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Brooklyn, New York, United States

About Me




Sharif Shaalan
Principal Salesforce.com Consultant
@ roundCorner www.roundcorner.com
Principal Salesforce.com Consultant and Owner @ Agile Cloud Consulting LLC
www.agilecloudconsulting.com
Co-host of the yappexchange podcast www.yappexchange.com
Salesforce.com MVP
Certified Salesforce.com Sales Cloud Consultant
Certified Salesforce.com Developer
Certified Salesforce.com Advanced Administratior
Certified Salesforce.com Administrator

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Thursday, March 6, 2014

10 Steps to start your freelance consulting practice in one day!

I wanted to put together a quick start guide for anyone looking to set up a freelance consulting company to do Salesforce implementations.  You can be up and running in one day (you will have to start pretty early in the day though : ).



I will make the following assumptions if you are thinking of going out on your own and becoming a freelance consultant:

  1. You have some project management/ Business analyst experience (you can gather requirements and manage at least a small scale project).
  2. You are very proficient in Salesforce, meaning you can design and build an app fairly easily (not necessarily coding, but declaratively at the very least).
Now that you're ready, here is all you will need to set up your company.  I have identified the vendors i used, although i am in no way affiliated with them other than using their service.  Feel free to look at other vendors that provide these same services and compare.

And these, of course, are all cloud based!
  1. Register your company- You can register an LLC and receive all of your business information instantly.  I would suggest registering your business in Delaware as there can be some benefits when tax season rolls around.  I used this company: Harvard Business Services
  2. Apply for an EIN (Employee Identification Number)- Next you will need to apply for your employee identification number with the IRS.  This is the number you will give to clients that hire you: Apply Here
  3. Set up your bank Account- Once you have 1 & 2 take walk down to your local bank and open a business account in the name of your LLC.  This will come in handy when you want to cash your checks!
  4. Set up an accounting and invoicing service- You have to generate and keep track of the invoices you send to your clients:  Intuit Quickbooks Online
  5. Set up a time tracking system- You will need to track your billable and non billable time, this is free, but i would spring for the $5/Month option that allows you to export time sheets to PDF so you can send them to clients along with invoices. 14 Dayz
  6. Set up a project management app- Somewhere accessible by both you and the client where you can keep track of the project as a whole. Basecamp
  7. Set up a virtual meeting app- You will have a lot of meetings, and you cannot always be onsite:  Gotomeeting
  8. Create and Launch your websiteHomestead
  9. Statement of Work template- Find a good statement of work template online to use.  This will serve as your contract when starting any project and must be signed by you as well as the client.
  10. Get clients!- You can start here.
And yes...this can all be done in one day : )  

6 comments:

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