Hello, I’m a US retirement actuary with around 20 years of experience. I’ve worked at a large consulting firm, I’ve worked at a small consulting firm. I’m contemplating a change, perhaps even going off and starting my own business.
I’d love to hear from others who have gone off on their own. What was your background, where did you find success? What were the expected and unexpected challenges? What advice would you offer?
I’m at a stage in my life where I feel I can take the risk, give up my steady salary. If it doesn’t work out, I’m not too worried about finding my way back into a company.
My strengths are modeling and software development. While I’ve been a traditional consulting actuary, I’ve also developed programmable benefit calculators as a service, annuity factor and related calculations as a service and spreadsheet add-ins, and worked on record keeping platforms. I’d be looking to develop some modeling/calculation software offerings and find opportunities for custom software work. I find software appealing for the possiblity of scaling. I can sell additional units of software without requiring much additional time/effort. I’m not thinking of competing with the large valuation or administration system vendors. I’d be looking at smaller tools and solutions. I’m thinking network and web services primarily, but heck I’ll build your Excel workbooks or fix your macros if needed.
At the risk of leading the witness, I think the biggest challenges will be around finding customers and gaining credibility. Even if I built the right thing to solve a customer’s problem, they still might not want to hire a small/solo shop.
I’d be open to taking contract/project work too, especially to get started and gain credibility. I would like to avoid taking on too much recurring work at the risk of not having enough time to spend on software development.
I’m considering looking at local community businesses - banks, accountants, lawyers, wealth managers and financial planners, etc. to see if I could find some early customers (presumably to help support their customers). I think talking with nearby (small) businesses, perhaps in person, can help overcome the credibility challenge. I’m located just outside of a large city, which should provide a lot of opportunities.
I’m in the early stages of thinking about this and how feasible it may be. What was your experience going off on your own? What kind of work did you find? How did you get off the ground? How has it gone since?