Two brief comments. When you write "find a niche I can serve, contact
companies in that niche, etc." you are proposing what most business
people call the "cold call". The cold call is a low yield strategy
because you almost never find the right person at the companies you are
calling and when you do find the right person, you find them at the
wrong time.
It's much better to get the clients to come to you. You do this by
increasing your visibility. Just as one example, I volunteered to run
the Kansas City R Users Group, and it has led to several new clients
approaching me for help. There's lots of other strategies for increasing
your visibility: giving talks, writing a blog, encouraging your friends
and co-workers to spread the word.
The other thing is that you may not know what your niche is until you
start working at it. You'll find that you tend to attract certain types
of clients more frequently or that you enjoy working with certain types
of clients or that you work most efficiently with certain types of
clients, or that you do not have a lot of competition for certain types
of clients. That's how you discover your niche.
So if you don't know your niche yet, start with anyone and everyone
until your niche discovers you.
Steve Simon, blog.pmean.com
------Original Message------
The fact that I know of and use that old idiom probably is symptomatic of my issues.
I'm a P.Stat who got into biostatistics by way of biomedical engineering and computational neuroscience. I like the work, and am employed full-time at it, but I'd like to do some consulting on the side. Not only for extra money, but also to explore areas outside of clinical data.
However, I'm not quite sure how to start. It seems a simple formula: find a niche I can serve, contact companies in that niche, etc. But finding that niche eludes me.
And I'm not sure how to differentiate myself in this climate of "big data."
Any advice, commiseration, warnings?
Thanks!
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Mitchell Maltenfort
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