Business Plan

I'm thinking more and more about starting up my own professional services firm. These guys that I'm working for now seem like good people, but it's obvious to me that they don't know how to build a business.

I see two branches of this type of business: 1) Staffing and 2) Professional Services. To be clear, "staffing" is a professional service, but I'm differentiating here between the business of providing contractors and FTEs to companies vs. other professional services, such as application development and support.

The advantage of the staffing business is that it provides recurring revenue that helps support the rest of the company and it opens doors to the other side of the business, which is where the real money is made. Five years in, the goal should be to have a staffing business that's pulling in $3 million or more each year, and a professional services business that's worth $20 million or more annually. With profit sharing to key practice leaders and partners, income for a CEO should be in the range of $300K.

The opportunity that's hitting me over the head is in the so-called big data/business intelligence stack. This is what I think that stack looks like:

Client Application Development
Custom development of client applications on PC, Mac, Tablets, iOS, and Android devices. This is one end of the data stack, where user activity is captured. At this layer, we'll need expertise in project management, requirements gathering, design, user experience, development and testing. I don't know if this is really where the big money is or to what extent expertise here is truly a differentiator. It may be the case that the way to go here is to have a small team and then sub-contract out that work to other shops. 

Front-End Web Services
Web service architecture allows us to create applications that can provide initial processing of input from client applications and provide information in return. We can think of the front-end as the next step in the data chain. At this layer, we'll need expertise in project management, requirements gathering, front-end web development, and testing. Since the front end will likely need to exist on a cloud platform, expertise in Azure, AWS, and similar services comes into play here as well. 

Cloud Hosting and Storage
The basic idea here is that data comes in through the FE and then needs to be stored somewhere, either in a relational database of some kind or some sort of structure like Cassandra or Amazon S3, or perhaps all of those. I'm not versed enough in the various tools that are available to know the distinctions, especially between Cassandra and S3. The expertise that would be needed at this layer would be varied, but would include basic server administration, SQL, Cassandra, and Hadoop, and possibly even this new thing called Spark that I am completely unfamiliar with. Opportunities at this layer also include reselling of cloud services and providing expertise in various pricing plans and structures.

This is also where I think there may be opportunities in application monitoring and support. 

Data Mining and Business Intelligence
These are probably two different areas but for now I'm going to lump them together, the basic idea being that this is where the data that is collected is somehow turned into useful information for business people or in some cases consumers (e.g. recommendations). This is probably where the "data scientist" application comes into play. 


To deliver on all of this, you need some sort of Project Delivery Framework, some set of agreed upon methods and processes for getting work done from initial requirements gathering to project delivery. Which brings us to...

Project Management Office
This is both something that will be needed to get work done and potentially another practice area as well. The PMO is where projects are registered and chartered, where project managers are assigned and where project planning takes place. The PMO is also where project status across the company is compiled and centralized, so business leaders understand how work is progressing and where problem areas may be cropping up that require intervention. Over time, as we get better at managing work efficiently and effectively, we can farm out that expertise to companies that want to implement a PMO themselves.