What should you look for in a project manager?

We use Salesforce for CRM, so we implemented Financial Force PSA. This has been an excellent solution for us, but it definitely requires a lot of customization to represent your business processes (like any holistic solution would).

I think you should first really step back and ask if you need that role filled. Are your sales growing? Are they growing as quickly as you'd like? Do you think someone could push that needle? I've worked at companies with strong focus on sales and some where there were no sales people at all. It depends on your niche and who your customers are. Depending on your outreach methods, perhaps you need to hire someone with a strong sales background who's going to pick up the phone and start cold calls all day, or maybe you just need someone to handle your marketing better and help you out with some Adwords campaigns. Business Development is a big term, and it can cover a lot of things, most commonly sales... but salespeople aren't right for every business. So, look at your existing success. What sorts of things bring in the money now... and look to amplify those existing efforts before you go breaking new ground. You should be looking for someone who complements your existing success and can continue to tell that story, in your existing playing fields, and gradually moving into new areas. I know this was a vague answer, but I hope it helps.

Growing up from 1+subs to a team like you're saying is a classic problem in consulting. The financial math is not in your favor until you get a consistent team. Here's an article of mine detailing the issues and also detailing solutions: http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html Having said that, I would also say you're trying to do too many things at once with not enough resources, which means the chance of being successful with each one is diminished. For example, you could focus on consulting revenue so you can build up your bench, so that you truly can self-fund the development of a product without distraction. Or you could focus on product, investing time/money there with consulting only to pay for that, even using subs for that, until the revenue there gets to the point that it's scaling (which will be hard, as you can already see). Building a product or a successful consultancy is individually very hard -- most fail. So trying to do both at the same time means you'll almost certainly fail. Which is a shame, because that's "failure due to time-management / strategy" as opposed to actual market forces. i.e. something fixable! I hope some of this helps, although I agree with you that talking through the details would probably be more helpful. The specific details of your situation matter.

I'd recommend RecruiterBox as long as you can focus on filing one position at a time. It let's you accept up to 200 applicants for 1 position for free. http://recruiterbox.com/recruitment-software-pricing-with-free-signup/ Also, There are quite a few others out there most of which offer free 30 day trials or free access to their platforms with feature limits on them vs the company's paid offerings. Based on the way you phrased the question, this app should do the trick! Side note - if you're making use off Google apps - just create a form for submissions. It's always free.

Some of this is stage dependent and all of it is highly dependent on the team above the product manager. The simplest answer of course is to find PM's from companies who have had exemplary success where the Product Manager candidate either led prior success or was exposed to it in a meaningful way. A simple starting point is to ask them to give you examples of conflicting opinions on a feature and how they evaluated the conflicting opinions and made a decision and tracked the success or failure of that decision. AirBnb actually gives PM's homework as part of the interview process where they have to actually present a unique idea (from scratch) to the interviewing team. Happy to talk to you about best process based on your stage and existing team.