctly, there was a fairly easy take-home test and then an interview, with the first half a pairing exercise and the second a whiteboard session.

I did not enjoy the pairing exercise much. I really don't work well in that time-pressure situation, and it's not the kind of pressure you actually get in real life. I like to let a problem settle in my mind a little before I start racing to write code and tests. Feedback afterwards was that I didn't do very well in that part. Meh fortunately for me, my performance in the whiteboard session impressed more. I'd enthusiastically explained how we'd built out capabilities at the last startup and taken iterative, fail-fast approaches to get value out fast.

Note

EE's changed its recruitment process a great deal since then. The pairing-under-pressure is a thing of the past, phew.

My first engagement with EE wasn't a great fit, being quite slow-moving (I'm not known for my patience), but I just flagged that it wasn't really working for me and got lots of support finding and moving onto something that suited me better. My new engagement was fantastic, working in a diverse team with a large UK retailer on search optimisation. I was directly involved with delivering and measuring significant revenue uplifts and learned a huge amount from that engagement. It was the first time I'd seen all the things I'd read about as practices and philosophies come together to make my team and the teams around us really fly!

Equal Experts - Employee¶

In 2020 I was offered a permanent position as a consultant with EE and I took it, despite the drop in income. Why?

I had a great experience working with Equal Experts.
My son had just been born.
COVID had just hit.
IR35 legislation was about to be implemented in the private sector.

Whilst I had done nothing to avoid tax, I remember feeling unsure that I knew enough to be on the right side of the IR35 legislation. I felt that the legalese and opinions surrounding it were confusing and that if I got something wrong for any period of time, the financial consequences could be severe. Taking the job felt like a safe option, and I hoped to learn more about the inner workings of a successful consultancy.

Tempered Works Ltd. still exists but is dormant at the moment. I'm able to keep the company alive for less than a couple of hundred GBP per year. I was also able to get a tweak to my contract so I could wrap up a light engagement with The Developer Academy, providing some course materials and teaching for their new data science bootcamp. I write on the EE blog, but I'm still able to write independently here, and I just credit Equal Experts where my writing crosses over significantly or involves some time in working hours, like this:

Thanks to for supporting this content.

As an associate and an employee, I've had access to lots of other people and their experiences through our Slack. That's been really useful in collecting up other people's ideas and putting my own out there to be challenged.

I've also had the huge benefit of staying in communication with the teams I've worked with over the years, and in particular the people who saw how my decisions played out after I moved on. By and large, the things I leave behind for the next person seem to have worked out positively in my absence! I'm very grateful for those long-term perspectives where I've been able to get them.

Next steps¶

If you've got a few years of experience and you're considering contracting or consulting, I'm happy to answer any questions you might have that I can help with, so please feel free to give me a shout on LinkedIn. I will not share anything from any conversation without permission.

I'd also really recommend taking a look at joining the Equal Experts network, for all the reasons I talked about earlier. Up-to-date info about joining is available on the site. I'll signpost our values, which are really important to all of us and haven't really changed since I first read them back in the day.

Feedback

If you want to get in touch with me about the content in this post, you can find me on LinkedIn or raise an issue/start a discussion in the GitHub repo. I'll be happy to credit you for any corrections or additions!

If you liked this, you can find content from other great consultants on the Equal Experts network blogs page