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This talk is aimed at giving an overview of the challenges faced growing your OSS consulting business from the single person phase all the way through to employing staff and managing multiple projects. I'll be using our own growth as a case study to outline what we've found to be the major challenges. I'll be touching on diverse topics such as project management and development methodologies, licencing and contractual issues, staffing, accounting, marketing and sales, venture capital, and others. This won't be the gospel for how to run your business, but many of the issues we've faced will be common to OSS (and other) consulting companies trying to grow, so we hope this will be an informative and useful talk for people at the start of the curve, or considering consulting for themselves.

Stream: Development Process & Project Management

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Kevin Littlejohn has worked in and around the Internet industry, almost exclusively with Open Source technologies, for the past fourteen years. For the last seven of those, he's been part-owner and manager of Obsidian Consulting Group, a software development company based in Melbourne. Obsidian currently employs 10 people and is involved in both custom software development (primarily Zope/Plone based) and off-the-shelf software sales.