On finding clients as an independent consultant

This post was published on November 27, 2025

I’ve been a freelancer / independent consultant for some 11 years now, and until recently, keeping myself occupied has been fairly smooth sailing. There has always been a lot of demand for people with the technical skills that I have gathered over the years, so finding new consulting clients has been easy enough. Sure, sometimes I had a couple of weeks off between projects, but never much more than that.

Add to that the fact that I seem to be able to break big tasks down into a logical sequence of smaller ones, and then explain those smaller steps to others in a clear way, and you might get an idea of why my test automation training business has also been growing year over year.

This year, however, has been significantly slower than the ones before. Part of that is probably due to the global economy growth slowing down a little, but the main reason is the fact that the Dutch government started to actively enforce a law that was designed to protect the low-wage freelance gig workers, but that had a significant negative impact on all freelance work (the ‘wet DBA’, for those in the know). I wrote about that in more detail about a year ago, so feel free to read that blog post for more details.

Today, instead of elaborating on / complaining about the current situation, I’d like to dive a little bit deeper into how one can still find freelance projects. Yes, the market has slowed down significantly, and I’ve seen many freelancers struggle and even go back to permanent employment, but the freelance market hasn’t come to a complete standstill, at least not yet. And that’s a good thing, because while I respect the choice of other freelancers to go back into permanent employment, and I wish them all the best, I think I myself would become very, very unhappy if I was forced to make the same choice. The last 11 years have probably made me pretty much unemployable - I simply enjoy and have become used to the freedom of working independently too much.

So, how do I still get clients, and what options does a freelancer / an independent consultant have? I’ll go through several options in this post, and I have ordered them from ‘least desirable’ to ‘most desirable’ for me. Before I start, two notes:

• first, the order in which I list the options is my personal opinion, and your mileage may vary
• second, while my client base is becoming more global year after year, I still do a large part of my work in the Netherlands, so the options and opinions are biased towards the market conditions over here

With that said, here are some options I’ve used in the past to look for and find projects as an independent consultant.

Aggregation portals

Back when I just started freelancing, and even slightly before that, I frequently searched platforms like Upwork and Fiverr for projects. Would I recommend you do the same? Well, unless you are either willing to compete on price (which I don’t think you should) or you really, really the work, I would avoid these platforms. Rates on there are a race to the bottom as you’re competing with other freelancers from around the globe, and there’s always someone willing to do the work for less. I’ve gotten a few writing gigs from Upwork years ago, and made a couple of hundred bucks from it, but that’s about it. I have no experience with platforms such as Toptal, which I think cater to a slightly more upscale market.

Recruitment agencies

I found most of my projects early on through recruitment agencies specializing in sourcing and placing freelancers, and this is how many freelancers over here still find them. A lot has been and is being said about recruitment agencies, but as with most things in life, there are good ones and not so good ones out there. I’ve worked with a couple of great ones, but I have also been screwed by one or two in the past.

By all means reach out to recruitment agencies, but I think you’d be wise to keep a couple of things in mind:

• If they don’t want to name the client they’re recruiting for, that’s a red flag. It probably means they don’t have a good relationship with that client, if they have a relationship at all.
• Find out if they’re working for the client they’re recruiting for directly. I’ve seen many project openings that were simply literally copied from other agencies or portals and then forwarded to freelancers. These agencies simply move themselves between you and the other agency and take a cut, and that cut is coming out of your rate.
• Speaking about cuts, find out what the recruiter’s cut is. A decent recruiter is transparent about this. Recruiters who don’t want to tell you have something to hide. I find up to around 10% for a middle man to be acceptable. Above that, I’ll try and negotiate it down.
• Avoid recruitment agencies with no presence in the country the client is working for. I for example don’t work with agencies calling from the UK or from India. The chance they actually know the client they’re recruiting for (or pretend to recruit for), unless those are actually in the UK or in India, is close to zero. They just want to make a quick buck. Avoid.

That said, I’ve enjoyed working with a few recruiters and agencies in the past. These were mostly recruiters that either work independently themselves, or for a small, boutique recruitment firm. My experience with them has overall been way better than with the big agencies, although even with them, there are some exceptions.

Client portals

Many companies and government agencies, especially the larger ones here in the Netherlands, publish projects open to freelancers directly on their own portal. I’ve never really found a project that way, but I’ve heard from plenty of others who have. The good thing about this is that you cut out the middle man (the agency), which leaves you with a better rate. The downside is that everybody can see and respond to the project, which might lower the rate you can get, simply because there’s more competition.

These portals are also a great way to avoid the recruitment agencies that simply copy the project descriptions from these portals and list them as ‘their clients’, by the way. When you do receive a project description from an agency, I recommend seeing if there’s a direct way to submit a proposal to the client you’ll be working for.

Your own network

This is where we move from more passive ways to find new projects to the more involved, the more active ones. Over the last 20 years, I’ve built up a decent network of people, both fellow testers and developers, as well as tech leads, managers and people in other roles. These are a treasure trove when you’re looking for a new project, because they know you and they know the quality of your work. And hopefully, they want to work with you again.

When you see a project end, or if you (like me) do part-time projects only and your schedule is starting to show some gaps, these people should be the first ones you reach out to. Beware, though, that it takes time to build a solid network, and even more time to maintain it. Also, if you really only reach out to people when you need them, I don’t think that’s a good look, and not something that everybody would appreciate.

So, spend the time to build and maintain your network, preferably when you don’t need a new project ‘right now’. Reach out to people, catch up with them over real or virtual coffee and have a chat. You never know what it might lead to, somewhere down the line. My personal favourite tactic is offering to help people in my network when I think there’s something I can do for them, without expecting anything in return. It makes me feel good, it (hopefully!) helps the other party out, and people will remember these things, which might just lead to a case of the final item on my list.

Clients reaching out to you

This, of course, is the proverbial holy grail of consulting: clients coming up to you asking if you could please take their money. However, please don’t expect this to happen right away. People tend not to reach out to just anyone out of the blue if they’re looking for a consultant, a trainer, or someone else who can help them.

Instead, they’ll reach out to people who

• were recommended to them by others, or
• they have seen, followed and appreciated online for a while

Both have happened to me, mostly the first scenario, and I’m slowly getting into a position where the second one starts to happen more frequently. Do keep in mind, though, that there are no shortcuts here. It took me 10 years of writing, public speaking, being active on social media and more to get where I am now.

And I’m not even where I want to be yet. I’d love to be in the position where I continuously have a healthy 6-12 month pipeline of consulting and training work, without having to do too much marketing or direct outreach myself, so there’s still plenty of work to be done building my ‘brand’.

A position where people know who I am, what I do and how I can help them, and have them reach out to me proactively, is the position I want to be in, though.

Hopefully, this post was useful to you. Again, the list above is a result of my personal experience, and is heavily biased towards the situation in the Netherlands. From my experience talking to and working with both freelancers and companies abroad, though, I’m pretty confident at least part of it applies to other countries and contexts, too.

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