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It will sound too silly but: find clients first.
First, you need to know what you are doing exactly. What is your service? What are you solving? If these questions' answers are vague, you are have to go back to your drawing board. Consulting cannot happen unless you are an expert or somewhat very good at something. Better than the client you are trying to consult and ask money for.
Once you are really good at what you are doing and have confidence as well as persuasion skills, you will need to identify your niche's client sources. This could be word of mouth, SEO, door-to-door, hiring a salesperson, or simply finding a way that other consultants couldn't figure out yet so you can get those clients they didn't.
There are so many things to cover. But firstly, you must have a valid product and solve a real problem others, including the clients, cannot solve themselves or they are willing to pay someone else to take care of it for them because it is time consuming or would cost too much to hire a full time employee due to insurance, HR stuff, and liabilities.
Companies are not hanging out in a single place. Most of the companies out there don't even look for a consultant until someone brings it up to them.
Your first & the easiest consulting client should be your current employer. Second and third clients should come from your network etc.
Don’t fall into freelance sites consulting gigs. It will be minimum wage type of work.
I agree except the current employer part. Current employers are weird. I’ve found they didn’t take me seriously till I was gone. Find past employers who liked you and would want you back, offer to consult on their most pressing issues (I only work on high priority gig value problems. You’ll get a lot of value). Moonlight for a bit to build momentum, quit your day job, reach out to your whole network.
I get the weirdness- the key is to leave before it gets weird -/ before bridges are burned.
1. Figure out what you can do better than anyone else
2. Figure out which types of potential clients would benefit the most from this
3. Ensure this isn't performed by someone internally
4. The marketplace is the web. Self publish, tell the world
Work on leads, networking, and sales as much as you can to learn the ropes and then figure out how to offload, automate, or optimize those things as best you can to create sustainability.
Talking to the decision makers and having friends or intros to help with that will by far be more effective than cold emails or random RFPs as a new company.
Find a mentor who is doing what you want to do.
This will save you time, money and failure.