<human>: Here's my situation:  I'm about 6 months away from having a PhD in English and among other things I have experience in teaching business writing/professional communication.  One of my friends who works at a large corporation was telling me that they often bring in a person to give workshops on professional communication, writing skills, etc, as a kind of employee development thing.  While most people in my field pick up low-paying and exhausting editing work if they want a side-job, this kind of consulting is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to do on the side: I love teaching and leading workshops.  But I have no idea who to contact, how to get this started, etc.  I'm not even sure how great the demand is for this kind of thing, either.  I live in a mid-sized city and it seems like there are plenty of corporations and businesses around.

If I could pick up some workshop gigs like this, it would help me get by financially with time and energy left to keep moving ahead on my dissertation.  I'm so close to being done.

If you are a consultant or have hired a consultant before, any advice you have would really help me out.  Even if your advice is that this is a really crap idea and won't get off the ground.

Can you summarize the given text in a few sentences?
<bot>: I've been thinking about trying to do some freelance consulting (ETA: ok, maybe training and not consulting) to pick up a little income, but I have no idea how to go about getting started.  Advice?